Kéré Architecture   Uganda   The kamwokya informal settlement, located among the hills of Kampala’s central district, is one of the most indigent areas of the capital, with a high dwelling density, scarce infrastructures, and poor health conditions. Surprisingly, it hides the on

Kéré Architecture   Senegal   For the very first time in the history of the prestigious German institution, one of its centers scattered all over the world will occupy a building expressly designed for the purpose. Rising behind a wall that keeps out traffic noise, the building e

Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   A group of modular pavilions houses an educational center that provides high school graduates in the country’s third most populous city with the opportunity to obtain further studies. The location being a flood plain, landscaping work was needed to p

Kéré Architecture   Kenya   On the shores of one of the African Great Lakes, a center devoted to new technologies offers training and job opportunities, endeavoring to put a halt to the exodus of young entrepreneurs. Finding inspiration in the region’s abundance of mounds built

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   United Kingdom   Every year the Serpentine Gallery in London chooses an international architect to build a temporary pavilion in Kensington Gardens. The pavilion of 2017, designed by Francis Kéré, is conceived as a microcosm: a community structure that fuses cultural

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   United States   Inspired by Philadelphia’s rich textile tradition, this installation shows how one single material can produce an extraordinary structure with the power to unite the community. This installation, in the Perelman atrium of the Philadelphia Museum of A

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Germany   Located inside the iconic Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome in the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, the Camper Pop-up Shop pioneers a new form of retail shopping by combining the best attributes from in-store and online shopping through a mix of virtual

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Denmark   As part of the exhibition ‘Africa: Architecture, Culture and Identity’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the installation recreates the sensation of being under the shade of a big tree. This powerful symbol, present in both Nordic and African my

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   United Kingdom   With a focus towards exploring the experiential qualities of architecture, the ‘Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined’ exhibition enlisted architects such as Kengo Kuma, Álvaro Siza, and Eduardo Souto de Moura to produce site-specific installations

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Germany   Located in the center of Berlin, Tempelhof Airport closed its doors to passengers in 2008 during the migratory crisis to offer emergency shelter to the more than 8,000 refugees escaping war in the Middle East and other global conflicts. The construct

Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   After 31 years of dictatorial rule, the people of Burkina Faso rose up and ousted their former president following a violent revolt in 2014. In protest of the old regime, the former National Assembly was attacked and destroyed by the citizens. Aside

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Sudan   In a semi-desert landscape between the Nile and Atbara rivers, the remains of the city of the Kushites in Meroe – a powerful dynasty that reigned from the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD – were declared a UNESCO Heritage Site in 2011. Located ab

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Mozambique   Located at the point where the Revuboe and Zambezi rivers converge, the project aims to create a new type of neighborhood to address the increasing demand for housing in Tete, Mozambique. The community will be able to test a new planning method that

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Kenya   Located in the Kenyan village of Kogelo, where Barack Obama’s father was born, the Mama Sarah Obama Legacy Campus will be an educational enclave for a thousand students and preschool-age children in danger of being marginalized. The project presents

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Situated in the rural countryside of Boulkiemdé province, the Noomdo Orphanage lies approximately 2 kilometers outside Koudougou, and is home to more than fifty children between the ages of six and seventeen. Mimicking the nearby residential compound

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   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

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Developed to establish an exchange between local craftsmen, builders, architects, students, and visitors, Atelier Gando was initiated under the organization of Francis Kéré with the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in Switzerland. The Atelier w

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

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   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   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

The Guardian   Jon Henley   For Unesco (United National Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Francis Kéré has designed an immersive virtual museum of cultural objects stolen from museums, collections, and archaeological sites worldwide. The project aims to raise

At the recently renovated Richelieu site of the National Library of France (BnF), on 12 September, the Japanese Imperial House and the Japan Art Association named the winners of the Praemium Imperiale, an accolade awarded every year to five figures f

The Japanese Imperial House and the Japan Art Association have annually since 1989 awarded the Praemium Imperiale in five categories. The winners of this year’s 34th edition – each to receive the sum of 95,000 euros – have been announced in a ceremon

Pritzker Prize laureate of 2022, Francis Kéré has become a symbol of social and sustainable construction. Born in the Burkinabè village of Gando in 1965, Kéré studied in Germany and set up his office in Berlin, from which he returns time and again to

The Architect's Newspaper   Ibai Rigby   It didn’t surprise me when the Pritzker Architecture Prize announced its latest laureate. After all, the so-called Nobel Prize of architecture has a history of alternating between global media darlings, such as Philip Johnson or Rem Koolhaas, and mor

Pritzker 2022

In a ceremony which at least symbolically has anointed him as the African master of contemporary architecture, Francis Kéré was handed the Pritzker Prize in the Marshall Building of the London School of Economics, a civic-brutalist work of Grafton Ar

Amid the grandiloquence that architecture of success sometimes seems to don as proof thereof, this year’s Pritzker is the definitive anointing of a practice that stands out for humility and commitment to serve people in the most efficient and economi

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The world has its eyes on the war waging in Eastern Europe, but the continent’s south has its own calamity: the tragedy of hunger, terrorism, and desolation.

Like the Oscar and like the Nobel, the Pritzker is not simply a prize: it is an encrypted emblem and the reading of it is biographical, sociological, and political all at once. Who receives it, and why, are equal in importance. The case of Francis Ké

The Hyatt Foundation has granted the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize to the Burkina Faso architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, the first African architect to receive the distinction. The award is bestowed yearly since 1979, and consists of 100,000 USD (91

‘Francis Kéré. Primary Elements’ at Museo ICO

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

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

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   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

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   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

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

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

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.

Andres Lepik (ed.) Ayça Beygo   Berlin  2016  
Hatje Cantz   - 208 Pages 

Kéré Architecture   Berlin  2013  
Keré Architecture   - 136 Pages