architecture
Pritzker Prize goes to Francis Kéré
Francis Kéré is the first Pritzker Prize winner to come from an African country. Photo: picture alliance / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The Pritzker Prize is considered the highest honor in the world of architecture. This year it is going to an architect from an African country for the first time: Francis Kéré, who was born in Burkina Faso, lives in Berlin.
Architect Francis Kéré, who was born in Burkina Faso in West Africa and lives in Berlin, has been honored with this year’s Pritzker Prize, the highest award for architecture.
«He knows intuitively that architecture is not about the object, but about the goal; not about the product, but about the process,” said the jury in Chicago as a reason. “His buildings, for and with communities, are directly from those communities – in their creation, their materials, their programs and their unique characters.”
The honor moved him to tears, said Kéré, who was born in 1956, in the New York Times. “I still can not believe it. I pushed this work in architecture to bring quality architecture to my people.”
In addition to his home country, Kéré has also worked on architectural projects in Mali, Kenya, Uganda, the USA and Germany. He became known, among other things, through his work on the “Operndorf Afrika” by director Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.
“We are connected”
“I hope that I can change the paradigm, that I can drive people to dream and to take risks,” Kéré was quoted as saying by the award jury. “Just because you’re rich, you shouldn’t waste materials. Just because you are poor, you should still try to create quality. Everyone deserves quality, everyone deserves luxury, everyone deserves comfort. We are connected and concerns about climate, democracy and scarcity are concerns for all of us.”
The Pritzker Prize is considered the most prestigious award in the architecture industry and is endowed with 100,000 dollars. Previous awardees have included Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Peter Zumthor. Last year, the French architecture duo Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal won. Kéré is the first Pritzker Prize winner to come from an African country.
This shows a “positive development in architecture and the Pritzker Prize,” said Martha Thorne, who was director of the prize for years and is now dean of the IE School of Architecture and Design in Madrid, the German Press Agency. «Architecture can no longer only be viewed as objects in the landscape. Architects can and must be transformative.”