The Pritzker Prize goes this year to Burkinabé Diébédo Francis Kéré, 57 years old. He is the first African architect to receive it since the award has existed, that is to say for 43 years. It is historic, and for the lucky winner, it is a clear invitation to all young people on the continent to dare to embark on architecture: “Nowhe confided to the British daily The Guardian, thanks to this prize, African students will see me and be able to say that, yes, it is a possible professional path for them tooBecause, it’s no secret, the profession remains very elitist. Diébédo Francis Kéré knows what it’s all about.
Congratulations to Francis Kéré, 2022 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize! pic.twitter.com/JZKAmEpmNt
— Pritzker Prize (@PritzkerPrize) March 15, 2022
He was born and raised in Gando, a small remote village in Burkina Faso, without water or electricity. As a teenager, what interests him is building buildings for his village, with what he has on hand, what is available locally: clay, fired brick which will become, with the use of wood, his signature. Diebedo Francis Kere started out as a carpenter, then, thanks to a scholarship, went to study architecture in Berlin where he graduated in 2004.
His first project is for his village: a primary school, all in brick, with a thick layer of earth for insulation, and with several openings designed to circulate air in the classrooms and thus do without air conditioning. Local materials, ancestral local ventilation techniques, but also local hands since it was the villagers who worked on the site. The result earned him a first prize, that of the Aga Khan, with which Diébédo Francis Kéré then went on to multiply the projects: no skyscrapers, but schools, hospitals, libraries, community centres. All in the same spirit, buildings on a human scale, taking into account local climatic and material constraints.
“I hope to change your visionhe explains to AFP, just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you have to waste materials and just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to quality, everyone deserves quality, and at the same time, we are all linked to each other, and concerns about climate, democracy, resource scarcity concern us all.” Where we understand that it is not just an architect who is rewarded with this prize, but another philosophy, pragmatic, human and full of meaning.