How star architect Francis Kéré is designing creative solutions for a rapidly changing world
He honed his climate-responsive designs in some of the planet’s fastest warming regions. Now, the Burkina Faso–raised Kéré is scaling up his trailblazing approach with ambitious projects across the globe.
When Francis Kéré became the first ever African laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2022, the judges behind the “Nobel of architecture” praised his efforts to “change unsustainable patterns of production and consumption.” But today, sitting in his studio in Berlin, the Burkina Faso–born architect admits with a shrug that the very concept of sustainability was, for much of his career, foreign to him.
“I had no clue what that is,” says Kéré, now 60. “Everything I was doing was born out of sheer necessity.”
Kéré’s work has earned global acclaim over the past 20 years, and lately he’s in high demand, with a trio of megawatt projects in Las Vegas, Brazil, and Germany all in development at once. But these have come only after decades of honing his vision in service of, as he says, sheer necessities—building schools, clinics, libraries, and other structures across Africa, undertakings defined by Kéré’s innovative use of local materials, creative techniques to keep buildings cool, and relentless commitment to community buy-in.
Consider Gando Primary School, built 25 years ago in Burkina Faso and today praised as one of this century’s most significant works of architecture. When Kéré, on a break from his studies in Germany, told the people in his home village of Gando that he wanted to build them a schoolhouse out of mud bricks, his neighbors balked, demanding one made of concrete and glass, like the buildings of Europe.
But clay, Kéré explained, was plentiful and cheap. A concrete building would need air-conditioning, and Gando didn’t have electricity. Clay bricks would absorb heat, keeping the schoolrooms cool. And the building Kéré had in mind would have two roofs: a vaulted clay one, patterned with small holes for ventilation, and a wider, overhanging tin roof above it. The tin would shield the clay and, heated by the sun, draft cooler air up from the classrooms below.
In the end, the people of Gando didn’t just approve his design for the school; they were so taken with his vision that they decided to help build it.
Now the ideas that Kéré began exploring in that era of his résumé are starting to take shape outside Africa on a grand scale, with several projects currently underway, including the Las Vegas Museum of Art (which aims to open in 2029), Kéré’s first major North American commission; the Biblioteca dos Saberes in Rio de Janeiro (no target completion date), his first commission in South America; and the Museum Ehrhardt in Plüschow, Germany (expected to open late next year), his first European museum. As Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, Kéré’s friend and colleague, points out, the architectural world is watching to see how Kéré will “continue to scale up ideologies that are rooted in more traditional forms of architecture and local materials and local techniques.”
Kéré wants to show that even in a place like Las Vegas—an energy-devouring desert metropolis reliant on air-conditioning, and one of America’s fastest warming cities—we can build in ways that complement nature rather than fight against it. Yes, this time he’s using concrete (a structural necessity), but the 60,000-square-foot museum will be clad in locally sourced stone, a ventilated facade that both mimics the red-rock surroundings and allows heat to escape, which will help keep the building cool. The Museum Ehrhardt, meanwhile, will primarily use rammed earth and wood.
All three new buildings will feature some of Kéré’s signature passive-cooling elements, like canopy roofs, perforated exteriors, and natural-ventilation towers that circulate air—drawing on hard-won lessons from working in a region that’s warming faster than any other, says Nana Biamah-Ofosu, a Ghanaian British architect and critic. She sees Kéré as a leading figure in an “African renaissance of architecture” prompting a global rethink of how structures are sourced and designed. “Drastic climate change, this is already happening on the African continent,” Biamah-Ofosu says. “To learn from [Africa] and take it as a place of deep knowledge is really important for the survival of humanity.”
To facilitate that learning, Kéré is expanding a training and research center he founded in 2018 in a city near Gando called Tenkodogo, where some 200 Burkinabe workers have acquired skills to help carry out his projects in Africa. This year he plans to open up the center to architects, designers, and craftspeople from across the globe, with a five-year goal of teaching 2,500 people how to build elegant, energy-efficient structures out of clay, wood, rock, adobe, and other vernacular materials.
“I see it as an exchange,” he says. “We have something positive from the continent—something that is so good that other people would love to benefit from.” Just as the villagers of Gando once asked him for a building like the ones they’d seen in Europe, Kéré hopes the rest of the world will aspire to build from the example of Africa.
