Francis Kere: Building Stories

Description

Francis Kéré’s riveting first-person account reveals the ideas and values that drive him and his socially engaged architectural practice. The 2022 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize covers 26 key projects, illustrated with many unseen sketches, photographs, and drawings in a volume beautifully crafted by the Amsterdam-based graphic design studio of Irma Boom. Featured works include his Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the Gando school projects, national assembly designs for Burkina Faso and Benin, the Thomas Sankara Memorial, and the recently revealed Las Vegas Museum of Art. Kéré’s own voice moves effortlessly between poetry and pragmatism. From the technicalities of cutting bricks on site to the political and environmental forces shaping his designs, he delights in both hands-on craft and big thinking. One chapter subtitle—How to funnel imagination into the grid of rules (without preventing it from flying)—says it all. For Kéré, architecture is an engine of shared learning and exchange, made collectively rather than imposed from above. The architect is never the star, but a facilitator of common purpose. His designs are rooted in vernacular knowledge and non-elitist values, yet fully engaged with the urgent realities of our time, from climate change and overpopulation to the fragile infrastructures of young democracies. Reading this feels like looking into Kéré’s own notebook, with his annotations scribbled alongside the work. It concludes with two reflective texts—one by Ghanaian-Scottish academic and novelist Lesley Lokko, and another by Kéré’s mentor Juhani Pallasmaa—placing his practice within a wider cultural, ethical, and architectural conversation.