Students at Diébédo Francis Kéré’s Lycée Schorge in Burkina Faso.
Diébédo Francis Kéré is an architect from Burkina Faso, a desperately poor country in the Sahel, in northwest Africa. "We've never won a gold medal at the Olympics," he says. The national sport is football and they've never been to the World Cup, either. "We've hardly ever won anything."
They have now. This year Kéré was awarded the Pritzker Prize: world architecture's highest honour. Based in Berlin, he's designed parliaments and other civic institutions in many parts of Africa, but his speciality is community buildings: health centres, market buildings, schools.
In all of them, he pushes local materials to the fore – eucalyptus, clay, stone – in styles that marry traditional knowledge with a striking modernist eye and a deeply felt humanism.
And an instinctive respect for environmental values. At the Lycée Schorge secondary school in the city of Koudougou, the towers on top are wind funnels. The walls are laterite stone, which is a clay rich in mineral deposits, dug from the earth and hardened in the air to provide thermal protection. Overhanging plaster-covered white roofs turn the glare into soft light. A gorgeous angled wall of eucalyptus staves also helps with the glare and creates a kind of cloister.
Kéré designed his first building, a primary school for his home village of Gando, when he was still an architecture student. He didn't stop with the design, though: he raised the money and organised the entire construction too.
But his biggest project has not been built: it's a new national assembly in the capital, Ouagadougou. The old one was burned down in 2014 in a popular uprising against the dictator who had ruled the country for 31 years.
"I was invited by artists, teachers, activists, musicians — you know, people from all groups — to create something that is representative of Burkina, that is transparent, that is new, that is important - and that is also a memorial for people that have been killed during the revolution."
So Kéré came up with a low pyramid surrounded by gardens and with a cornfield on top that he hopes will be used to encourage urban farming. It's also to be the main vantage point for looking out over the very flat city.
"People can go on top of it at any time, during the day and during the night," he says. "Symbolically it is transparent, it is open."
There's a tree in the middle, an "arbre a palabres", or tree of discussion, just like the trees in rural villages under which decisions are made. The ruins of the dictator's old building, meanwhile, will become a memorial where rainwater is collected for irrigation.
Burkina Faso is one of the most challenged nations in the world. Since 2014, attempts by Burkinabés to build a democracy have been disrupted by jihadists, military coups, child-slavery gangs and some of the worst impacts of global warming anywhere.
And yet the country has some beautiful buildings and the hope of more. While sporting triumph remains elusive, Kéré's buildings give great dignity and hope to the people who use them.
Design for Living appears weekly in Canvas magazine.
