Pritzker prize-winner Francis Kéré has designed a memorial to honour ‘Africa’s Che Guevara’, Burkina Faso’s visionary president who was assassinated in 1987Francis Kéré was the first African architect to win the Pritzker prize when he scooped the “Nobel prize of architecture” in 2022. A native of Gando, a small village in Burkina Faso’s Central-East region, Kéré was once criticised by his neighbours for building a school for the village before constructing a house for his parents. But that project has led to commissions including the new parliament building in Benin, the Goethe Institute Dakar and the Las Vegas Museum of Art.“I wanted to give something to my people, and that has given me an international career,” he says of his decision to build the school. Continue reading...
Francis Kéré, the first African recipient of the Pritzker Prize, is designing the Thomas Sankara Memorial in Burkina Faso to honor the visionary leader known as "Africa's Che Guevara." The memorial, part of a larger 14-hectare site, includes a mausoleum, amphitheatre, and green spaces, aiming to celebrate Sankara's legacy and promote vitality. Kéré, reflecting on the significance of the project, emphasizes architecture's power to transform spaces into meaningful symbols of life and legacy.
