The Berlin-based architect Francis Kere has become the first African to win the most important prize in architecture. By using local resources, he developed a pioneering style.
Francis Kere is the first African to win the prestigious prizeImage: picture-alliance/Photoshot
Dubbed the "Nobel Prize of architecture," the Pritzker Prize recognizes the work of exceptional architects. Here are the works of recent winners.
Image: Tom Welsh
2024: Riken Yamamoto
Concerned that the modern Japanese city is becoming increasingly cramped, Riken Yamamoto has built inviting houses with inner courtyards and elevated terraces. The jury called it "a new architectural language that not only creates spaces for families to live in, but also communities for families to live together." 78-year-old Yamamoto is the ninth winner from Japan.
Image: Shinkenchiku Sha
2023: David Chipperfield
Considered a likely winner for years, the British architect finally won the prize in 2023. The jury citation described David Chipperfield as "radical in his restraint" yet demonstrating "reverence for history and culture." In Germany, he has made a significant impact on Berlin's Museum Island. He also designed the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach. He has designed over 100 projects worldwide.
Image: Marijan Murat/lsw/dpa/picture-alliance
2022: Francis Kéré
Born in Burkina Faso in 1965, Francis Kéré has lived in Germany since 1985. He runs the Kéré Architecture office in Berlin. In his work, Kéré relies on regional materials and traditional local craftsmanship. Kéré designed this elementary school, built in 2001, in his hometown of Gando.
Image: Erik-Jan Owerkerk
2021: Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal met while studying in Bordeaux in the 1970s. They later worked in Niger, which still has an impact on their building work today. They vehemently oppose the demolition of social housing. Pictured here is the Palais de Tokyo exhibition building in the French capital, which opened in 2002 and is one of the best-known buildings from their joint Paris office.
Image: Philippe Ruault
2020: Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara
The Irish architects were the fourth and fifth women to win the prestigious prize in its 41-year history. Their Dublin-based firm, Grafton Architects, is renowned for concrete and stone designs. The judges lauded the pair for buildings that "maintain a human scale and achieve intimate environments." The Bocconi University (pictured) in Milan is one of their acclaimed designs.
Having designed buildings since the 1960s, the late Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, was long considered a visionary in the field and lauded for his futurist designs. He has 100 built works to his name, including the Qatar National Convention Center (picture). "In his search for meaningful architecture, he created buildings of great quality that to this day defy categorizations," said the jury.
Image: Imago Images/P. Karatzas
2018: Balkrishna Doshi
Pictured here is the Aranya low-cost housing project by Balkrishna Doshi in Indore, India, which accommodates over 80,000 people through a system of houses, courtyards and internal pathways. The Indian architect, who died in 2023, was lauded by the Pritzker jury in 2018 for his bodywork that has "touched lives of every socio-economic class across a broad spectrum of genres since the 1950s."
2017: Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta
Their architecture is "rooted and turned towards the world." The jury awarded the Spanish trio the Pritzker Prize in 2017 with this citation. Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta are architects who are active in small towns. Their best-known projects include the public space at La Lira Theater in Ripoll and the El Petit Comte kindergarten in Besalú (pictured).
Image: Pritzker Architecture Prize/Hisao Suzuki
2016: Alejandro Aravena
Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena has been leading a "Do Tank," a more active version of a think tank, since 2001. Together with his four partners, his firm Elemental integrates people and the environment in their projects. This Innovation Center on the Catholic University in Santiago de Chile campus is 14 stories high, adapts to the climate and protects against the sun and heat.
Image: Sebastian Silva/EPA/picture alliance
2015: Frei Otto
Frei Otto's constructions are a tribute to the lightness of form and material. His most renowned creation is the filigree roof of Munich's Olympic Stadium (pictured). The German architect received the Pritzker Prize posthumously but learned of the honor before he died in 2015. "I never did anything to receive this prize," he had said then.
Image: Marc Müller/dpa/picture alliance
2014: Shigeru Ban
Born in Tokyo to a haute couture designer and an engineer at Toyota, Shigeru Ban combines aesthetics with engineering skill. Inspired by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto's focus on regional context and material, Ban has created temporary housing facilities, including a shelter made of paper tubes, for use after natural disasters. Pictured here is the Pompidou Center that he built in Metz, France.
Image: Phil Bird/Zoonar/picture alliance
2013: Toyo Ito
Toyo Ito built this apartment building on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona in 2009. Its undulating exterior cladding is reminiscent of the Catalan city's most famous son, Antoni Gaudí. Such curved shapes are the trademark of the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, who uses them to lend his buildings an organic and physical quality.
Image: Yuri Palmin/Arcaid/picture alliance
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"For a better future for all of us, not just in Africa, but for all of us on this planet, it's important to go back and actually use only those materials that nature gives us freely and to stop over-exploiting them," architect Diebedo Francis Kere told DW in February, discussing his designs for the Goethe-Institut in Senegal.
This approach is exactly what earned Francis Kere the Pritzker Prize, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of architecture."
By winning the award, the Burkina Faso-born architect also became the first African to win the honor in its more than 40-year history.
The Pritzker jury praised his "pioneering" designs that are "sustainable to the earth and its inhabitants — in lands of extreme scarcity."
Kere "empowers and transforms communities through the process of architecture," designing buildings "where resources are fragile and fellowship is vital," the jury's statement added.
"Through his commitment to social justice and engagement, and intelligent use of local materials to connect and respond to the natural climate, he works in marginalized countries laden with constraints and adversity," the organizers of the award also noted.
An architect on a mission: Francis Kéré
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His first design in Burkina Faso won top awards
Kere was born in 1965 in Gando, a Burkina Faso village of about 3,000 residents, in a family of 14 children. At an early age, he was sent to a neighboring town to learn traditional building techniques.
Through a scholarship, he moved to Germany, and started studying architecture at the Technical University of Berlin in 1995. He is meanwhile a dual citizen of Burkina Faso and Germany.
The first building he designed, a primary school in his home village, was recognized with the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004.
The award-winning Gando Primary School: Kere innovated by returning to traditional materials and building methodsImage: Erik-Jan Owerkerk
His pioneering approach was to return to traditional techniques. Instead of using concrete, a widespread but expensive material for building schools in Burkina Faso, Kere worked with local resources, building with clay. Long dismissed as the "poor people's building material," earth constructions are better suited to the Sahel's climate than concrete buildings, which become intolerably hot.
Projects multiplied for his architectural practice, Kere Architecture, which he founded in 2005 in Berlin.
His designs include schools, health facilities, housing, civic buildings and public spaces across Africa, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Togo, Kenya, Mozambique, Togo and Sudan.
Using the stone of the area, Kere's facilities for the National Park of Mali blend into the local topographyImage: Diébédo Francis Kéré
In 2017, Kere became the first African architect to design the Serpentine pavilion in London's Hyde Park, a prestigious assignment given to a world-famous architect every year.
He was also one of the architects behind Geneva's International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum and has held professorships at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Yale School of Architecture and the Swiss Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, along with solo museum shows in Munich and Philadelphia.
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Architecture 'to serve humanity'
Reacting to the Pritzker Prize, Kere told press agency AFP that he was the "happiest man on this planet" to become the 51st recipient of the prestigious accolade.
He said that he is "totally convinced that everyone deserves quality" — not only the rich. "This is my way of doing things, of using my architecture to create structures to serve people, let's say to serve humanity."