New Look Among Pritzker Winners

Diébédo Francis Kéré, Photo Lars Borges, All images are copyright of the respective photographers and artists cited, and courtesy of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

This year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, the world’s most prestigious honor for design, is going to Diébédo Francis Kéré – also known as Francis Kéré – a citizen of both Burkina Faso and Germany. There’s no overlooking the way he differs from all 44 preceding annual winners. He is the first Black so honored.

It turns out there are many compelling reasons, other than diversity, for Kéré’s selection. His works are exceptional for their embodiment of the social and environmental virtues now being recognized as essential to superior architecture. And his design has been focused on community projects, with buildings of exemplary form and detail constructed within typically limited means.

Kéré’s unusual career path led him to become a social and environmental activist as well as a designer. Born in 1965 in Gando, Burkina Faso, as the eldest son of his village chief, he was the first in his family to go to school. Thanks to scholarships granted by German institutions, he began to learn carpentry in his home country in 1985. Ten years later — at age 30 — he moved on to study design at the Technische Universität Berlin.

Designs to fit community needs and resources

To provide better school buildings in his home town in Burkina Faso, Kéré launched a successful international fund drive, then based their designs on the area’s available resources and established construction methods. His first building there, the primary school (2001), earned a prestigious Aga Khan Award (honoring outstanding architecture for Muslim communities) in 2004. The success of that building led to expansion of the school to include teachers’ housing (2004), additional teaching facilities (2008), and a library (2019), as the student body rose from 120 to 700. The school’s buildings are especially notable for their passive climate control through thermal masses of locally-made cement-fortified clay bricks and elevated roof canopies with broad overhangs.

Kéré’s buildings for the Burkina Institute of Technology (2020) were constructed with cast-in-place clay walls for thermal insulation and canopies of locally available eucalyptus shading open spaces. Metal roofs fend off seasonal rains, the runoff stored underground to irrigate mango groves on the site. The design of the Start-up Lions information and technology campus in Turkana, Kenya (2021) includes dense walls of local stone and tall ventilation towers, which together minimize the demand for air-conditioning to protect its technological equipment. Its distinctive silhouette, on a hilltop site, make it something of a regional landmark.

Gando Primary School, 2001, Gando, Burkina Faso. Photos Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk.
Gando Primary School, 2001, Gando, Burkina Faso. Photos Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk.
Gando Primary School, 2001, Gando, Burkina Faso. Photos Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk.

Other works in Burkina Faso include the Opera Village, a community developed to support an as yet unbuilt opera house, master planned and designed by Kéré in collaboration with the late Christoph Schlingensief. Some of his health-care facilities there are characterized by small windows at varied heights, offering framed landscape views for sitting visitors, standing staff, and reclining patients.

National Park of Mali, 2020, Bamako, Mali. Photo courtesy of Francis Kéré.
National Park of Mali, 2020, Bamako, Mali. Photo courtesy of Francis Kéré.

Kéré’s largest and most prominent Burkina Faso project, the National Assembly, is yet to be constructed. Commissioned in 2014 after the destruction of the former parliament building, the structure will shelter a 127-person assembly hall under a stepped-pyramid lattice roof. Its master plan envisions surroundings including indigenous plantings, exhibition spaces, and retail. For the neighboring nation of Benin, Kéré has also designed a National Assembly of somewhat more traditional form, with offices elevated above colonnades that surround a central meeting hall.

Surgical Clinic and Health Centre, 2014, Léo, Burkina Faso. Photo courtesy of Francis Kéré.

Here in the United States Kéré has carried out two projects. The name of his Sabalé Ke, originally designed for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, translates as “House of Celebration.” Its conical shelters in a variety of sizes are constructed of steel frames with vividly colored panels that filter the sunlight by day and illuminate the interiors by night. His Xylem pavilion at the Tippetts Rise Art Center in Montana, inspired by sacred village gathering places in Burkina Faso, is constructed almost entirely of raw, local, sustainable pine wood. A canopy of clustered logs, supported on concealed steel columns, allow daylight to filter in from above. Seating at various heights allows visitors to enjoy a variety of natural views while standing, sitting, or lying down.

Lycée Schorge Secondary School, 2016, Koudougou, Burkina Faso. Photo courtesy of Franc
Lycée Schorge Secondary School, 2016, Koudougou, Burkina Faso. Photo courtesy of Franc

The Perennial Pritzker

The evolution of the Pritzker’s honoree list has more or less followed the trajectory of worldwide architectural judgment over its 45-year history. Sponsored all those years by the Hyatt Foundation in Chicago, the prize was meant from the outset to recognize the world’s greatest architects. Its first 23 annual winners maintained the reigning view that great architecture was created by individual male architects (11 from Europe, 7 from the US, 3 from Japan, 2 from Latin America).

Serpentine Pavilion, 2017, London. Photo courtesy of Iwan Baan.
Serpentine Pavilion, 2017, London. Photo courtesy of Iwan Baan.

In 2001, the Pritzker juries finally decided that partners doing great work together could be honored together (Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron). The prize’s 2004 breakthrough was its award to the first woman, Zaha Hadid. The roster of individual males resumed until 2010, when the mixed-gender partners Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa took the prize. In 2017 the honor went to a man-woman-man partnership, in 2020 to woman-woman partners, and last year to a woman-man partnership (all of those from Europe). Along the way individual males so recognized included the first ones from China and India, and now someone from Africa.

Burkina Faso National Assembly, in progress, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Renderings courtesy of Kéré Architecture.
Burkina Faso National Assembly, in progress, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Renderings courtesy of Kéré Architecture.

It should be clearly understood that the evolution toward diversity in the Pritzkers was not attributable to bias or backwardness in its juries, but to the all-too-gradual evolution of the profession, all over the world.

Benin National Assembly, under construction, Porto-Novo, Republic of Benin. Renderings courtesy of Kéré Architecture.
Benin National Assembly, under construction, Porto-Novo, Republic of Benin. Renderings courtesy of Kéré Architecture.
Sabalé Ke, 2019, California. Photo courtesy of Iwan Baan.
Xylem. 2019, Fishtail, Montana. Photo courtesy of Iwan Baan.
Xylem. 2019, Fishtail, Montana. Photo courtesy of Iwan Baan.