My pavilion will become a beacon of light

Today the Standard exclusively reveals the design for this summer’s Serpentine Pavilion. Its architect, Diébédo Francis Kéré, talks us through his vision

IN MY home village of Gando,” says architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, “it is always easy to locate a celebration at night by climbing to higher ground and searching for light in the surrounding darkness.” This small light becomes larger, he says, as more and more people arrive.

As the designer of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, the Burkina Faso-born architect is hoping some of this sense of gathering will emerge of an evening when “the pavilion will become a beacon of light, a symbol of storytelling and togetherness”.

Unsurprisingly, Kéré tells a good story because his own is remarkable. In his 2013 TED talk in front of a rapt audience, he described his own West African origins, where he was born in 1965, in Gando, a small village. “There was no electricity, no clean drinking water and no school. But my father wanted me to learn how to read and write.” So this son of the village chief left home for the city aged seven to learn in a basic schoolroom crammed with 150 other children, and became not only the first of his village to be literate but won a scholarship to study architecture at Berlin’s Technical University.

Kéré still practises from the German capital but builds largely back in Africa, starting with a school in his home village — built with mud bricks bought with the $50,000 (£40,100) he raised while still a student.

The school is typical of his work in its use of traditional building techniques and materials with modern engineering that create a culturally- and climateappropriate architecture. His fellow villagers were initially aghast when he came back from Europe wanting to build in traditional mud, which they saw as a material of poverty (“You left us working in the fields for this?!”), but they gradually came around to the idea. The Gando village school won him a prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004 and established his name.

Kéré’s only previous exposure in the UK has been his joyful installation of plastic honeycomb rendered hairy with colourful straws at the Royal Academy’s Sensing Spaces exhibition in 2014.

For his Kensington Gardens design, clay has been left behind in favour of a roughly circular structure that evokes the idea of a tree and its canopy — the meeting point of a community in many cultures. Surrounding indigo walls enclose the centrally focused space. The steel-framed roof and its perforated blue walls are clad in reclaimed timber salvaged from construction waste. This will allow dappled light and shade but there will also be a clear polycarbonate layer to keep the rain off — especially important in 2017 when the 300sq m pavilion, which opens in June, will have a bigger programme of events than usual.

A central oculus will funnel any rainwater that collects on the roof via what’s billed as “a spectacular waterfall effect”, before it is evacuated through a drainage system in the floor and stored for later use in irrigating the surrounding gardens.

Kéré describes it as a micro-cosmos, an open structure that embraces the elements with water at its heart — “You cannot create a cosmos or a community without water.”

The idea of the tree as meeting place is also central to Kéré’s largest project to date — creating a new parliament in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou after the old one was burned down by protesters during upheavals in 2014. For societal divisions to heal, Kéré maintains, there should be places for people to come together, rather than somewhere isolated behind high walls and security. He’s hoping his parliament will have a green roof that people can walk on to.

“The tree is a powerful structure. It is the very first meeting place for human beings — the primary shelter that gives you protection under its canopy. If you go through Africa today, meetings are happening under trees, in cities and in the countryside. It has a lot of positivity for human beings.”

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the design cognoscenti were content with knowing the architectural goto names of Europe, North America and Japan — plus a few outliers such as Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil or India’s Charles Correa. It was a lazy consensus that has tumbled this century, with architects from Vietnam to Chile, Ghana to Lebanon now commanding attention.

The Serpentine has helped widen this vision through its art and architecture programming. Previous pavilion architects have included Chilean Smiljan Radic, and a Summer House by Kunlé Adeyemi — famous for his floating school in Lagos — was one of the pavilion’s supplementary structures last year.

‘The tree is a powerful structure, the primary shelter that gives you protection under its canopy’