THE ARCHITECT AS
KERSTIN PINTHER His architect’s office is to be found in a
brick-like wing of the Weisses Schloss in
the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Francis Kéré
and his colleagues have been using the
light-suffused rooms of what was once a
piano factory for more than ten years. Cross
the back courtyard, take the elevator to the
third floor, and you are in the large main
room of the office. Here, at pushed-to-
gether desks, work is simultaneously under
way on a range of building and exhibition
projects for Africa, Europe, and the US.
Adjoining the desks, on the left, is Francis
Kéré’s personal workspace, loosely sepa-
rated by a glass wall papered with sketches
and plans for the Ouagadougou Parliament,1
with his bicycle propped against the wall in
a corner. Some of the shelves provide sur-
faces for parking or showcasing models
of past or future projects, others serve to
store samples of materials: red clay bricks
from Gando, stone of various colors from
India, Hempcrete for a Swiss project, soil
and wood samples, research materials
originating in specific places that are just
as much initiators of the design process as
the first sketches and drawings. “I always
try to work with reference to the material,
with its particular properties and sensuous
qualities, but it must also perform techni-
cally,” as Kéré noted in our interview. 2 For
Francis Kéré materials and floor plans are
a greater source of inspiration than archi-
tecture books or specialist journals, even
though studies of building in mud, or of ar-
chitecture as a tool of thought, are indeed
part of a small library, along with works
172
on Rem Koolhaas and Oskar Niemeyer. “Of
course books do help my thinking, but as
an architect my work is shaped more by ex-
perience and particular contexts.” Despite
working on sites and projects in Burkina
Faso, Mali, Sudan, Switzerland, and Mann-
heim, Francis Kéré spends a lot of time in
his office. With his colleagues, who come
from different parts of the world, he speaks
German, French, or English; with close
friends in Burkina Faso he speaks Mooré,
the language of the Mossi, or French. Com-
municating with project partners is often
maintained via Skype or telephone; how-
ever, he sees it as essential to be on the
spot and to be aware of the atmosphere
and context (Illustrations 1-5).
The mélange of materials, drawings, and
models, the atmosphere of communicative
interchange, the smooth, open transitions,
and the central “threshold space”3 are what
distinguish both the architectural office and
Francis Kéré’s own way of working. If one
sees an architect’s spaces not as a repre-
sentative Gestus, but discerns in them man-
ifestations of architectural attitudes and
assumptions,4 then, for example, the array of
framed awards, prizes, and photographs in
Kéré’s office points to a very specific network
of international donor organizations, national
architectural associations, and local protag-
onists (in this case LOKOMAT). Symbolically,
therefore, they represent an architectural
practice nurtured by a range of cultural and
professional experiences and tied directly to
a transnational existence and to the figure of
the architect Kéré as culture broker.
S CULTURE BROKER
The particular circumstances of producing
architecture between Africa and Europe will
be examined in this text. I am more con-
cerned with the “how” of building, and only
secondarily with the “what.” In the spirit of
an “oral history” of making architecture, I am
working with quotations from an interview I
had with Francis Kéré in his Berlin office in
early July 2016. I was seeking a technolog-
ical view of his architectural creativity, and
central questions were about processes
of cultural translation, about expectations
and conflicts of expectation as they occur
in this very special context. I was also in-
terested in the roles of his experience in
the field and in architectural discussions
in the office. How does practical and the-
oretical architectural knowledge interact?
What is the importance of knowledge that
cannot be acquired while sitting at a desk?
How does local knowledge and experience
of space translate beyond the local?
The idea of a cultural intermediary or broker
is closely linked with travel and migration
and with the idea of diaspora, which can be
seen as being both “here” and “there”—an
abundance rather than a privation.5 The
media philosopher Vilém Flusser under-
stood the logic of exile as “floating over
places”6—a characteristic of Afropolitan-
ism, a form of cosmopolitanism with Af-
rican roots. Achille Mbembe,7 its leading
theoretician, considers mobility between
different places, along with digital mobility
and visibility, to be essential here. He points
out the special ability to move and medi-
ate between places and cultures, and the
multilingualism this involves. Here “transla-
tion as a cultural technique for dealing with
cultural difference” comes to the fore.8 Im-
portant, and for Francis Kéré as a person,
absolutely understandable, is the “complex
multi-polarity of the translational context,”9
which has to do not just with “Africa” and
“Europe” but with transferences between
cultures and “classes,” which is in itself
multilayered, contradictory, and jumbled.
Of course there is conflict as well. I have to
deal with many different places and actors,
some of whom have very definite views on
building, the status of architects, and on
immutable regulations too. In some cases
local actors seek to involve me in their small
businesses; in others I have to explain to my
European partners that there are rights of
the land in Burkina Faso too—and that the
rituals they involve are both necessary and
cannot be folkloristically repeated for re-
cording on camera. Sometimes the strict
attitudes of international participants seem
almost to resemble the rights of the elderly.
They demand proof and documents that
cannot be provided without endangering
the intended building process, or that are
already obsolete and outdated by the time
they are produced. Material proof, facts and
figures, count for nothing here.
In particular, the complex scenarios and
relationships that cultural translations in-
volve make it clear that fracture zones and
power struggles are inherent in the pro-
cess. A culture broker’s course is often
flagged by specific expectations and con-
flicting contexts.
Francis Kéré’s biography is marked by sev-
eral migrations and translocations. He was
born in 1965 in Gando, a multi-ethnic village
of just on 3,000 inhabitants, where common
practice limits buildings to cylindrical mud
huts thatched with straw. “It’s all collective
work; anything else would be immoral. At
the end of it the house is a collective work,
and so is the process that produced it.
There is no guidance in the form of plans;
it’s just drawn on the ground.” Kéré sees
rectangular, concrete houses with corru-
gated iron roofs as the first sign of devia-
tion and commercialization in building:
In Gando there was a tradition of terrace
building that probably came from the north.
My father’s house was one of those, roofed
with palm wood. But in recent years or de-
cades these houses have been built by
young men, some of them from surrounding
villages; they can lay out right-angled cor-
ners, and people pay for their services and
for the materials, on a piecework basis.
At the age of seven Kéré left the village to go
to the school in the next town, Tenkodogo.
Before he left for Germany in the mid-nine-
teen-eighties he spent just a year in Oua-
gadougou in the house of his extended
family, the “embassy” to use the transla-
tion he employed for my benefit. The capi-
tal Ouagadougou then had a population of
some 400,000 and—as he was only later to
realize and appreciate—under Thomas San-
kara’s revolutionary presidency (1983–87)
was about to break free from colonial plan-
ning and move to a new structure of soci-
ety. And (something that has continued till
173
 Kéré Architecture office,
2016
today and proved seminal for Kéré’s own
experience) urban domestic architecture
was translated into a flexible, additive ar-
chitecture attuned to the changing needs
of its inhabitants:
The house, its form, is continually in motion,
in the throes of change. That is just what we
have picked up on in a design for a dwelling
house. The light colored parts on the model
denote elements that can be added later
by the occupants. That allows for a flexible
reaction to new situations. [Illustration 6].
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ARCHITECTURE AND TRAVEL PATTERNS
By now it is common knowledge that (co-
lonial) contacts and passages of travel
and their particular excesses shaped the
formation and development of modern ar-
chitecture in Europe and the US.10 But what
is so far still relatively unconsidered by re-
search is that northward journeys by African
students seeking architectural education
in European capitals also contributed to
shaping specific architectural assump-
tions. And yet in the cases of, for example,
Oluwole Olumuyiwa (1929–2000), Demas
Nwoko (b. 1935), or (later) David Aradeon (b.
1933) their paths into the architectural pro-
fession in the nineteen-fifties and nine-
teen-sixties led through a colonial matrix in
London, Paris, or American universities (as
with Aradeon). Cities like London, and above
all Paris, developed into contact zones where
the paths of intellectuals, artists, and bud-
ding architects intersected and bred artistic
174
developments that would later, from the
nineteen-sixties onward, become virulent
back in the newly independent African na-
tions.11 The experience of diaspora opened
up new thinking spaces. In the architectural
field this led to a strengthening (or even the
first constituting) of the regional—beyond
the often-criticized obsession with micro-
climate in Tropical Modernism. In Nigeria
Demas Nwoko and in India/Sri Lanka Min-
nette De Silva (1916–1998) sought a new cul-
ture that symbolically linked local and global
elements. Any nostalgic or purely superficial
historicizing reversion to ornamental motifs
or specific building materials they rejected,
if all it would do would be to impose on
buildings an “African” or “Indian” veneer.12
The work of both architects showed signs
of experimentation with local materials
and also of trans-regional references—in
Nwoko’s case, allusions to the Mbari houses
of the Igbo. Nwoko strove to find a way of
translating into spatial terms the “Natural
Synthesis-Paradigm” that he and the Zaria
Rebels had formulated for the visual arts:
one of the aspects of this was the search
for a way to link traditional forms and new
materials (“Latcrete”) and techniques.
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DISPUTED IMPLICATIONS OF MATERIALS
Francis Kéré had a European university ed-
ucation in common with the older archi-
tects of West Africa. But, unlike them, he
returned only temporarily and as required
by a variety of projects in different parts

of Africa. All the same, he shared many of
their (varied) assumptions. Over and above
the frequently noted references to Hassan
Fathy’s work, there are parallels with the
thought of Demas Nwoko. Like him, Kéré
works with materials and techniques that
relate to local craft and building practices,
but are continually being transmuted and
updated for new contexts. Hence Kéré’s
architecture, too, is aiming to conflate es-
tablished local building knowledge with
modern technologies that are equally sim-
ple and resource-frugal (“low-tech”).
Since his first project in 2001, the Gando
School, he has worked with sun-dried mud
bricks (into which a little cement is mixed for
better stabilization), compressed by means
of a newly introduced machine. And his
use of materials, structures, and forms has
been constantly broadening—for example,
the clay pots incorporated into the women’s
center and the Gando School Library. In this
last detail, which regulates light and air cir-
culation, one might see a reference to the
ceiling forms of older clay mosques in the
Sahel region. But these references are not
conclusive. The particular light and venti-
lation provisions at Ouagadougou’s central
market might equally come to mind.13 “This
concrete-built market was constructed
with the help of Italian engineers, but its real
architect was Thomas Sankara. A gigantic
market with massive supporting beams, a
heavy structure, almost brutalist in appear-
ance but very functional and with strong
contrasts of light and shade.” In his archi-
tecture Kéré is not consciously pursuing
Sketches and plans for
Ouagadougou Parlia-
ment project on the
offices’ walls, 2016
connection with vernacular building forms
and techniques—even if at the formal level
analogies with the wooden roof construc-
tions of Bamum buildings in Cameroon
sometimes emerge. Recently, though, Kéré
has resisted all the expectations others
have imposed on him on the basis of
(presumed) visual codes or indicators of
“Africanness.” He does not use difference
as a resource, especially not in the Re-
search and Documentation Centre for Eco-
logical and Sustainable Building Technology
in Mopti, where the nearby mosque in the
Sudanese style has undergone various co-
lonial and, later, Afrocentrist adaptations.14
Simple borrowing from “traditional” archi-
tecture means nothing to him if—as with
Ouagadougou’s Maison du Peuple, built in
in the nineteen-sixties, with its superficial
quotations in a façade reminiscent of Kas-
sena buildings and its light wells mimicking
round huts on the roof. “The market lives
and breathes; this building does not. It was
intended as a meeting place for the people
after independence and was meant to ex-
emplify that change, but the job was given
to French architects, and later Algerians.”
It is the social and also the economic con-
texts that determine the final form of a
building and the choice of materials.
For me the material is important. Its beauty
but also its potential for connectivity. It
must perform well technically and also
make sense to people. I often use an ev-
eryday material as the starting point for my
buildings—the clay pots that the women
make are an example. They only needed
cutting in half to be used for the Library;
there was no need to go to the city to look
for material. . . . I’m not a theoretician. I ob-
serve, make the first sketches on the com-
puter and copy them, because I’m no good
at rendering. Then I try it out. For a roof
support structure I bundle up steel tube.
Everywhere in the streets of Ouagadougou
you can see workshops working this stuff;
everyone can weld, and steel tube is avail-
able anywhere. It’s the cheapest connect-
ing material. . . . Vernacular architecture is
fashion. Once I was taken to task at a con-
ference for mingling mud and steel: build-
ing in mud was supposed to be organic and
was to be worked in rounded forms; that
was what was appropriate for “Africa”!
And so ultimately mud, the most import-
ant basic material of many of Kéré’s proj-
ects, is also a subject of controversy. While
one camp seeks to essentialize this natural
material in a primitivistic manner, others,
in particular local actors of all persuasions,
see it as a “poor” material with undertones
of simplicity and backwardness.
Building is tied up with dreams and imag-
inings. Schools—so it was handed down to
us by the French—should be solidly built, of
concrete and steel; with glass windows too,
for those who saw more; and those who
knew more wanted air-conditioning. . . .
Ouaga 2000, even though today it stands
almost completely empty, is seen by every-
one (including those who have nothing) as
the epitome of the New and Modern.15
A little Afro-pessimistically he adds that
it may be his own appearance, his style of
175
 Publications and
materials library in the
Kéré Architecture office,
2016
dress, and the lack of status symbols like
chauffeurs and large cars, or his general
refusal of a tendency to ostentation, he of-
ten elicits bewildered astonishment. At the
same time local figures approach him ex-
pecting help when a new building project
threatens their “supplementary income.”
That’s where I had such excellent allies in
the Aga Khan Foundation. Colleagues there
knew about this sort of dependency and
took care that these people received fur-
ther education, which enhanced their sta-
tus and weaned them off their previous
business. That way we got them on our side.
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MATERIAL PROOF AND
PERFORMATIVE TRANSLATION
I constantly tell my students that here the
bottom line is different from what it is in,
for example, Gando. Here you must deliver,
and you also know that there is the pos-
sibility of implementation; there a precise
direction must result. Before something
is done you need fairly exact instructions.
Here one must fulfill legal requirements on
paper; there you need to build something
that stands up—physical proof is important!
Since the Gando School project, in the
event of reservations and conflicts of un-
derstanding, Kéré has constantly turned to
models as both aids to communication and
instruments of a utopian ideal.
Of course, we also use drawings, but making
something is important. Models (preferably
full-size) are needed for details just as much
176
as sketches. . . . “Mud won’t do,” they say to
me. Then you have to argue and show proof,
convince the elders, the ones that have a
voice. You build a base of granite, a contin-
uous footing, and show that it can stand up
and it can last. You don’t need to show your
diploma, you need to prove what you say.
A similarly performative sort of transla-
tion was involved when he invited half the
population of a village onto the roof of his
houses to demonstrate quite literally the
load-bearing capacity of his barrel vaulting
(Illustration 7).
Another way of gaining respect, credibility,
and support of local communities is to carry
out ritual requirements, particularly when
they involve land (and, hence, ancestors).
The land belongs to nobody, my European
backers tell me. But I know that the land be-
longs to somebody. Only when I have found
the earth priest, carried out the prescribed
rites and offered sacrifice can building be-
gin. Now nobody else can raise a further
claim to the site unless he is ready to take
on the underworld.
Kéré, knowing the importance of these ges-
tures and over the course of many projects,
has had to disabuse international compan-
ions of any expectations of repeating the
rituals so as to video or record them. Along
with the categorical importance of experi-
ence as a mediator of architecture, an ap-
preciation of local traditional knowledge
and practices—collective building, say—is
another mediation tool. At a conceptual
level there may even be convergence with
“traditional architectures” and their specific

functions as instruments for transmitting
thought and knowledge. If one “reads” the
Gando School as a knowledge space, it
soon becomes clear that here a normative,
rational organization of space is seen as a
prerequisite for formal learning.
Kéré’s architectural practice is grounded in
the premise of taking something capable of
improvement and turning it into something
highly desirable. Inherent in this is looking
ahead to a vision of the future: a utopian el-
ement that similarly marked Thomas Sanka-
ra’s little-known experiments in architecture
and urban development. Sankara’s social-
ist and pan-African-inspired policies found
concrete expression in a series of new urban
and rural building types.
Ouagadougou was informal. Urbanization
actually only began with Sankara. He set
out a revolutionary program: Cité 1, 2, 3. . . .
Some of these housing schemes are built
of mud—stabilized mud—and all the walls
of government buildings were to be mud-
built. Decoratively attractive, but adapted
without the necessary technical knowledge,
as though working with concrete. And from
this stemmed the bad, off-putting image
of building with mud. Only the development
organizations have since insisted upon it.
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ARCHITECTURE DRAWING ON
TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
As early as the nineteen-sixties the first
generation of African architects began,
via new networks, to look anew at building
Francis Kéré in the office,
2016
techniques and materials, the aesthetics of Beijing Pavilion as well as the shimmering
building, and their social and political con- Colorscapes in lightweight cord (a “locally”
text. Today, (temporary) (re-)migrations of common material) for the Philadelphia
architects and designers have helped to Museum of Art, which showed Kéré’s works
update artistic and architectural practice in in 2016, it is always about mediating a par-
various parts of the African continent. Bor- ticular aesthetic and social experience of
rowings and references are many and var- space. Here references to “Africa” have
ied, but common factors often seem to be their effect on a conceptual level more than
an anti-essentialist outlook and a particu- as direct allusions to specific visual codes
lar striving for the future. And this expe- or “indicators of Africanness.”
rience has a knock-on effect in Europe. It
is from the periphery that spaces are often
rethought and redesigned—stemming from
the experience of migration and trans-
national linkages.
For some time now the schemes Kéré has
realized in many places in Africa have been
supplemented by new building projects in
other parts of the world. In 2013 his office
won an urban development competition in
Mannheim; and he later planned a pop-up
store on the Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein.
Then came numerous spatial designs and
installations for exhibitions that took his
work and outlook as their theme. One in-
stance was in 2015 at the Louisiana Museum
of Modern Art in Denmark, where by means
of sections of tree trunks, some cut length-
wise, and branches “left to nature” the im-
pression was engendered of a great tree
that visitors could sit under. Another was in
Milan, in the courtyard of the Palazzo Litta,
where Kéré fitted in an installation whose
slack straw mats suspended on slim posts
evoked temporary weekly markets in West
African villages. As in the colorful, more
technical-looking steel structures of the
177

1 In Pursuit of a New Ouagadougou is the contribution
of Francis Kéré’s office to the 15th Mostra di Archi-
tettura di Venezia (Venice Biennale of Architecture),
curated by Alejandro Aravena.
2 Throughout this text quotations from our conversa-
tion (in German) on July 8, 2016, are placed within
quotation marks.
3 Threshold space here is conceived as a place of
coming together. See Kéré’s lecture organized by
ARCH+ features 2: Diébédo Francis Kéré; www.siedle.
de/App/WebObjects/ (accessed August 29, 2016).
4 For this approach, see Elke Krasny, “Of Tools and
Inspiration: The Economies of Architectural Crea-
tivity,” in Architekturzentrum Wien, The Force is in
the Mind: The Making of Architecture (Basel, 2008),
pp. 5–9.
5 Allan deSouza, “Name Calling,” in: Laurie Ann Farrell
(ed.), Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary
African Diaspora (New York, 2003), pp. 18–21 (p. 20).
6 Vilém Flusser, quoted from Burcu Dogramaci, Foto-
grafieren und Forschen, Wissenschaftliche Expedi-
tionen mit der Kamera im türkischen Exil nach 1933
(Marburg, 2013), p. 7.
7 Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism,” in Simon Njami et
al., Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent
(Johannesburg, 2007), pp. 26–29.
8 Doris Bachmann-Medick, Transnational und transla-
tional: Zur Übersetzungsfunktion der Area Studies,
CAS Working Paper Series 1/2015 (Berlin, 2015), p. 6.
9 Ibid., p. 8.
10 See Tom Avermaete et al., Colonial Modern: Aesthetics
of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (London, 2011).
11 See Ikem Stanley Okoye, “Architecture, History, and
the Debate on Identity in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria,
and South Africa,” Journal of the Society of Archi-
tectural Historians, 61/3 (2002), pp. 381–96; Hannah
Le Roux and Ola Oduku, “The Media and the Mo-
178
Shelves with conceptual
and architectural models,
2016
dern Movement in Nigeria and the Gold Coast,” Nka:
Journal of Contemporary African Art, 19 (2004), pp.
46–49; author’s interview with David Aradeon, Lagos,
August 2009. (author’s comment: it was not publis-
hed)
12 Cf. Moira Hille, “From Around a Modern House,” in
Model House Research Group (ed.), Transcultural
Modernisms (Berlin, 2013), pp. 66–79; on Demas
Nwoko see: John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood, The
Architecture of Demas Nwoko (Lagos, 2007).
13 See also Christian Larras, “Un grand marché au Bur-
kina Faso: Ouagadougou,” Aménagement et nature
96 (1989), pp. 24–25.
14 See Jean-Louis Bourgeois, “The History of the Great
Mosques of Djenné,” African Arts 20/3 (1987), pp.
54–63, 90–92; on translation in the context of ne-
gritude, see Kerstin Pinther, “Architekturen der
Migration. Migration der Architektur. Künstlerische
Annäherungen,” in Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Sissi
Helff (eds.), Die Kunst der Migration. Aktuelle Positi-
onen zum europäisch-afrikanischen Diskurs. Mate-
rial—Gestaltung—Kritik (Bielefeld, 2011), pp. 169–81.
15 On the urban development of Ouagadougou, see
Florence Fournet et al. (eds.), Ouagadougou (1850-
2004). Une urbanisation différenciée (Paris, 2009).
179