The 2022 Pritzker Prize Laureate is Diébédo Francis Kéré, Hon. FAIA, of Burkina Faso and Germany. Kéré is the first African recipient of the Pritzker Prize and Burkina Faso is the 23rd country to be represented amongst the Pritzker laureates.
Kéré was born in 1965 in Gando, a village of approximately 2,500 residents in Burkina Faso, a small landlocked nation in West Africa. In explaining its selection, the jury citation says, “In a world where architects are building projects in the most diverse contexts—not without controversies—Kéré contributes to the debate by incorporating local, national, regional and global dimensions in a very personal balance of grass roots experience, academic quality, low tech, high tech, and truly sophisticated multiculturalism.”
Initially trained as a carpenter, acclaim came early for Kéré. His first building, the Gando Primary School, was completed in his hometown in 2001 while he was still a student at the Technische Universität Berlin. The project received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004. The following year, he established Kéré Architecture, his Berlin-based firm, which he runs alongside the Kéré Foundation., a non-profit organization that pursues projects in his native Gando.
His designs are simple and modest, imbued with a sense of beauty and aspiration. Kéré manipulates natural light and ventilation to serve and inspire. Embracing the logic and simplicity of traditional methods without seeming to be constricted. Kéré’s modest approach is one that doesn’t shrink from solving the most pragmatic issues with both care and delight.
His initial design of the Gando Primary School comprised a single classroom structure under a sloped shed roof. The complex has been extended twice by Kéré, adding the barrel vaulted Gando Teachers’ Housing in 2004 and the circular Gando Primary School Library in 2019. His other projects include the Startup Lions Campus in Turkana County, Kenya (2021); Serpentine Pavilion in London (2017); and Xylem, the gathering pavilion for the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Mont. (2019). Currently under construction is the Benin National Assembly, Porto-Novo, Republic of Benin while his design for the 127-person assembly hall for National Assembly of Burkina Faso in Ouagadougou remains unbuilt.
He has regularly taught including TU München, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, and Yale University. Kéré is also the recipient of several other honors and awards including the 2021 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Architecture,
In the sole quote from Kéré released by the Pritzker Prize, the new laureate says: “I am hoping to change the paradigm, push people to dream and undergo risk. It is not because you are rich that you should waste material. It is not because you are poor that you should not try to create quality. Everyone deserves quality, everyone deserves luxury, and everyone deserves comfort. We are interlinked and concerns in climate, democracy and scarcity are concerns for us all.”
Kéré is the 51st Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. This year’s jury was chaired by 2016 laureate Alejandro Aravena in Santiago, Chile, and included Barry Bergdoll, curator, author, and the Meyer Schapiro professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University; Deborah Berke, FAIA, dean of the Yale School of Architecture; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, architectural critic, curator, and Brazilian Ambassador to India; Kazuyo Sejima, 2010 Pritzker Prize laureate; Benedetta Tagliabue, architect and director of Miralles Tagliabue EMBT; Wang Shu, 2012 Pritzker Prize laureate; and executive director Manuela Lucá-Dazio, Paris, France.
The award will be presented at the Great Hall of the Marshall Building, The London School of Economics and Political Science, designed by Grafton Architects and 2020 laureates Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara.
