Francis Kéré, architect of the community
The Burkinabè architect Francis Kéré on the construction site of the future National Assembly in Porto-Novo, Benin.
© Delphine Bousquet / RFI
Text by: Delphine Bousquet
6 mins
The future National Assembly of Benin was imagined by the Burkinabè architect Francis Kéré.
Based in Germany, he is known for his use of local materials.
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Impeccable white shirt, laptop in hand, Francis Kéré travels through the site of the future National Assembly, an 8 hectare site in the center of Porto-Novo, the Beninese capital, occupied by the national police.
As the work begins, he has an eye on everything: the soil samples that will allow the foundations to be laid, the scaffolding being repainted.
“
The shape is inspired by a palaver tree,”
explains the architect during one of his frequent visits to Benin.
It is an ancient democratic custom in Africa and I wanted this assembly to honor this tradition.
".
The plan also provides for a large park all around for Porto-Noviens.
The Chinese company CSCEC must complete the work in a maximum of 30 months.
The slim 50-year-old, who has a practice in Berlin, oversees projects around the world, teaches in Munich, Harvard and Yale, gives popular lectures, and answers phones in French, German and English, is on call. both excited and stressed: it's his biggest job to date and also the most expensive.
Asked in his native country to build a new parliament, it was finally in Benin that he took up the challenge.
Gando's school, for and with the community
It was in Burkina Faso, in Gando, his village without water or electricity, that it all started 20 years ago: there is no school and Kéré, then an architecture student in Berlin, decides to do so. build one. “
During a trip to the country, the villagers asked me for money for it. I told myself that we were going to do it ourselves,
”says Kéré, whose first name Diébédo and the discreet scarifications recall the Bissa origin. The school, made of earth and sheet metal, materials used locally, is built with the inhabitants in one year.
"
I had a bad memory of a class where we were 100, very hot and dark and I wanted airy and ventilated rooms
" explains the one who was the first in his area to go to school, at 7 years, a decision of his father, the village chief, who sent him to a foster family in Tenkodogo, 20 kilometers from his home.
A few years later, at the age of 17, thanks to a scholarship, he went even further, to Germany, to train in cabinetmaking.
It was there that he passed his baccalaureate, multiplied odd jobs to pay for architecture lessons, imagined the school that would make his reputation and find the financial and technical means to achieve it.
View of an information panel showing the Kéré Architecture project.
© Delphine Bousquet / RFI
It was in Gando that he forged his trademark, “
building for and with the community
”. The three classrooms are made of compressed earth bricks, topped with a raised tin roof and perforated so that the air circulates. Vertical openings allow the dry Sahelian heat to rise. If today school is a subject of study all over the world, it was difficult to impose the idea of a clay building: “
people didn't want it to be in the ground because every time rain, it crumbles
! When the walls were 1
meter high, there was a flood at night, and in the morning the women came to console me, they thought everything had fallen. Everything was standing. It was won
”.
Because Francis Kéré modernizes old techniques and trains the population who bring water, earth and irons every day.
The community appropriates this property of which it is proud and expands the school, adds a high school, which now educates 1,300 young people as well as a library and accommodation for teachers, financed by the Kéré Foundation.
Among the inhabitants, a team of technicians is recruited and takes part in other projects across the country and even elsewhere in Africa.
“
I am an architect who was fortunate to be rooted in Africa and who drew on local potential
», He analyzes.
He knew how to take the best of each world, Africa where he grew up, the West where he lives, to create an innovative and ecological path, long before sustainable development was on everyone's lips.
The right to beauty
To the journalistic expressions which qualify his style in a few words, “
sustainable high tech
”, “
low cost architecture
”, Kéré prefers to speak of the principles which guide him: “
my architecture takes into account the socio-economy, the climate and the comfort.
I use the abundant materials on site.
What I build is durable, simple, comfortable and it's easy to maintain
”.
And even when he works on community infrastructures, he has a requirement: "
Everyone has a right to beauty, it should be a human right
!"
"
With the Ghanaian David Adjaye, designer of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, he is the only African architect of global stature.
The man from Gando, as he is called in Burkina, points out that it is difficult to learn architecture on the continent and that studies are expensive.
And to young people who would like to imagine the works of tomorrow, Kéré reminds that being an architect “
is not only knowing how to draw.
It is having a vision
”.
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