Jomo Kenyatta commissioned the building in 1967, four years after independence, as a headquarters for KANU, and it went up in three phases — podium, tower, plenary hall — finishing in 1973. David Mutiso, Kenya’s first African government Chief Architect, developed the design in weekly meetings with Kenyatta after KANU secretary-general Tom Mboya brought him the brief in 1968, expanding an initial four-storey scheme into the finished tower. Karl Henrik Nøstvik, a Norwegian then serving as Mutiso’s junior in the same ministry, joined the project and continued as a private consultant once his government contract lapsed; international catalogues have long credited Nøstvik alone, a framing Mutiso disputed for the rest of his life. The composition is deliberately elementary: cuboids for the plenary hall, a cylinder of stacked cuboid bays for the thirty-two-storey tower, cones for the amphitheatre and the helipad, faced in pale terracotta chosen to recall earlier African building. At 105 metres it was Kenya’s tallest structure for twenty-six years and remains the image by which Nairobi is recognised.
The centre was commissioned as the headquarters of the Kenya African National Union, the party that had governed Kenya since independence in 1963 and that was the country’s sole legal party from 1982 until multi-party politics were restored in 1991; party and state functions were housed together in the building for much of that period. The complex was constituted as a state corporation under the Tourism Act in 2011, taking effect in 2012, and was renamed from Conference Centre to Convention Centre in 2013.
Wikidata Q3272625 · Commons: File:Kenyatta International Convention Centre, Nairobi, by Karl Henrik Nøstvik architect, general.jpg · Photo: IndicibleEspace · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0