“I am hoping to change the paradigm, push people to dream and undergo risk. It is not because you are rich that you should waste material. It is not because you are poor that you should not try to create quality. Everyone deserves quality, everyone deserves luxury, and everyone deserves comfort. We are interlinked and concerns in climate, democracy, and scarcity are concerns for us all.” — Francis Kéré, 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize Winner.

Burkina Faso-born architect, educator, and social activist Diébédo Francis Kéré wins 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize and becomes the first African and the first black architect to win this prestigious prize that has been awarded every year, since 1979.

Kéré, who is also a distinguished educator and social activist, first came to international prominence for a mud-brick primary school he built in his home village of Gando. Since then, his firm has completed myriad other social projects, including housing, schools, community hubs, and medical centers, across Africa.

The 2022 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Diébédo Francis Kéré was born in 1965, in Gando, Burkina Faso and is the oldest son of the village chief and the first in his community to attend school, where the architect’s first sense of architecture stemmed from his childhood classroom that lacked ventilation and light, on one hand, and from the little illuminated yet safe space where his grandmother would sit and tell stories, on another.

In 1985, he moves to Berlin on a vocational carpentry scholarship, learning to make roofs and furniture by day, while attending secondary classes at night.

In 1995, he was awarded a scholarship to attend Technische Universität Berlin and in 2004, he graduated with an advanced degree in architecture.

Francis Kéré’s work is characterized by the Pritzker Jury as empowering and capable of transforming communities through the process of architecture, “…improving the lives and experiences of countless citizens in a region of the world that is at times forgotten,” as stated by Tom Pritzker, chairman, and CEO of the Pritzker Organization.

Based in Berlin, Kéré has completed numerous schools and health centers across Africa in his native country Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mozambique, Mali, Sudan, and Togo.

In 2017, Kéré designed the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in London, a blue-walled, tree-inspired structure that harvested rainwater and made atmospheric use of filtered natural light. 

The Pritzker Jury praised Kéré for developing an architectural aesthetic based on responding to and respecting local climatic conditions.

“He developed an ad hoc, highly performative and expressive architectural vocabulary: double roofs, thermal mass, wind towers, indirect lighting, cross ventilation and shade chambers have not only become his core strategies but have actually acquired the status of built dignity,” said the Jury.

“Since completing the school in his native village, Kéré has pursued the ethos and the method of working with local craft and skills to elevate not only the civic life of small villages but soon also of national deliberations in legislative buildings.”

“He knows, from within, that architecture is not about the object but the objective; not the product, but the process,” says the 2022 Jury Citation, in part. “Francis Kéré’s entire body of work shows us the power of materiality rooted in place. His buildings, for and with communities, are direct of those communities – in their making, their materials, their programs, and their unique characters.”