

Berlin, Germany
The Burkinabè architect Francis Kéré designed this permanent pavilion for the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, on the edge of Yellowstone National Park in Montana. The building joins a series of unique pieces that engage in dialogue with nature on
With a population of 3000 inhabitants, Gando is a small village in the southern plains of burkina faso. It is located 200 kilometers from Ouagadougou, the country´s capital. In 1998, Francis Kéré launched a project to build a school in his native vil
The teachers’ houses were designed to attract teachers out to the countryside, as well as to promote the use of earth as a sustainable and durable building material. The houses were realized as a series of adaptable modules, each of size comparable t
Two years after the opening of the primary school in Gando, demand continued to increase, which encouraged to add an extension for more than 120 students. The extension was designed following the same principles that inspired the first school. The wa
Following the strategies applied at the Primary School in Gando, the main aim of the project was to design a sustainable school that would adapt to the extreme conditions of Burkina Faso. Its construction was carried out with the help of workers who
Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence, the National Park of Mali, located in Bamako, the capital, reopened. Several new accesses were built, aside from a restaurant and a sports center. Clad in locally sourced stone, the
Located where the Niger and Bani rivers meet, Mopti is Mali’s fourth largest city and its main commercial port. After the restoration of the Great Mosque of Mopti, commonly known as the Mosque of Komoguel, The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) turned
Two years before his death, artist, filmmaker, and playwright Christoph Schlingensief managed to embark Kéré on his dream of building an opera house in the heart of Africa. While traveling through Burkina Faso in search of the adequate site, the coun
The construction of a health center as part of the Opera Village project followed the aim of improving basic health assistance for the local population. The CSPS, acronym for Centre de Santè et de Promotion Sociale, is fit out with the necessary inst
The success of the primary school in Gando and its positive impact on the community encouraged to build a secondary school to offer opportunities to those students who wanted to continue their studies. Inspired in the distribution of the surrounding
The Songtaaba Women’s Association is made up of approximately 300 members from the village of Gando and the surrounding province of Boulgou. The association provides a venue for the local women to form a strong social and economic union, in order to
Four years after the exhibition ‘The Architect is Present,’ which showed the Spanish public the work of five architects marked by a deep social calling and a strong language of sustainability, the ICO Museum in Madrid has just inaugurated a show, aga
Francis Kéré is Burkinabè and Berliner. His work is deeply rooted in his home country, but he uses universal principles and elements that make it suitable for completely different contexts like that of his adoptive city. These primary elements were d
‘Francis Kéré. Primary Elements’ at Museo ICO
The 3-minute video presents the exhibition curated by Luis Fernández-Galiano, which walks us through the trajectory of the Berlin-based Burkinabè by focusing on the essential nature of his architecture....
Madrid’s Museo ICO presents the exhibition: ‘Francis Kéré. Primary elements’ curated by Luis Fernández-Galiano and organized by the ICO Foundation. The exhibition showcases 27 projects and six artistic installations carried out in three different con
Francis Kéré commences a third century for our monographs, and there are good reasons for this. The most evident refer to his leading role in a new generation of architects determined to build a better world working for those in need, for whom the Bu
In the beginning was the tree. If Gottfried Semper had extended his archaeological and ethnographic explorations to the African Savannah, he would there have found confirmation of many of his theses, and he would have modified others to enrich his na
Diébédo Francis Kéré appeared on our screen with the Aga Khan Award in 2004. I wrote about him in the newspaper El País in December of that year, and the Yearbook released shortly after (AV 111-112) covered prominently the now mythical school in Gand
This year’s summer pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery has just opened to the public, to little surprise with respect to the computer rendering that was presented a few months ago by its author, the Burkina Faso-born Berlin-based architect Diébédo Fra
When he was 18, Diébédo Francis Kéré was awarded a scholarship to be a carpentry apprentice in Germany, but the fact that wood is scarce in his country, Burkina Faso, led him to decide to study something more useful: architecture. Now an internationa
The works and projects of these three builders of the necessary stand for a return to reality and to the material, social, and cultural roots of architecture.
‘Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.’ Tatlin’s quote gave the cue for the third congress of the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad, held in Pamplona in June 2014. Like the two previous conferences, celebrated in 2010 and 2012, the event gathe