Francis Kéré: Radically Simple

FROM THE BOOK

Excerpt from the chapter, “Primary School Complex: Primary School” Tenkodogo is a city that is located 200 kilometers from the capital Ouagadougou and close to the Ghana and Togo border in Burkina Faso. The only asphalt road that crosses the city separates into a very narrow dirt road to the west. The huge baobab tree at this spot is the reference point for the newcomer who wishes to find Gando, the village where architect Francis Kéré comes from. Today, 3,000 inhabitants live in this place, still without electricity, indoor plumbing, or paved streets.

The bumpy dirt road goes along the plain reddish landscape of savanna for thirteen kilometers, among the baobabs, mango trees, and loosely set village compounds on the agricultural land, until it reaches a denser ensemble of trees. An unexpected sign in this secluded landscape, points out a specific place which is also clear from the floating roofs and walls hidden among the trees. There is no entrance here; the Primary School Complex of Gando pulls the visitors directly into the large courtyard.

The courtyard covered with mango trees is surrounded by four buildings that Kéré built separately within fifteen years: the primary school on the north, library and school extension on the west, and the teachers’ housing on the south. A pre-existing school building from 1984 standing in the middle of the courtyard is also actively used due to the high number of students.

The story of the primary school in Gando is closely connected to the life story of Francis Kéré. It goes back to the 1970s in Burkina Faso, when there were no schools in Gando. Suffering from poverty, insufcient infrastructure, and a lack of educational facilities, more than ninety percent of the population was illiterate. When it came time for early education, Kéré had to move to a relative’s home in order to attend school in Tenkodogo. The overcrowded classrooms designed as enclosed boxes and the difficulties of learning under the extreme climatic conditions of the country are vivid memories of the architect, who mentions it quite often. After getting a carpenter scholarship from Carl Duisberg Centrum and moving to Germany in 1985, then finishing high school and attending the Technical University of Berlin to become an architect, Kéré remained concerned about the problems of “his people” in Burkina Faso. When he was in his third term at the university, he was asked to help rebuild his village’s school, the only school and one that was built in 1984 and in danger of collapsing. The non-profit organization Schulbausteine für Gando was born in 1998 in order to be able to raise funds for the construction of a new school in Gando. After communicating with the villagers, integrating their input and ensuring local support, he realized the school in the village in 2001. The project won him the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004 for the “elegant architectonic clarity, achieved with most humble means and materials, and for its transformative value.”

The Primary School in Gando represents a multiple of social, cultural, economic, and ecological aspects, not only as an architectural product, but also as an autonomous learning, training, and production process. This serves to help with the empowerment and development of the community, which were concerns introduced for the first time in Burkina Faso by a local architect. Using the human potential and pre-existing resources, getting the most out of them, he initiated a self-sufficient mechanism for the long run. Simple, but well-considered solutions offer options for future generations in a village with long-standing education issues.