As part of the Walker's presentation of Designs for Different Futures (2020), we are publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019), exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
This conversation took place by phone on September 20, 2018, with Francis Kéré in Berlin and exhibition co-curator Michelle Millar Fisher in Philadelphia.
Michelle Millar Fisher
Can you describe yourself and your practice in two sentences? Can that be done, now that it’s gotten so large?
Francis Kéré
Well, I am an architect born in Burkina Faso, based in Europe, and trying to use whatever is available in terms of materials, but also in terms of location, to shape the world through architecture.
MMF
You are truly a cross-cultural figure. You’ve spent time working in many areas of the world. You trained as an architect in Germany, where you now live and teach. You’ve also realized projects in the United States and China, and in countries in Europe and Africa. Where do you think that we—as citizens, policy makers, and emerging architects or designers—should look for models for future cities? Who is getting it right and who is getting it wrong today?
FK
I don’t think anyone is doing it right. Facing the growing population of cities, we have to consider a city as an organism, a holistic organism that needs to adapt. We have to take into account the strong, rapid growth and change of cities, and only then will we tackle our problems. Policy makers, architects, and even citizens—we have to consider seriously how we create cities to bring people together. An organism needs every component.
MMF
I wonder whether, in the near and perhaps very far future, it’s going to be citizens rather than policy makers or trained architects who will be able to get us to think of the city as an organism and work more collaboratively. I know that you crowdfunded one of your first projects, the school you built in Gando [in Burkina Faso]. What do you think is the role of citizens in the future of architecture and cities? Do they have an important role to play?
FK
Of course. We have to adapt to see our neighborhood as a community for ourselves. We have to be ready to engage ourselves, for [the good of] our cities. We cannot wait for something from outside to come and show us how to do things. We have to feel responsible for our cities. This is a beginning. Being a citizen means I am part of a community in a given place. We need to talk again about neighborhoods, about infrastructure, about sharing. In French it’s partager [to share out]. That’s how to make our cities places to work, spend our time, raise our children. Everyone has to feel responsible: you, me, the architect, the policy maker. We have to work together if we want this place—if you want this place—to be ready for the future, a place we build together where we like to stay.
MMF
Can you talk about some of the ways that you have engendered or helped that type of sensibility take root in the communities where you’ve worked—how you bring people into a project so that they feel ownership and a shared responsibility?
FK
When we were raising the addition to the school, children brought building materials. They brought a rock or a stone every day so they could participate in the building of the project themselves. Or they brought a bucket of water to contribute to the construction process. It is important to connect; giving something makes people feel it is their project. It helps them be a part of the vision, but it also gives [the project] a soul and identity. How do you do this in a city, where you have to buy materials and structures are often complicated? I think that we must engage cities in dialogue. We must get neighborhoods to be part of the process, in terms of communicating the project, in terms of asking them to contribute—intellectually, socially—and in terms of community. I think it’s better to take people with you, take them along with the idea, rather than force them to accept it. We need to take more time to explicate our projects. To explicate is to implicate.
MMF
Can the village be a model for building future cities? Can microscales be knitted together so that many small communities form one macro? Can rural areas offer the city of the future a template?
FK
Yes. Exactly. If you really analyze a city and break it down, what are the components? There are many, many neighborhoods linked to each other. I’m not just talking about infrastructure that we share, or even parks, things that we commonly use together. It’s about the micro, the little parts of the city, the neighborhoods. I know my neighbor, and we talk together; we share the neighborhood; we share the same road. So we and our kids know each other. And if we knit together many, many spaces like this, we make a city. I’m not talking about the physical parts of the city; I’m talking about the people living there, raising their kids there, working there, sharing time. So if architecture and architects engage at this level, you will see that the city is not far from our village—from the way the community lives in the village: knowing each other, supporting each other, sharing what they have together. This is what a good, working neighborhood should do in the city. We have to build our comfort, in terms of security, in terms of trusting each other, in terms of quality of the community. Everybody should have someone that they can appreciate, you understand?
MMF
You make me think of different cities, from Lagos to Edinburgh to New York, that are experienced neighborhood by neighborhood. I think of the arrondissements
in Paris, for example, where it’s very, very localized. Is the future of the city perhaps something that’s much more medieval than modern—in that it’s not the modern gridded city, which is expansive or that can be surveilled and seen all at once, but something that’s very much about the premodern, something that is rooted in the very local?
FK
The very local is so important. What is local? Local is now. If you know it, it gives you safety. It gives you security. It gives you comfort.
MMF
You’ve spoken before about migration as, in part, a building crisis. You have said that architects have a responsibility to help make sure they’re not building in ways that keep people on the periphery—you’ve talked about the banlieues in Paris, for example—but instead to think about how existing structures can be creatively reused to shape community and embed people in a diverse way in a city.
FK
Absolutely. I think that is the key. We cannot just, as in the past, go to a green field and create a new place for new arrivals so that these people remain at a distance. If you integrate them, bring them into an existing community, they will try to behave like the existing community. If you want to learn to swim, you cannot sit at a desk and just learn to swim; you have to jump into the water. So you need to really integrate people. If you don’t invest in this way, and you keep them distant, then don’t be surprised to find isolation. It is a requirement for human beings to become part of a vital community. People will always migrate. People will migrate because of catastrophes, because of the destruction of their environment, because of their living space, even to find better opportunities. The United States is a result of migration.
MMF
Yes.
FK
I know that it’s always a challenge when new arrivals come to a town. But every experience is a challenge, you know? It has been this way always. But healthy and wealthy communities have to have the potential to integrate new arrivals. That is the way we renew ourselves.
MMF
Earlier, you said that taking time was very important—that being able to take time to speak with people, to listen to their concerns, to make them feel invested in a project is necessary in thinking about future architecture. Is that something that you feel you can always do, especially when things move so quickly today? Is it something that you really insist upon having?
FK
I can say that it depends on the project. But, honestly, any project involves a community and affects a community, because constructing it will affect the neighborhood. Any building is like putting a new puzzle into an existing puzzle. So we have to find the time to explain the project and to communicate. I know that is not always easy, but it’s important. I’ll tell you an example: In Germany there is a train station in Stuttgart. A very successful colleague of mine won the huge competition to build the train station. And then there were some trees that had to be removed [in order to build], and there was a huge, huge demonstration, a real battle, between the building company’s security and the community living there. There were the interests of the city, which wanted the train station to happen and the idea of the architect to be realized. And then there was the community, which didn’t want to see them kill trees that were hundreds of years old. It was really, really a huge battle. So, if you don’t communicate, it becomes a mess. If you want things like this not to happen, you have to explicateright from the start. You have to give people ownership.
MMF
So, my last question is very short. Do you have hope for the future as an architect?
FK
Oh, yes. I’m very hopeful. Challenges make our profession even stronger. We just have to see the advantage in striving, in changing, in challenging, and to make the best of it. That is what will take us into the future. ▪︎
FRANCIS KÉRÉ established the Kéré Foundation while studying at the Technical University of Berlin and founded Kéré Architecture in Berlin in 2005. He received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in 2017, and the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2022. Kéré has undertaken projects across four continents and continues to work in his home country, Burkina Faso. He currently teaches architectural design and participation at the Technical University of Munich.
MICHELLE MILLAR FISHER is the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work investigates intersections of power, people, and design. She is currently collaborating on the book and exhibition Designing Motherhood. Previously she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized Items: Is Fashion Modern? (2017) and Design and Violence (2015).
The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago
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