Francis Kéré is a Burkinabé architect recognized for sustainable and collaborative designs. He established the Kéré Foundation and Kéré Architecture to fund schools in Burkina Faso using local materials and techniques. His first building, the Gando Primary School, combined European knowledge with traditional methods and won awards for its passive ventilation. Kéré has undertaken various international projects while continuing community-focused work in Africa.

1. COST EFFECTIVE ARCHITECTS
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2. FRANCIS KERE
Diébédo Francis Kéré (born 10 April 1965) is a Burkinabé architect, recognized for creating
innovative works that are often sustainable and collaborative in nature.Educated at the
Technical University of Berlin, he has lived in Berlin since 1985. Parallel to his studies, he
established the Kéré Foundation and in 2005 he founded Kéré Architecture. His
architectural practice has been recognized internationally with awards including the Aga
Khan Award for Architecture (2004) for his first building, the Gando Primary School in
Burkina Faso, and the Global Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction 2012 Gold.
Kéré has undertaken projects in various countries including Burkina Faso, Mali, Kenya,
Uganda, Mozambique, Togo, Sudan, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the USA, and the UK. In
2017 the Serpentine Galleries commissioned him to design the Serpentine Pavilion in
London. He has held professorships at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Yale School
of Architecture and the Swiss Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio. In 2017 he accepted
the professorship for "Architectural Design and Participation" at TU München (Germany).
In 2022, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the first person from Africa and the first
black person to do so. During his studies he felt it was his duty to contribute to his family
and to the community which had supported him, and to give the next generation the
opportunity to follow in his footsteps. In 1998, with the help of his friends, Kéré set up the
association Schulbausteine für Gando (now Kéré Foundation), which loosely translates as
"Building Blocks for Gando", to fund the construction of a primary school for his village. His
objective was to combine the knowledge he had gained in Europe, with traditional building
methods from Burkina Faso.
Kéré's architecture was conceived of and built with the help of village inhabitants. The
village, located south east of Ouagadougou, has approximately 3000 inhabitants who live in
mud huts without access to running water or electricity. According to the UN Human
Development Index in 2011, Burkina Faso is the 7th least developed country in the world.
Most residents are subsistence farmers, remaining dependent on the harsh climate which
has restricted rainfall between October and June, and high daytime temperatures of 45 °C.

3. Lycee Schorge Secondary School
Architects: Kéré Architecture
Area : 1660 m²
Year : 2016
The design for the school consists of 9 modules which accommodate a series of classrooms and
administration rooms. One of these modules also houses a dental clinic which will provide a
new source of dental care for the students.
The walls of these modules are made from locally-harvested laterite stone, which, when first
extracted from the earth, can be easily cut and shaped into bricks. When the stone is left
exposed to the atmosphere above ground, it begins to harden. The material functions really
well as a wall system for the classrooms because of its thermal mass capabilities. This, in
combination with the unique wind-catching towers and overhanging roofs, lowers the
temperature of the interior spaces exponentially.
Another major factor that helps to naturally ventilate and illuminate the interiors is a massive
undulating ceiling. The wave-like pattern of plaster and concrete components are slightly offset
from each other, allowing the interior space to breathe and expel hot stagnant air. The off-white
color of the ceiling serves to diffuse and spread around indirect daylight, providing ample
illumination during the day while keeping the interior learning space protected from direct solar
heat gain.
Wrapping around these classrooms like a transparent fabric is a system of wooden screens. This
secondary façade is made from a local fast-growing wood and acts as a shading element for the
spaces immediately surrounding the classrooms. The screens not only function to protect the
earthen classrooms from corroding dust and winds, they also help to create a series of
secondary informal gathering spaces for the students as they wait to attend their classes.

4. In order to maximize the material transported to the site, the school furniture inside the classrooms is made from local
hardwoods and leftover elements from the main building construction such as steel scraps from the roof. In this way, the economy
of the building is extended by reducing waste adding additional value to the cost of construction.
Creating a sort of autonomous ‘village’ condition, the radial
layout of classroom modules wrap around a central public
courtyard. This configuration not only creates privacy from the
main public domain, it also shelters and protects the inner
courtyard from wind and dust. An ampitheater-like condition
at the center of the courtyard will accommodate informal
gatherings as well as formal assemblies and celebrations for
the school and community as a whole.
Overall, one of the most important goals of the design is to serve as a catalyst for inspiration for
the students, teaching staff, and surrounding community members. The architecture not only
functions as a marker in the landscape, it is also a testament to how local materials, in
combination with creativity and team-work, can be transformed into something significant with
profound lasting effects

5. Gando Primary School
• Status: Completed
• Date: 2001
• Site: Gando, Burkina Faso
• Size: 520 sqm
• Client: Community of Gando / Kéré Foundation
• Collaborators: Community of Gando
• Awards: Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2004, Global Award for Sustainbale Architecture 2009
The Gando Primary School was built to expand the sparse network of schools in the province of Boulgou, in the east of Burkina
Faso, and addressed two characteristic problems of many educational buildings in the area: poor lighting and ventilation.
Francis Kéré created a design that resolved these issues directly, within the parameters set by cost, climate, resource availability
and construction feasibility. Clay is abundantly available in the region and traditionally used in house building, so a clay/cement
hybrid was used to create structurally robust bricks. These are not only easy to produce, but also provide thermal protection
against the hot climate. Despite their durability, however, the walls must be protected from damaging rains by an overhanging
roof.
In Burkina Faso, corrugated metal roofs are a popular solution, although they absorb the direct sunlight and overheat the interior
of the buildings. Kéré’s design solves this problem by pulling the roof of the Gando Primary School away from the learning space
of the interior. A dry-stacked brick ceiling is introduced in between, allowing for maximum ventilation: cool air is pulled in from
the interior windows, while hot air is released out through perforations in the clay roof. This also significantly reduces the
ecological footprint of the school by alleviating the need for air-conditioning.
For this project, traditional building techniques and modern engineering methods were combined to produce the best quality
building solution while simplifying construction and future maintenance. The success of the project can be attributed to the close
involvement of the local population in the building process. With the support of his community, and funds raised through Kéré
Foundation ,Kéré was able to realise his very first building. It marks the birth of Kéré Architecture and Kéré’s ongoing collaboration
with his community in Gando through the Kéré Foundation.

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7. HASSAN FATHY
Hassan Fathy was a noted Egyptian architect who pioneered appropriate technology for
building in Egypt, especially by working to re-establish the use of adobe and traditional
mud construction as opposed to western building designs, material configurations, and lay-
outs. Fathy was recognized with the Aga Khan Chairman's Award for Architecture in 1980.
Hassan Fathy was a cosmopolitan trilingual professor-engineer-architect, amateur
musician, dramatist, and inventor. He designed nearly 160 separate projects, from modest
country retreats to fully planned communities with police, fire, and medical services,
markets, schools, theatres, and places for worship and recreation.[citation needed] These
communities included many functional buildings such as laundry facilities, ovens, and wells.
He utilized ancient design methods and materials, as well as knowledge of the rural
Egyptian economic situation with a wide knowledge of ancient architectural and town
design techniques.He trained local inhabitants to make their own materials and build their
own buildings.
Fathy's plan devised groundbreaking approaches to economic, social, and aesthetic issues
that typically impact the construction of low-cost housing.
With regard to the economic issues, Fathy noted that structural steel was not an apt choice
for a poor country, and that even materials such as cement, timber, and glass did not make
good economic sense. To address this issue, Fathy instead devised a plan that included the
use of appropriate technology, notably mud brick construction.
Noting that the traditional village, although afflicted with issues of overcrowding and poor
sanitation was also an expression of “a living society in all its complexity,” Fathy strived to
design New Gourna in a manner that addressed the social concerns, including attempting
to consult directly with "every family in Gourna" and advocating for the involvement of
social ethnographers in the planning process. Despite this, inhabitants of the former village
were not enthusiastic about relocating, which effectively cut them off from their existing
livelihood of trading in archaeological finds.
With regard to aesthetic issues, Fathy placed emphasis on traditional Nubian architectural
designs which he observed in a 1941 trip to the region (enclosed courtyards; vaulted
roofing), yielding what Fathy described as "spacious, lovely, clean, and harmonious
houses." He also made use of traditional Nubian ornamental techniques (claustra, a form of
mud latticework), as well as vernacular architecture techniques of the Gourna region

8. ALAADIN MUSTAPHA HOUSE
A house designed in 1981 for Master Mason Alaadin Mustapha takes on added significance when the long collaboration between
these two men is closely considered. Mustapha not only introduced Nubian construction techniques to Fathy, but also
implemented them in many of the projects built in the forty years since. One of the most important features in Mustapha's own
house is the main doorway, which is the only interpretation of a Nubian-style portal found in any of the architect's work since
Balitim. Perhaps when he designed it. Fathy was thinking of an experience he had described in 1967, when he said, "I have found
a similar case when I was in charge of building the village of New Gourna, near Luxor. I asked Muallim Alaadin Moustapha to
decorate the main entrance door to one of the houses in any way he wished. He designed some hieroglyphic symbols on top of
the door representing God, the earth and the mountains, between a five-pointed star. When I asked him how he knew about this
symbol, he told me it prevented the "evil eye". He didn't realize that it was a hieroglyph. It so happens that optimism and
pessimism pass from generation to generation even when people change their religion. The constancy of the Nubians in using
these decorations for their front doors is due mainly to the fact that they are so isolated which has allowed them to continue as a
prototype since the time of the Pharaohs.The plan itself is also a direct interpretation of a traditional Nubian house as found in
Abou el-Riche or Gharb Aswan today, which are both among many such villages previously surveyed by the architect. In this
reasonably literal translation, the symbolic doorway leads directly into a sequence of rooms lined up on either side of an open
entrance vestibule which are each related to the entertainment of guests. A long, vaulted room to the left of the main door, with
built-in seats, or "mastaba" set between the piers that support it, is set aside for larger, special ceremonial functions just as in the
traditional model. A smaller, square muddiffa on the right serves smaller groups, or individuals, who might visit on a more
frequent basis. A door at the rear of the entry vestibule leads across an open court and up a short flight of stairs to a corridor
serving all of the private family rooms strung along the rear wall of the house, which are visually and physically cut off from the
guest rooms in front. This corridor also leads directly outside into an enclosed service court with its own exterior access. While in
the established Nubian prototype this yard is almost always set aside for animals, the only function specified by the architect in
this case is the storage of fodder.
Variant Names : Alaadin Mustapha House
Street Address :El-Mahamid
Location :Idfu, Egypt
Architect/Planner : Hassan Fathy
Date : 1981
Building Type : residential
Building Usage : private residence

9. PLAN

10. CERAMICS FACTORY
A second community-oriented project that followed New Gourna at this time
was a Jesuit based crafts centre located at Garagos, which was intended to
improve the standard of living of the people in the village there. The plan for a
ceramics factory, while deceptively "low-tech" in appearance, represents an
extremely logical and efficient production diagram for the manufacture of
pottery. The spaces in the complex are organized sequentially, beginning with
the delivery of the clay, which is available locally, through its screening,
washing, preparation and storage and then on to the workshops where it is
sculpted and formed. After sculpting, the pottery is fired, packed, stored and
shipped.The tricky problem of how to utilize the desirable northern exposure
in all of the workshop spaces and yet maintain a compact, linear organization
is solved by running all utilitarian spaces not used by the craftsmen
perpendicular to the studios so that they act as dividing elements, and take up
less room across the plan. The final spatial organization of the complex is not
only arranged in a highly functional way, but also results in a satisfying
horizontal massing of the elevation. The large curve of the dome covering the
offices of the supervisory personnel on the one extreme, balanced by the thin
vertical smokestack of the firing kiln on the other, act as visual brackets for the
undulating curves of the vaults that wave up and down between them. The
volumetric composition of the centre as actually built is much altered from
this first concetions as intended.
Street Address : Garagos Village
Location:Qina, Egypt
Architect/Planner : Hassan Fathy
Client : Jesuit Mission
Date :1950
Building Usage : factory
Building Type: industrial