Francis Kéré: Building Stories

Experience Pritzker Prize winner Francis Kéré’s first-hand perspective on his creative world. A rich selection of unseen sketches, photos, and architectural drawings accompanies original stories of 26 projects, from the Primary School in Gando, Burkina Faso, to the Las Vegas Art Museum, revealing his experimental, communal, and inventive approach.

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. 

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.