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Pritzker Prize winner Diébédo Francis Kéré on why his childhood is keeping him motivated

2022-03-22T18:01:00-04:00

I never saw myself connected to this big thing. I was just using my skills to create comfortable spaces and beautiful schools and housing for my people. No, I never dreamed to see this work connected with Pritzker. No, no, never.

NPR’s Michel Martin got the newest Pritzker laureate and recently-named Dakar Goethe Institute designer to harken back to his childhood village in Burkina Faso, which he credited as a strong influence beginning with his educational experiences in darkened classrooms that frequently hovered around 100 degrees.

Recently on Archinect: Francis Kéré named 2022 Pritzker Prize winner

“Being in the village, you're thinking about big buildings, glass and whatever, far away,” Kéré told NPR. “And so in Burkina, that is it. The focus is the Western. But in my case, it's like you just have, you know, a tradition, which is strong, which has skills, which has some great things that I relate to the environment, to the ecology […] but people don't see it [as if] it has a value. And when we started, it cost me a lot of energy to really convince [them]. But a couple of years ago, people started to see that what I'm doing was the good solution.”

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Francis Kéré named 2022 Pritzker Prize winner

2022-03-15T10:00:00-04:00

Diébédo Francis Kéré has been awarded the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize, widely considered one of the industry's highest honors.

"Francis Kéré has found brilliant, inspiring and game-changing ways to answer these questions over the last decades," said the jury citation for the award. "His cultural sensitivity not only delivers social and environmental justice, but guides his entire process, in the awareness that it is the path towards the legitimacy of a building in a community. He knows, from within, that architecture is not about the object but the objective; not the product, but the process."

Born in Gando, Burkina Faso in 1965, Kéré studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. In 2005, while living in Berlin, he set up Kéré Architecture and has since designed a portfolio of notable works, including the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion, installations at Coachella, and a pavilion for the Tip...

Francis Kéré and others are attempting to muddy up the rising use of concrete in West Africa

2021-11-22T15:24:00-05:00

Architects, officials, and villagers confirm the trend: People are discarding traditional materials, mostly mud, in favor of concrete, as soon as they can afford it. As living standards increase making concrete more accessible, some of the world’s hottest, poorest landscapes are rapidly morphing from brown to cinder block grey.

Architects like Francis Kéré have been attempting to buck the trend of using concrete by experimenting with upgraded versions of terrestrial materials like mud bricks that simultaneously provide tools for community-building in developing countries like Burkina Faso.

Facade detail of Kéré Architecture's Burkina Institute of Technology. Photo: Jaime Herraiz.

The ancient material is much more heat-adaptable when compared to concrete, which is increasingly valuable in an area whose number of extreme heat days is expected to rapidly increase over the next three decades due to climate change.

“It’s a matter of time, it’s a matter of belief. It’s a matter of political will,” Kéré, told National Geographic. “But there’s a lot of accumulated knowledge now. In 10 years, you’re going to be surprised by our success.”