Black architect receives architecture's top award.

Author: Editorial Crew | Image: Niklas Halle'n/AFP

Diebédo Francis Kéré was born in Burkina Faso in this small village without a school and did grow up in a family with minimal means.

Now he is the first black winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize had already received numerous honors in his field, including the Aga Khan Prize and the Thomas Jefferson Medal, but unexpectedly he was recently selected for the most famous architecture award in the world.

At the age of twenty, in 1985, Kéré obtained a professional scholarship to study carpentry in Berlin. He was still a student when he designed and helped build the revolutionary Gando Primary School. But immersed in the practice of building roofs and furniture, he also took evening classes and was admitted to the Technische Universität Berlin, where he quickly graduated in 2004 with a degree in architecture.

While based in Berlin, his work centers mostly in his native Africa, with signature buildings that include primary schools, community centers, and health care clinics. His work made him a true pioneer of sustainable architecture, and while it has continuously been developed in countries facing poverty and extreme scarcity, it has improved the life and experience of countless citizens around the world.

In his designs for the Burkina Faso Gando School Elementary and NavaVev Gouma Junior High School, Kéré emphasizes attracting traditional building materials such as concrete and local mixed clay to reduce air conditioning, in doing so, evoking the feeling of an oasis.

Through buildings that demonstrate beauty, modesty, boldness, and a territorial invention, he gracefully upholds the mission of integrating a new kind of natural sustainability into the future of architecture. His buildings, designed for and with communities, are heartily dedicated to the lives growing around them, naturally placing them into a hopeful future.