Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré became famous in 2001 with a building that, looking back, seems like the first answer of the new millennium to all the questions that have shaped it ever since.

Born in Gando, Burkina Faso, in 1965, Kéré had designed a primary school for his hometown, using building materials made from a mixture of local clay and cement;

the climate in the rooms is tolerable even at high temperatures, a far overhanging roof that floats above the classrooms provides shade and allows the wind to cool the building without air conditioning and the heat to escape.

The positioning of the buildings was due to the course of the sun and the winds, their appearance brought the achievements and forms of western modernism together with the intelligence of old local building techniques:

Nicholas Mak

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Clever natural ventilation and the resource-saving way of constructing buildings are today, when we know that forty percent of all climate-damaging greenhouse gases are caused by the construction and operation of buildings and seven percent are due to the production of concrete alone, one of the most important topics of contemporary architecture: Kéré already had worked on a resource-saving construction method two decades ago, which uses local materials and develops its forms from the location.

Above all, what makes Kéré's architecture significant is its social quality.

Almost all of his buildings are also "community buildings" and aim to improve the living conditions of those who cannot afford architecture.

Architecture for the poor

Kéré has told time and again how, growing up in a small village, he had to move to the nearest town to live with relatives in order to attend school - and studied in cramped, stuffy rooms.

The airy, almost luxurious, sculptural school building is also a reaction to these experiences - an architecture that combines social and aesthetic qualities.

His building for the national park of Mali, which with its butterfly roof and large openings is reminiscent of Marcel Breuer's modern style, has such a quality.

This was followed by a clinic in Burkina Faso, again made of the reddish bricks, whose buildings thread along a street like small houses in a village;

the "Opera Village" for Christoph Schlingensief;

a school in Koudougou,

whose classrooms are arranged under a large roof in a round village and are held together by a wooden wall made of eucalyptus trunks, through which the wind blows and which blocks the sun.

"Everyone deserves quality, everyone deserves luxury, everyone deserves comfort," says Kéré.

The idea of ​​"luxury for everyone" can also be read as a criticism of an apparently social architecture that leaves the poorer population to their own devices and sells this task of design as self-empowerment and social benefit.

One of the most controversial Pritzker Prize winners was Alejandro Aravena, who, with his "Half a house" concept, represents a form of social housing in which the poorest only get a half-finished house and have to build the rest themselves in their meager free time.

Kéré builds whole good houses - and public spaces,

in which a democratic society can flourish.

This is also shown by Kéré's spectacular design for the National Assembly building in Ouagadougou: the roof is terraced like an amphitheater and parts are accessible, a public terrace awaits at the top, the edges of the building curve so high on the sides that under the robe of the Façade in the shade market stalls can settle: The political space can be settled by the population like a reef.

For this social quality of his spaces alone, Kéré is rightly awarded the highest prize that the world of architecture can award;

it was also long overdue that an architect who was born and worked in Africa finally received the prize.

However, one should not categorize Kéré exclusively as an “African architect”, as is often the case.

He built in Montana and London, studied architecture in Berlin and founded his own office here in 2005.

Seen in this way, he is also a global architect, also a Berlin architect - and one can only hope that he will finally be able to realize a larger building in his German hometown.

After all the castles and barns, she urgently needs a house in which the forms of modernity, a traditional,