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The future National Assembly in Benin was represented by Burkinabè architect Francis Kéré. Based in Germany, he is known for his use of local materials.
Impeccable white shirt, portable in hand, FrancisKér saves the site of the future National Assembly, an 8-hectare site in the center of Porto-Novo, the Benin capital, occupied by the national police. When the work begins, he has an eye on everything: the soil samples that make it possible to lay the foundation, the scaffolding is repainted.
“The shape is inspired by a palm tree,” explains the architect during one of his frequent visits to Benin. It is an old democratic custom in Africa and I wanted this congregation to honor this tradition. ” The plan also provides a large park around Porto-Noviens. The Chinese company CSCEC must complete the work in a maximum of 30 months. The slim 50-year-old, who has an exercise in Berlin, oversees projects in all corners of the world, teaches in Munich, Harvard and Yale, hosts popular lectures and answers phones in French, German and English, are both happy. and stressed: it is his largest project to date and also the most expensive. Asked in his home country to build a new parliament, it was finally in Benin that he took up the challenge.
The Gando School, for and with society
It was in Burkina Faso, in Gando, his village without water or electricity, that it all began 20 years ago: there is no school and Kéré, then an architecture student in Berlin, decided to build one. “During a trip to the country, the villagers asked me for money for it. I told myself we would do it ourselves, says Kéré, whose first name is Diébédo and the discreet sharpnesses remember the Bissa origin. The school, made of earth and metal, materials used locally, is built with the inhabitants. in one year.
“I had a bad memory of a class where we were 100, very hot and dark, and I wanted airy and ventilated rooms,” explains the person who was the first in his area to go to school, at the age of 7, a decision of his father, the village chief, who sent him to a host family in Tenkodogo, 20 kilometers from his home. A few years later, at the age of 17, he went even further, thanks to a scholarship, to Germany to study in cabinets. It was there that he passed his degree, multiplied odd jobs to pay for architecture lessons, imagined the school that would make his reputation and find the financial and technical means to achieve it.
It was in Gando that he forged his brand, “build for and with society”. The three classrooms are made of compressed bricks, topped with a raised tin roof and perforated so that air circulates. Vertical openings allow the dry Sahelian heat to rise. If today school is a subject for study all over the world, it was difficult to introduce the idea of a clay building: “people did not want it to be in the ground, because every time it rains it breaks! When the walls were a meter high, there was a flood at night, and in the morning the women came to comfort me, they thought everything had fallen. Everything stood. It won ”.
Because FrancisKéré modernizes the old technologies and trains the population that provides water, soil, irons every day. The community joins the property it is proud of and expands the school, adds a high school that now educates 1300 young people as well as a library and housing for teachers funded by the Kéré Foundation. Among the residents, a team of technicians is recruited who participate in other projects across the country and also elsewhere in Africa. “I am an architect who was lucky enough to be rooted in Africa and who exploited local potential,” he analyzes. He knew how to take the best of every world, Africa where he grew up, West where he lives, to create an innovative and ecological path, long before sustainable development was on everyone’s lips.
The right to beauty
With the journalistic expressions that qualify his style in a few words, “sustainable high technology”, “architectural low cost”, Kérépréfère speaks of the principles that govern it: “my architecture takes into account the socio-economy, climate and comfort. I use the rich materials in place. What I build is sustainable, simple, convenient and easy to maintain. ”And even when he works with community infrastructures, he has a requirement:” Everyone has the right to beauty, it should be a human right! “
Together with the Ghanaian David Adjaye, the designer of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, he is the only African architect of global stature. The man from Gando, as he is known in Burkina, points out that it is difficult to learn architecture on the continent and that studies are expensive. And for young people who want to imagine tomorrow’s work, Kéréra reminds us that being an architect “does not just know how to draw. It has a vision ”.
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