Diébédo Francis Kéré

Diébédo Francis Kéré (1966-) is considered one of the most important contemporary African architects, the first from that continent to be awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2022, considered to be on a par with the Nobel Prize for Architecture, then repeated the following year with the almost equally illustrious Japanese Imperial Prize. He holds both the nationality of Burkina Faso, his country of origin, and that of Germany, the country to which he moved in 1985 to study thanks to a scholarship at the Technische Universität in Berlin, the city where the headquarters of his studio has also been located since 2005. Kéré remains very attached to his homeland and to his native village of Gando, where he created the work that made him famous internationally, the local elementary school (2001, then expanded several times in the following years), awarded in 2004 with the Aga Khan Award. Central to Kéré’s work is the revival of traditional Burkinabe construction techniques and stylistic elements typical of West African vernacular architecture, often limited to a single storey in height and featuring extensive use of wood and simple bricks, in an operation that can be considered in some ways parallel to the Western response to the values ​​of classicism, in opposition to the standardized and “globalist” style of the most famous archistars. It is no coincidence that many of his most famous projects were created in Africa, including the renovation of the Mali National Park (2010), which includes the construction of new structures, the Lycée Schorge Secondary School in Burkina Faso (2017) and the Startup Lions Campus in Kenya (2021). Other well-known creations of his include the Xylem pavilion (2019) in the United States, built entirely from dead tree trunks, and the 2017 installation at the Serpentine Pavilion in London, which featured some stools designed by Kéré himself and produced by the Italian company Riva 1920, a specialist in solid wood processing.