Burkina Faso-born Diébédo Francis Kéré has been awarded the Pritzker Prize. He is the first Black architect, and the first architect from Africa, to win the award.
Kéré found fame for a series of school and hospital projects, designed to be produced using local or inexpensive materials including clay-earth bricks and corrugated iron. After studying in Berlin, his first realised design was a school for his village. Since then he has built in Mali, Togo, Kenya, Mozambique and Sudan. His design for the National Assembly of Benin is under construction and future projects include a museum in Rwanda, a home for the Goethe Institute in Senegal and a civic centre for the Technical University of Munich, where Kéré teaches.
If the biggest commissions in architecture have long been dominated by European and North America men, further sign of change comes in the decision by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to commission Mexican architect Frida Escobedo to design its new Modern and contemporary art wing. Escobedo will be the first woman to design a wing at the institution.
The extension had been due to open in 2020, but went through a series of delays, not least due to fundraising. In 2021 however financier Oscar L. Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu-Tang, donated $125 million to the New York institution in exchange for naming rights.
