Why I gravitated to finance from architecture

My formal training was in architecture at the University of Nairobi. Architecture teaches you to look closely: to read a site, organise a programme, understand proportion, coordinate systems, and imagine how people might inhabit a place that does not yet exist. It is an education in possibility—but also in constraints.

The longer I looked at projects, the more I noticed that many of their most consequential architectural conditions had been established before the architect began to draw. The land had been acquired at a particular price. A return had been promised. A programme and area target had been adopted. Time, financing, approvals, procurement, and market expectations were already pressing on the brief.

These were not external commercial matters waiting politely outside architecture. They were inside the plan. They influenced the depth of a floorplate, the size of a unit, the generosity of circulation, the choice of structure, the amount of contingency, and the patience available for design.

The transition began earlier than I understood at the time. In my first years of practice in Uganda and Rwanda, I worked on offices, serviced apartments, commercial projects, hospitality, and corporate interiors. The principal of the practice also introduced me to financial modelling and business-plan writing. For the first time, the drawing and the development argument were being discussed together.

That connection became more explicit when I moved into an in-house architect and project-management role at Spencon Development Company. I was not only coordinating consultants and developing concepts across land banks in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. I was also researching markets, modelling proposed projects, and writing the initial business cases. The question was no longer simply, “What can we design here?” It was, “What project should this land become, and does its case hold?”

I began moving toward finance because I wanted a more complete language for those forces. Architecture could tell me whether a proposition was spatially coherent. Finance helped me ask whether its assumptions were economically coherent—and who carried the risk when they were not.

Studying toward the CFA charter was demanding precisely because it required a different discipline. It moved from physical relationships to cash flows, capital structures, valuation, uncertainty, and opportunity cost. Yet the underlying habit felt familiar: take a complicated system apart, understand how its pieces interact, and test whether the whole argument holds.

The spreadsheet was not the opposite of the drawing. Both were models. Both simplified reality. Both could clarify a decision or conceal a weak assumption. And both were only as useful as the judgment behind them.

Architecture can become absorbed by the object and understate the machinery required to realise it. Finance can reduce the project to variables and understate the physical and human consequences of those variables. Working between them creates a productive discomfort.

A high efficiency ratio may look compelling until the plan reveals what has been sacrificed to achieve it. A premium specification may appear excessive until it is connected to durability, leasing, maintenance, or the credibility of the product. A target return may look precise until one asks how much of it depends on optimistic pricing, compressed time, or risks transferred to somebody else.

I became interested in the space where one discipline interrupts the easy conclusions of another. That is often where the real development decision sits.

Finance did not replace the way architecture taught me to think. It expanded the field in which that thinking could operate. I still begin with relationships: between a site and its city, a user and a room, a structure and its span, an asset and the systems that sustain it.

But I now also look for the capital relationship, the timing relationship, the operating relationship, and the distribution of risk. A building is not only designed through plans and sections. It is designed through acquisition terms, investment mandates, approval pathways, procurement choices, debt covenants, and decisions about what must be protected when pressure arrives.

Development advisory sharpened this integration further. At Mentor Management, Britam Properties, and later Property Geometrics, the work ranged from feasibility and investment strategy to professional-team assembly, design optimisation, funding, leasing, operations, and asset exits. Projects as different as retail centres, serviced apartments, corporate headquarters, affordable housing, and mixed-use developments kept reinforcing the same point: value is created across the whole chain, not inside one professional package.

This has made me less interested in disciplinary territory and more interested in project coherence. The question is not which profession owns the answer. The question is whether the land, market, design, capital, delivery plan, and long-term use tell the same story.