The 2022 Pritzker Prize Is Awarded to Diébédo Francis Kéré
In the world of architecture, there’s no bigger award than the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize. As we’ve noted before, it is to architecture what the Nobel Prize is to literature. On March 15th, it was announced that the 2022 Pritzker Prize was awarded to 56-year-old architect, Diébédo Francis Kéré. In addition to the bronze medallion, the Burkina Faso-born architect will receive $100,000 and, more significantly, his name will now be included in the same echelon as past Pritzker winners: Philip Johnson, James Stirling, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Oscar Niemeyer, I.M. Pei, Norman Foster, and Tadao Ando, just to name a few.
In recent years, the Pritzker jury of experts have focused on lesser-known practices around the world—socially conscious firms championing design as a catalyst for the greater good. With the selection of Kéré, the Pritzker committee continues that pursuit, with increased attention to sustainability, both in terms of environment and community. Kéré employs large numbers of Burkinabé citizens with jobs in carpentry, welding, brick making, masonry, and painting, ensuring that the local community benefits from his projects. Kéré was born in 1965 in Gando, Burkina Faso—the eldest son of the village chief. He grew up without electricity or access to clean drinking water. He moved away at a young age and became the only child in his family to attend school, graduating from the Technical University of Berlin in 2004. He returned to Burkina Faso, where he flourished and provided his community with much needed infrastructure and opened his firm (Kéré Architecture) in 2005, with offices in Berlin and Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa with an area of 105,900 square miles, bordered by Mali to the northwest, Niger to the northeast, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, and the Ivory Coast to the southwest. It has a population of 20,321,378.
The designs of this year’s laureate range from the Startup Lions Campus in Kenya to a series of teachers’ housing units in Burkina Faso. The two works use indigenous clay to maintain cool interior climates where temperatures routinely top 100 degrees. Kéré also designed London’s Serpentine Pavilion. In 2019, he completed his first permanent structure in the Americas with a bundled pine log pavilion (made from dead trees) in rural Fishtail, Montana.
Kéré is the first African-born architect to win architecture’s highest honor. He is a humanitarian, a man with an architectural vocabulary that spans the globe while staying singularly focused on the needs of his home village. the world eagerly awaits to see how 2022 Pritzker Prize laureate Diébédo Francis Kéré’s mind will continue molding the made environment in the years to come.
