Francis Kéré — schools and community centers, Burkina Faso

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kéré consistently designs buildings that treat local materials as invaluable Resources. His projects for schools and community centers in his native Burkina Faso often utilize locally sourced clay, laterite stone, and eucalyptus wood, minimizing transport costs and embodied energy. He re-engineered the process for making clay bricks, using a manual press to create compressed stabilized earth blocks (CSEBs) that are denser and more durable than traditional adobe, yet require far less energy than fired bricks.