Francis Kéré’s Revolutionary Slingshot Towards Architectural Sustainability

Community engagement is central to the work of Burkinabé-German architect, Diébédo Francis Kéré, as he champions the use of local materials to build sustainable housing.

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Demas Nwoko’s Natural Synthesis and the Rise of African Architecture. Buy the issue here.

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...

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