Imagine a typical day during the hot season at Gando Primary School in Burkina Faso, where a building designed by architect, Diébédo Francis Kéré, has transformed the learning experience since its completion in 2001. As the sun rises in the small, Burkinabé village of Gando, the students are arriving at Gando Primary School already feeling the heat of the region too intense to beggar our human, evolutionary ability to adapt to anything. Across the dry savanna landscape, there is dust everywhere just as the roofs of the nearby traditional buildings are becoming one with the sun. However, as the students enter their respective classes, their daily sigh of anticipation and relief is resounding: the temperature has dropped considerably enough to make even them think they are in a completely different climate; soft, natural light filters through the perforated ceiling; the zephyr moves smoothly through the classrooms, courtesy of the elevated roof design; the sound of wind also flows through the building’s ventilation gaps; and the texture of the compressed earth blocks stay cool to the touch. The students are comfortably working at their desks, and the teachers are moving between corridors without sweating. What seems to have been an almost irrepressible reality has been conditioned by sustainable architecture, headed and made possible by the innovative brilliance of Kéré. 

Kéré, born on 10 April 1965, is a Burkinabé-German architect from Gando, a village in Boulgou province located 223 kilometres from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. In the early 1970s, at the age of seven, he had to leave his immediate family to study in the city. At the age of 20 in 1985, he travelled to Berlin, Germany on a vocational carpentry scholarship, learning how to make furniture and roofs by day while attending secondary school at night. Awarded another scholarship in 1995 to attend Technische Universität Berlin and train as an architect, Kéré graduated with an advanced degree in 2004.  However, three years earlier, he had accomplished what would define him as a visionary and revolutionary architect. He created a building in collaboration with the people of his community in Gando, using local materials from clay to local woods—the now famous Gando Primary School. The project was funded through a foundation called Schulbausteine für Gando (Bricks for Gando), which he founded in 1998. As architecture curator and critic, Kate Goodwin, notes in the anthology, Sensing Spaces, this charity, ‘raises money to improve life for the people of his home village.’ The foundation was renamed Kéré Foundation in 2005, conscribing Kéré’s socio-cultural capital and image to give the charity more visibility. 

For someone who comes from such extreme weather, a national reality grappling with high levels of poverty (according to Global Finance, Burkina Faso sits as the 16th poorest country in the world as of 2024), and a village with no schools, electricity, or clean drinking water, Kéré’s mission as a trained architect was simple and his question towards his revolutionary idea-turned-accomplishments even simpler: to build schools that inspire both the community and the students about the possibilities that abound in their small community as well as in the locally sourced materials they think so little of; the question was: ‘How can we use the most available material just because it is cheaply available to create something sustainable?’ As the Polish scholar and sociologist, Magdalena Matysek-Imielińska, argues in her 2024 paper, problematizing the West’s interest in African architecture and positioning Kéré as, ‘a spokesperson of African architecture: 

Kéré’s architecture is modernist in the sense specified by the first German modernists… It is an instrument of social change involving the emancipation of the local population, including women and children; it also takes into account and respects the local environmental, social, and economic context. 

Therefore, with every project Kéré has taken on since 2001 after the completion of Gando Primary School, Kéré has found many ways to answer that question addressing climate and social challenges of his home country through creativity as well as his determination to educate and inspire through his architecture. In ‘Beyond the West: Francis Kéré,’ his 2020 interview with the publication, gestalten, Kéré essentially states what is central to his work as an architect and visionary: ‘Inspiration is a source of development; it is a source of energy. We need vision; we need ambition. Do not fear criticism. Just go.’ His works in Africa, and across the world, convince us that he is the physiognomy of that vision and ambition, both of which he wears so well because he goes at the possibility of being able to inspire with a monomaniac energy.