Las vegas art museum
Las Vegas is a city of casinos, excess and air-conditioning turned up full blast. Francis Kéré made his name doing almost exactly the opposite: building economically, using natural ventilation and local materials, beginning with a primary school in Gando, the village in Burkina Faso where he was born. Yet it is Kéré who has now been chosen to design Las Vegas’s first freestanding art museum, scheduled to open in 2029. The apparent contradiction says a great deal about this singular architect.
pritker prize
Born in 1965, he now divides his time between Burkina Faso and Berlin. In 2022, Francis who first trained as a carpenter has reached architecture’s highest echelon when he received the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize, becoming the first African architect to receive the distinction. Despite this extraordinary ascent, he remains remarkably approachable: modest, affable and invariably passionate. France has now bestowed its own recognition. On May 13, 2026, he was elected a foreign associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, occupying seat number four.
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Building Stories
And yet, for all these accolades, Kéré remains relatively little known to the wider public. Taschen is attempting to remedy that with Francis Kéré: Building Stories, a substantial 444-page volume published in English. This is not merely another decorative architecture book destined for an elegant coffee table. Kéré writes in the first person, constructing a kind of travel diary that takes him from Gando to some of his most prestigious projects, including the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2017.
rationality and poetry
Kéré has a singular mind. His projects combine rationality and poetry, Western knowledge and African experience. The same could be said of his Western experience and African knowledge. He is, in many ways, a bridge between two cultures. “I wanted to share my struggles and my joys,” he explains.
What is most striking about the book is the extent to which childhood remains the epicenter of his story.
always gando
The 45-minute Zoom interview I conducted with him offers a revealing glimpse into his recurring obsessions: for instance, the story of his father, who was the chief of his village and once took a long-haul flight with his son without even realizing they had taken off, so smooth was the journey; or, in a very different vein, his idea of recreating the Nevada landscape inside the art museum he is due to build in Las Vegas.
And then, of course, Gando — always Gando.
a natural storyteller
On this subject, he traces his love of vivid colors that recur throughout his work to memories of his village. “I wanted to dress my pavilion at Serpentine in blue. You know, in my village everything is open. Everyone sees you. So one day, when you want to let people know that a certain girl is the one for you, you dress in blue and walk across the savanna. Everyone notices how elegant you look. They even follow you with their eyes until they see you enter her house. That blue is a symbol of union, a way of saying: ‘I am here.’”
The architect is a natural storyteller. Now you can listen to him.
Francis Kéré. Building Stories. Taschen. 444 pages. €75.
