CityLab Daily: Pritzker Winner Pushes Architecture’s Green Future
Also today: An artists tackles the racial wealth gap in Pittsburgh, and why it’s time for a net zero building boom.
The Gando Primary School, the Kéré Foundation’s inaugural project in 1998, uses bricks made from local clay and a wide, overhanging roof to retain cooler air inside and promote circulation without air conditioning.
Photographer: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk
In March, Diébédo Francis Kéré became the first African architect to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. Born in Burkina Faso and currently based in Berlin, Kéré focuses his work on promoting stability and sustainability in some of the world’s most vulnerable and threatened places. His first project was a self-cooling school building in his hometown of Gando — and his next one could well be building the country’s National Assembly building, which demonstrators burned down in 2014 amid political unrest.
In an interview with Kriston Capps, the Burkenabè architect spoke about the geographic diversity of his projects — from Kenya to Mali to Montana, the significance of using native materials, and what winning the Pritzker award means for his community back home. Today on CityLab: Look to West Africa for the Future of Green Architecture