Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré: ‘My life is serendipity’

Kéré is the best-known and most feted African architect of his generation. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s most prestigious award, in 2022. His work ranges from carefully wrought but low-budget schools of mud brick in his native Burkina Faso to huge national symbols such as the under-construction Benin National Assembly. While Kéré was still studying, he went home to build a school. Completed in 2001, the Gando Primary School, the first in his village, is a remarkable building. Made of mud bricks produced from the earth around it and with a curving, floating roof of corrugated metal supported on a web of cheap steel reinforcement bars, it is a structure designed for the climate and for low maintenance. The roof allows hot air to exit above the classrooms, the overhanging eaves shade the windows, and loggias create social spaces for kids to play. The interiors are light, airy and spacious, and the structure immediately garnered global attention. It made Kéré nervous, though. “There was a terrible fear of failure,” he says. “That if the school was not good, it would bring shame on my family. People in my land do not forget. Shame lasts for ever.” The school’s reception was quite the opposite. In 2004 it won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, given for buildings in Islamic territories or associated with Islamic use.