Growing up in rural West Africa, Diébédo Francis Kéré and his friends would build makeshift shelters from clay, tree branches, and leaves when they got caught in the rain away from home. Decades later, in 1999, he returned home to Burkina Faso as an architecture school student to build a school in his hometown of Gando, thinking he was unlikely to ever find a job.
With light streaming in, passive ventilation, and walls made from bricks pressed from clay and concrete, that school was recently recognized by The New York Times as one of the most important buildings constructed since World War II.
Kéré combines traditions of African architecture with influences from pre-industrial
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