20 The New York ReviewBurkina Faso’s Master Builder
Martin FillerMomentum of Light
by Iwan Baan and Francis Kéré.
Zurich: Lars Müller,
177 pp., 75.00 (paper)1.
Since its creation in 1979, the annual
Pritzker Architecture Prize—the high-
est tribute bestowed on living practi-
tioners of the building art, likened to
the Nobel Prize in other disciplines—
has undergone a number of identity
changes. None has been consistent or
permanent, and none has diminished
its prestige or, perhaps more impor-
tantly to the winners, its monetary ben-
efits. Those (apart from the $100,
check that has accompanied it from the
beginning) come from the guarantee of
commissions that the accolade brings
them for the remainder of their careers,
not least because the short lists for sev-
eral major construction projects have
been limited to Pritzker recipients. For
example, the 2003 competition held by
the United Nations Development Cor-
poration for a new office tower south of
the UN’s landmark Secretariat build-
ing in New York City was thus circum-
scribed, and the job went to Fumihiko
Maki, the 1993 Pritzker laureate. This
restriction may betray a want of imag-
ination among uninformed or insecure
clients, but the financial risks involved
in large- scale construction are so wor-
risome that recourse to architects with
the Pritzker’s imprimatur is an under-
standable precaution.
At first it seemed destined to be a
lifetime achievement award. The ini-
tial honoree was Philip Johnson, who
turned seventy- three in 1979 and was
thought to best exemplify the Olympian
stature the prize intended to affirm. In
ret ro s p e c t , i f it were i n s t it ut e d t o d ay, t he
choice of this inveterate shape- shifter,
who was of undeniable historical im-
portance because of his early advocacy
of modern architecture but whose work
was always extremely derivative (and
leaving aside his having been an ardentfascist), would be less certain. Johnson
was immediately followed by the far
more deserving Luis Barragán, the re-
clusive seventy- eight- year- old Mexican
Minimalist whose monumental yet in-
timate architecture, previously known
only to specialists, had been the subject
of a revelatory Museum of Modern Art
retrospective in 1976.
Next in line were a number of
younger architects whose selection
indicated a desire for the Pritzker to
be more in touch with current devel-
opments, such as Richard Meier, who
was designated in 1984, shortly before
he turned fifty, and then won the cov-
eted commission for the Getty Center
in Los Angeles. But from time to time
several long- overlooked old masters
have been retrieved from architectural
history and given one final victory
lap: the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer in
1988, the Danish Jørn Utzon in 2003,
the German Frei Otto in 2015, the In-
dian Balkrishna Doshi in 2018, and the
Japanese Arata Isozaki in 2019, all of
whom were in their eighties or nineties
at the time. Niemeyer and Doshi fur-
ther enhanced the geographic diver-
sity of an award that has been heavily
skewed toward Europe (twenty- three
winners thus far), followed by the US
(eight) and Japan (seven).The only continent (apart from
Antarctica) that had not yet been
represented was Africa, an omis-
sion remedied with the surprising an-
nouncement in March of this year’s
laureate, the fifty- seven- year- old Fran-
cis Kéré, who is also the first Black
architect to win the Pritzker. He was
born in Burkina Faso, the landlocked
West African nation of some 21 mil-
lion inhabitants that is bounded on the
east by Niger, on the south by Benin,
Togo, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast, and
on the west and north by Mali. Slightly
larger than Colorado, it was colonized
by France in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, gained its indepen-
dence in 1960, and was known as UpperVolta until 1984, when after a military
coup it was renamed Burkina Faso,
which translates roughly as “country
of incorruptible people.” Not since the
emergence around the turn of the mil-
lennium of Kéré’s one- year- younger
contemporary the Ghanaian- British
David Adjaye, whose major works in-
clude the National Museum of Afri-
can American History and Culture of
2009–2016 in Washington, D.C., has an
African master builder burst onto the
world stage.
The Pritzker’s periodic shifts in
emphasis have reflected the chang-
ing composition of its jury, which now
comprises a chair and eight members
(a mix of former prizewinners, other
architects, educators, curators, critics,
and architecture buffs such as US Su-
preme Court Justice Stephen Breyer),
whose terms are staggered to encour-
age both continuity and change. The
present chair is the Chilean architect
Alejandro Aravena, who received the
accolade in 2016, four years before
he was chosen to head the jury, when
the announcement praised “his com-
mitment to society, resulting in works
and activism that respond to social, hu-
manitarian, and economic needs.” The
same could be said of Kéré, who might
thus have been just the kind of candi-
date Aravena favored for the Pritzker,
and I reacted to the news of Kéré’s
recognition with unalloyed joy. The
Pritzker Prize medallion and honorar-
ium will be presented to him at a cere-
mony on May 27 at the London School
of Economics’ Marshall Building of
2016–2022, designed by the Dublin-
based firm Grafton Architects, whose
principals, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley
McNamara, are the 2020 laureates.
I first met Kéré eighteen years ago, at
the very outset of his building career,
when he was among the winners of the
Aga Khan Award for Architecture. It
was inaugurated, two years before the
Pritzker, by Prince Karim Aga Khan
IV, the spiritual leader of the world-
wide Nizari Ismaili Shia community, to
encourage better architecture through-out the Islamic world. Kéré was sin-
gled out for his first executed work,
the Gando Primary School of 2001 in
the village of his birth. This low- cost
project’s material modesty, combined
with its functional logic, attentiveness
to environmental conditions, and a
beauty both specific to its place and yet
geographically transcendent, instantly
convinced me of his uncommon talent.
My wife, the architectural historian
Rosemarie Haag Bletter, and I traveled
to India for the Aga Khan Award festiv-
ities at which Kéré was to be honored.
The proceedings began in New Delhi,
after which the honorees and dozens of
guests were to fly to Agra for the culmi-
nating events, but due to a heavy fog our
flight was delayed for several hours. As
we milled around the airport’s VIP de-
parture lounge, we introduced ourselves
to Kéré, who in his presentation of his
award- winning project had touched us
deeply with his eloquence, sincerity, and
unabashed commitment to social issues,
a concern all too rare in architecture
today. He apologized for his English—
which was flawless—and explained that
because he had been living in Berlin for
almost twenty years he was much more
fluent in German. Thereupon Rosema-
rie, who was born near Stuttgart, seam-
lessly switched to her Muttersprache
and the two chatted away for the rest
of our wait.
Ever since that memorable encounter
I’ve monitored Kéré’s development with
close interest. I’ve also feared that my
initial enthusiasm might wane, as can
happen when promising young archi-
tects get off to a fast start and then pro-
duce more and more work that suffers
from the myriad financial constraints,
bureaucratic obstacles, and circumstan-
tial disappointments—to say nothing
of the temptations and corruptions of
fame and fortune—that even the most
idealistic practitioners of this constantly
compromised art form must face. But
Kéré’s relatively small yet wholly orig-
inal and remarkably cohesive body of
work—fewer than forty buildings exe-
cuted thus far, a number sure to increase
rapidly now—instills a feeling of enor-
mous optimism about the uplifting new
direction he opens in the building art for
his people in particular and the world at
large.2.
Diébédo Francis Kéré was born in
1965 in Gando, a small community in
the southeast of what was still called
Upper Volta, the oldest son of the
village chief. As the first- born male,
Diébédo—who now goes by his middle
name—was expected to learn how to
read and write in order to handle his
father’s correspondence. Because there
was no school in Gando, at age seven
he was sent to live with an uncle in the
nearby city of Tenkodogo where he
could be given a basic education. The
boy turned out to be talented, and after
he finished his primary schooling he
learned the useful trade of carpentry.
He showed such aptitude that in 1985
he was given a scholarship to study
wood craftsmanship in West Ger-
many by the government- sponsored
Carl Duisberg Society. That nonprofitThe courtyard of Kéré Architecture’s Léo Doctors’ Housing, 2019, at the Surgical Clinic and Health Center, Léo, Burkina FasoJaime Herraiz/Kéré ArchitectureFiller 20 22 .indd 20 4 / 13 / 22 4 : 12 PM