I'm Jesse — a civil and structural engineer. Over the last four years I've designed homes, apartments, a church and a filling station for families and small businesses across Kenya and Uganda, and run the structural calculations behind every one.
Twenty pieces of work from the last four years, the structural sets first. Open any one to page through its full set of renders; three of them have the 3D walkthrough the client used to tour the house before the first stone went down.
Click a project to open its gallery · hover a walkthrough card to play it
A render only shows the half of the job a client can see. Switch either drawing below from architecture to structure and you get the other half — the frame, the trusses and the foundations I had to design to hold the pretty picture up.
A house goes up in a fixed order, and I design every layer of it. Build this one up stage by stage, drag to walk around it, and click any part to see what the engineering on that layer actually involves.
The 3D model needs WebGL, which this browser has turned off. The stages and their descriptions still work on the right.
Both are about the day job, more or less. One asks you to stack a tower without letting its centre of gravity wander off the footing; the other puts you on a murram road of the sort I spent 2025 supervising. Keyboard or touch, no loading, no scores sent anywhere.
Drop each storey onto the one below. Anything that overhangs is cut off, and if the centre of gravity leaves the footing, the tower goes over.
Click, tap or press space to drop each storey. Line it up with the one below.
Keep the pickup on the road. Dodge the potholes, the lorries and the roadworks; the surface gets worse the further you go.
Steer with the arrow keys, A and D, or by dragging. Three hits and you are done.
I grew up wanting to know why buildings don't fall down. That curiosity took me through a civil engineering degree at Dedan Kimathi University — First Class Honours, which my mum still mentions — and on into a master's in structural engineering.
Most jobs start the same way: a client, a plot and a rough idea. I sketch the house with them, model it in 3D so they can walk through it before a single stone is laid, then design the frame, the slabs and the roof so the thing is safe and doesn't cost more than it should. Fifteen-odd projects so far, from a small bungalow in Masinga to a 600-seat school in Laikipia.
I've put in site time too: supervising road works for the Kenya Rural Roads Authority, running residential builds for a developer in Kiambu, testing materials in the government lab. These days the week splits between teaching young engineers at DeKUT and a few commissions of my own.
Two 2025 studies on making concrete greener using material already lying around the Kenyan coast.
XRF, SEM and EDS analysis showing that a 6% coral sand powder additive improves strength, pore structure and sulphate resistance.
Read the paperDemonstrates crushed clay tile waste with silica fume as a viable concrete constituent, diverting waste from landfill.
Read the paperGot a plot and an idea? I'd love to hear about it.
Email is best — I usually reply within a day, and I'm happy to talk things through before anything is formal.