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...

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

Francis Kéré named 2022 Pritzker Prize winner