Diébédo Francis Kéré
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Architectural Digest (Published May 2022)
Ambling through the grounds of Berlin’s defunct Tempelhof airport late last summer, the architect Diébédo Francis Kéré looked out across the sweeping landscape. “Here you have so much space, so much freedom,” he says. “It’s public, it’s open.” Kéré, who lives and works in the German capital, has lately become an internationally recognized star among contemporary architects. Recently announced as this year’s Pritzker Prize laureate, he will receive the award—widely seen as the field’s highest honor—on May 27 at a ceremony in London. Best known for his innovative off-grid structures in his home country, Burkina Faso, Kéré has yet to build in Berlin despite 20 years in practice. But the city is where he has raised a family, where he became an architect, where he goes for runs on Tempelhof’s grounds. Planes haven’t taken off from the airport since 2008, but little has changed since its rebirth as a park south of Kreuzberg. The gargantuan terminal building—a stark remnant of the Nazi era—is still there, as are the airport’s twin runways, parallel strips of tarmac nearly two miles long cutting east and west across acres of wild grass. This was the base of operations for American military aircraft during the famed Berlin Airlift, the Cold War campaign that ferried millions of tons of food and fuel into blockaded West Berlin.
Germany was still divided when Kéré arrived there in 1985, from his village in Burkina Faso. At just 20 years old, he had received a scholarship from the Munich-based Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft to undertake language training and an apprenticeship in carpentry. As the plane lifted off from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, Kéré saw his country from above for the first time. “Your perception of the world from the top is very different,” he says. “You could see the man-made, the roads and the buildings, like I had never seen before.”
A portrait of the architect Diébédo Francis Kéré.
Photo: Lars Borges
Kéré was born about a hundred miles east of Ouagadougou, in Gando—at the time, the country was known as the Republic of Upper Volta. His father was a community leader in the village, and wanted Kéré to learn to read and write once he turned 7. The nearest school, though, was 10 miles away in Tenkodogo—a walk that took several hours, sometimes in blistering heat. Eventually he began to live with a local family, working to earn his keep. “I had to carry water, early in the morning, before school,” Kéré recalls. “Later, I carried construction materials—sand, gravel, mud—to fix my guest family’s house or to sell.”
When his scholarship expired in 1988, Kéré made the decision to stay in Germany. But without the Abitur—the German equivalent of a high school diploma—it would be impossible to secure residency or enroll at the university. He took night classes while working as a carpenter by day. “At that time I started to grow ideas to support my people,” he remembers. The degree took him five years to complete. In 1993, after a long absence, Kéré returned home and explained to his concerned family: He would study architecture.
Burkina Faso sits in the Sahel, the transitional belt stretching from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the Red Sea in the east, dividing the Sahara desert and tropical savannas. Clay construction is a hallmark of Sahelian architecture, an effective means of building in a harsh climate in which timber and stone are hard to come by. One of the finest remaining examples of traditional Burkinabe architecture is the Cour Royale de Tiébéle, in a southeastern village near the border with Ghana, not far from where Kéré grew up. A complex of low-slung structures covering almost three acres, the Cour Royale is a center of village life and the residence of the community leader, known as the pé. The smooth walls of the buildings have qualities of pottery, crafted from a mix of clay, straw and cow dung, all shaped and smoothed by hand. Their outer surfaces are decorated with intricate designs—abstract patterns and figurative scenes of the community’s history—drawn in colored mud and natural pigments. Thick walls temper extreme heat, but exposure nonetheless takes its toll on the earthen material. It requires constant upkeep.
Kéré’s first building, the Gando Primary School in his hometown—which was finished in 2001, while he was still a student at the Technical University in Berlin—is a modern application of earthen construction. “I wanted to go back and build a school,” the 57-year-old talent explains, “so that no kids would be forced to go and carry materials on the weekends.” Three years later, that project won the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture, launching Kéré’s career while the ink on his diploma was still wet. It also set the mold for his later work: Construction was completed by villagers handling locally sourced materials.
The school is deceptively simple, built from a handful of humble materials: Clay brick, concrete, and corrugated metal. A drawing of it could be mistaken for a modernist pavilion—all right angles and elegant proportions, its three identical classrooms arranged in a tidy row. It reflects Kéré’s affinity for simple geometries; it’s no coincidence that he confessed a love for the spartan minimalism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But the real innovations lie in the construction details. “It looks simple,” Kéré says, “but it has a lot of thought.” The bricks, composed of an experimental mixture of clay and cement, were formed and sun-dried on-site. Structurally resilient and eco-friendly, the bricks’ mass insulates the interior from even the hottest days, when temperatures often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
The school ingeniously transcends the limitations of its place, a theme that runs throughout Kéré’s work. Burkina Faso is among the world’s poorest countries, beset by punishing droughts and recently plagued by terrorist violence and political unrest. In an age when leading architects routinely call for materials that are shipped halfway around the world, Kéré’s designs remain intimately tied to local resources. The school buildings require little to no energy to operate, a necessity in a remote region that mostly lacks infrastructure for power and water. “I wanted to fit it within my reality,” Kéré explains. “For me it’s the most normal thing I could do. Nothing is complicated, everything works.”
The hovering roof, which he called a “big canopy,” is arguably his trademark. It lends shade to the spaces below while also protecting the building’s earthen walls from damaging rains. The principal function, however, is ventilation: A void between the gentle arc of the sheet-metal roof above and the brick-vault ceiling of the classroom below allows hot air to escape upward, pulling cooler air into the classrooms. “It works like a lung—the way you breathe fresh air,” he says. “My building is like an organism. It should breathe too.”
Lycée Schorge Secondary School, which was completed in 2016, is located in Koudougou, Burkina Faso. Photo: Courtesy of Francis Kéré
Considered against Kéré’s body of work, the expressive roof is an architectural leitmotif rather than a cliché. Subjected to persistent experimentation, it is always more sophisticated and further developed the next time that it appears. In the SKF-RTL Children’s Learning Centre in Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya, designed in 2016, the first Gando School’s curved and welded-rebar “butterfly roof” was reinterpreted with a simple steel frame set on a regular grid, covered over with sheet metal. Here, the roof became a landscape of shallow, shifted plates dancing over sinuous earth-brick walls and circular classrooms.
A year later, in 2017, Hans Ulrich Obrist, director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, tapped Kéré to design the museum’s summer pavilion, a prestigious annual commission previously handed to international architects including Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and the late Zaha Hadid. There, Kéré seized on the opportunity to push the roof further. He raised a broad and elliptical canopy on delicate space-frame legs arranged in a ring at the pavilion’s core. An opening in the funnel-shaped roof directed rainwater toward the center of the space like an ancient Roman impluvium. All varieties of architectural excess have been underwritten by the generosity of the Serpentine commission over the years, but Kéré held to the opposite tack, making the most of the least. His precision-engineered roof tapered to a paper-thin profile at its outer edge. Fine strips of the canopy’s wood cladding reached further outward into the air, continuing past the structural frame. In the summer sun, Kéré’s ingeniously-detailed pavilion created an ethereal halo of dappled light and cast a gentle penumbra onto the ground below.
Kéré frequently refers to his buildings as prototypes. He doesn’t intend each to be a one-off experiment, but rather hopes that one invention can be applied to another in the future. For the past two decades, he has been testing those ideas in the field and working to convince wary collaborators. His first project, which was built by residents of his home village, required Kéré to convince the community of his idea. At first they were skeptical of a “mud building,” but later he taught them how to form bricks. “My work is built on trust,” Kéré says.
For a 2011 addition to the Gando school, the Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School, Kéré formed the building’s walls by adapting his proprietary clay and cement mixture to be cast on-site and used in the manner of traditional concrete. The solid barriers—which look massive when compared with stacked brick—are more thermally protective, faster to erect, and cheaper. The method is not only a technical leap, but also an aesthetic achievement: These newer cast walls are more sculptural than bricks laid in straight courses, and take the shape of gentle arcs cascading along the length of the brown-red building. “Beauty is not just for those who can afford it,” Kéré argues. “Everyone deserves beauty—structures that embrace people, and their dreams and desires.”
Kéré’s latest project in his home country—the Burkina Institute of Technology in Koudougou, finished in 2020—explores the in situ casting method at the scale of a small campus. “I am always trying to make it happen with minimum material,” he says. “It shouldn’t be sophisticated.” Blocks of classrooms frame an open courtyard, shaded on three sides by broad overhangs. Locally harvested eucalyptus wood lines the roofs and walls, producing enclosure without inhibiting much-needed airflow. The ceiling of each classroom seesaws upward at one end, leading toward a chimney that vents hot air outside. Arrayed one after the other, the chimneys lend the spartan building a distinctive and sawtooth profile.
Many of his projects in Africa are financed by the Kéré Foundation e.V., a nonprofit he founded in 1998 to raise the $50,000 needed for the Gando Primary School. His studio is a separate organization that provides its design services to the foundation pro bono. It’s an unconventional model that combines entrepreneurship with humanitarian ambition, and which has for the past two decades been a robust means of translating ideas into durable civic infrastructure. “I wanted to help my people, and I had a vision,” Kéré says. “I was breathing a little idea into people’s minds.”
Colleagues see Kéré as a leader in the field, promoting a socially minded form of practice that is both environmentally sensitive and community centered. As many designers struggle to rise to the urgencies of climate change, Kéré seems to be asking—and answering—the right questions. “Where do materials come from? How do they get there? What is the embodied energy involved? What are the labor laws? Who’s doing this work?” The architecture curator and author Beatrice Galilee considers these questions to be fundamental for every architect. “Kéré has always had a profound relationship to the people who make the building and the materials that make the building,” she says.
Kéré’s firm relies on a core team of roughly 60 builders for its projects in Burkina Faso, though that number can sometimes balloon to as many as 300 working on-site. He regularly travels from Berlin to oversee construction on-site. His deep involvement in the construction process is not just a condition of building in remote areas, but a principle that he has begun to carry forward into his projects in Europe and North America. “It is a dimension we almost never pay attention to—people want to participate more,” Kéré says.
Kéré’s 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in London.
Photo: Iwan Baan
In 2019 the architect built Xylem, an open-air shelter on the campus of Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana. It was Kéré’s first building in the U.S. and a template for creating meaningful forms of architectural participation in the west, where do-it-yourself construction is uncommon if not unheard of. The clients at Tippet Rise, Peter and Cathy Halstead, were benefactors of the Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School in Gando. That project, and Xylem, are connected by an ethos of humanitarian architectural purpose that is shared by both the architect and the clients. Constructed from salvaged pinewood, the building in Montana takes its name from the core structures of trees which provide their strength and conduct nutrients from the roots to the branches. The finished pavilion, which sits amidst a copse of trees on the edge of the site, appears simultaneously rustic and futuristic. The ceiling is almost cave-like, with heavy bundles of dried logs suspended like stalactites from a hexagonal steel grid. Sculpted curvilinear benches cut from the same logs emerge from the poured-concrete floor like prehistoric stalagmites.
After just two decades in practice, Kéré has already reached the peaks of professional acclaim. His work is widely studied, and increasingly imitated. In a field sometimes beset by infighting, Kéré’s humanitarian approach is almost universally respected. He has been applauded by other Pritzker laureates, including the couple Jean-Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton, who received the honor in 2021. On the occasion of Kéré’s installation Arbre à Palabres at the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin last year, Vassal wrote that Kéré is “shaking up and awakening the world of architecture,” and noted that “he does it with his heart.”
Kéré is also in demand as a teacher. His courses at the Technical University of Munich, where he is a professor and chair of architectural design and participation—a specialty he single-handedly inaugurated—are perpetually oversubscribed, and his popularity has garnered visiting appointments in the United States at Harvard and Yale. At the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland, where Kéré also teaches, he challenges pupils to build with only scavenged materials. “You may live in a place of wealth,” he told them recently, “but you have to invent.” Students I spoke with were excited by his selfless approach to architecture and energized by his practical outlook. “I tell them to learn and find a way to contribute,” he says. “Where are you? What can you do within the profession? What can you do within your country?”
This teaching philosophy to contribute to one’s own society can be linked to a moment in 1983, when Kéré was 18. At that time, revolution installed Burkina Faso’s former prime minister Thomas Sankara in the presidency. Sankara, who had been thrown in jail by his political opponents just months earlier, was barely 33. He led the nation for four years as a popular reformer, a champion of women’s rights and postcolonial independence who gave the country its current name, which means “Land of Upright People.” “Sankara had a very strong mind,” Kéré explains. “You would get inspired by the way he said, ‘Go, do.’ I wanted to do, I wanted to be pragmatic. I didn’t have money, but I had knowledge, and I wanted to contribute.”
Sankara remains as an embodiment of Burkinabe self-determination. His successor, Blaise Compaoré, was ousted from power in 2014, following widespread protests against a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow him to remain in power indefinitely. Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, one of Compaoré’s later successors as president, convened a trial in 2021 to hold 14 conspirators accountable for Sankara’s 1987 assassination—including Compaoré, who remains in exile in Côte d’Ivoire. Kaboré’s government was overthrown earlier this year in a military-led coup d’etat, a development that has cast a pall over the country’s future. Just one day after the takeover in January, the parliament was dissolved and the constitution was suspended. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the Burkinabe military commander who orchestrated the coup, became president of the country soon thereafter. Although the military junta that has controlled Burkina Faso since January has promised a return to democratic elections within the next three years, it will ultimately fall to Damiba and his government to decide when—and if—this happens.
In 2017, Kéré designed a monument to Sankara in Ouagadougou, to be built on the site of the former leader’s murder. If built, the tower would rise a symbolic 87 meters, or about 285 feet, above the center of the capital, and it would be the city’s tallest structure by far. But even more provocative was Kéré’s proposal to place it within a new public landscape: A green space in a city largely without parks. Kéré imagines it as an open-air museum that introduces visitors to the principles of the revolution. And inside the monument’s cone-shaped tower, he envisions a helical ramp giving way to a panorama at the summit. “At the top of the tower I want the Burkinabe people to keep dreaming,” he says. “I wanted to extend people’s horizon, to lift them up to see the country.”
Completed in 2019, Léo Doctors’ Housing is located in Léo, Burkina Faso. The spaces accommodate medical residents and volunteers, which fosters the exchange of knowledge between visiting specialists and its local physicians. Photo: Courtesy of Francis Kéré