Kéré Architecture   Benin   The scheme drawn up by the Berlin firm of Francis Kéré for Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin, takes inspiration from the ‘word tree,’ the western African tradition by which the community gathers under a tree to make collective decisions. Facing the

Kéré Architecture   United States   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Mali   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Mali   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Youtube   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....

Designboom   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Juhani Pallasmaa   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.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   ‘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

Andres Lepik Ayça Beygo   Berlin  2016  
Hatje Cantz   - 208 Pages 

Kéré Architecture   Berlin  2013  
Keré Architecture   - 136 Pages