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Francis Kéré’s “Yesterday’s Tomorrow” installation at the 23rd International Exhibition at La Triennale di Milano. (Courtesy La Triennale di Milano)
Francis Kéré’s “Yesterday’s Tomorrow” installation at the 23rd International Exhibition at La Triennale di Milano. (Courtesy La Triennale di Milano)

In Milan, This Year’s Pritzker Prize Winner Takes a Victory Lap

Brian Libby

July 15, 2022
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Earlier this year, Burkina Faso–born Diébédo Francis Kéré became the first African, and the first Black architect, ever to be awarded the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award in the profession. It’s an incredible, noteworthy distinction. But his humble, collaborative, community-oriented approach and immaculately crafted buildings are what really make him stand out. His work, which incorporates local materials, near-ancestral wisdom, and vernacular building traditions, embodies collaboration. Unlike that of so many previous Prizker winners, Kéré’s practice is not one of a singular “auteur” architect. His is a collective architecture.

Though he’s following in the footsteps of previous Pritzker winners such as Sir Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, and Tadao Ando, Kéré doesn’t design gleaming skyscrapers or trophy-like art museums. Nobody would call him a “starchitect.” His profound presence in the field has emerged quietly, slowly, and steadily. While he has designed projects across Africa, Asia, and Europe, perhaps his most outsized contribution has been in his hometown of Gando, Burkina Faso, where he has designed two schools, a community center, and a tree-planting initiative. “Francis Kéré’s entire body of work shows us the power of materiality rooted in place,” the Pritzker jury said in a statement. “[His buildings] are tied to the ground on which they sit and to the people who sit within them. They have presence without pretense and an impact shaped by grace.”

Francis Kéré. (Photo: Astrid Eckert)
Francis Kéré. (Photo: Astrid Eckert)

In a victory lap of sorts, ​​Kéré has now designed a series of displays for “Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries,” the 23rd International Exhibition at La Triennale di Milano design museum in Milan, opening this week and on view through Dec. 11. Curated by astrophysicist and European Space Agency chief diversity officer Ersilia Vaudo, the show features installations such as “Yesterday’s Tomorrow,” built from clay bricks, in collaboration with students from the Politecnico di Milano and members of the Burkinabé diaspora in Italy. A symbolic gesture, the structure speaks to a broader philosophy: In a warming world worsened by burning fossil fuels and ubiquitous air-conditioning, wisdom exists in marrying the simple, passive-cooling structures of our ancestors with contemporary technologies such as 3-D printing, all to improve the lives of those with the fewest resources.

For the first-ever Burkina Faso exhibit at La Triennale, the architect has also conceived “Drawn Together,” a wall that visitors are invited to co-embellish. At the exhibition’s entrance, Kéré has also designed a 39-foot-tall tower that brings together images and materials referencing past and future. His other designs on view include the seating for La Triennale’s common areas and a second installation, “Under a Coffee Tree,” situated in La Triennale’s central cafè.

“I want my buildings to inspire the user, to make the user happy,” Kéré says in his Pritzker acceptance video. By introducing the International Exhibition’s hundreds of thousands of visitors to his collaborative spirit and commitment to local and natural materials, Kéré once again is getting to the root of what, to him, matters most in architecture: improving the lives of the very communities his buildings serve.

# Architecture# Africa# Exhibitions

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Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

culture

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.