Drawing on decades of work in Africa’s hottest regions, Francis Kéré is scaling climate-smart building design to a global audience.
Francis Kéré’s climate-smart building design began not as a grand vision but as a practical answer to a real problem. When the Burkina Faso-born architect returned to his home village of Gando in the late 1990s, he needed to build a school with almost no budget and no access to electricity. His solution used clay bricks, a vaulted roof with ventilation holes, and a raised tin canopy to pull hot air away from classrooms. It worked so well that the building is now considered one of the most important structures of the 21st century. That project set the course for everything that followed.
In 2022, Kéré became the first African architect to win the Pritzker Prize, widely regarded as the highest honor in architecture. The judges recognized his work for challenging wasteful building practices. Kéré himself admits he never considered his approach sustainable. He was simply solving problems with what was available.
That honesty is part of what makes his climate-smart building design so compelling. For decades, he designed schools, clinics, and libraries across Africa using local materials, passive cooling, and deep community involvement. Passive cooling means designing a building so air moves naturally through it, reducing or eliminating the need for air conditioning. In regions where temperatures are rising faster than almost anywhere else on earth, that is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
Now those same ideas are being applied at a much larger scale. Kéré has three major projects underway simultaneously. The Las Vegas Museum of Art, his first major North American commission, is set to open in 2029. A public library in Rio de Janeiro marks his first project in South America. A museum in Plüschow, Germany, expected to open in late 2026, will be his first European museum.
Each project carries forward the principles developed in Africa. The Las Vegas museum will be clad in locally sourced stone that both reflects the desert landscape and allows heat to escape through a ventilated outer layer. That reduces reliance on air conditioning in one of America’s fastest-warming cities. The 60,000-square-foot building uses concrete as a structural necessity, but the climate-smart building design approach shapes everything around it. The German museum will use rammed earth and wood as primary materials. All three buildings will feature canopy roofs, perforated walls, and natural ventilation towers that move air without mechanical systems.
These are not decorative choices. They are engineering decisions that reduce energy use and lower a building’s environmental impact over its lifetime. The global construction industry currently accounts for roughly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Finding ways to build that work with local climates rather than against them is one of the most direct tools available to reduce that figure.
Critics and peers have taken notice. Ghanaian-British architect Nana Biamah-Ofosu describes Kéré as a leading voice in a broader shift in the architectural world’s view of Africa. For too long, the continent was seen as a place that needed to catch up with Western building standards. Kéré’s career flips that assumption. Africa has been managing extreme heat for generations, and the climate-smart building design techniques developed there offer lessons the rest of the world urgently needs.
As cities face rising temperatures and energy costs, architects and city planners are increasingly looking to traditional African building methods to inform modern construction. Kéré’s Nigerian architect colleague Kunlé Adeyemi notes that the profession is watching closely to see how ideas rooted in local materials and traditional techniques can be scaled up for global use.
To make those lessons more widely available, Kéré is expanding a training center he founded in 2018 in Tenkodogo, a city near his home village. Around 200 local workers have been trained there so far, building skills in clay, adobe, wood, and stone construction. This year, the center will open its doors to architects and craftspeople from around the world. The goal over the next five years is to train 2,500 people in climate-smart building design using natural, locally sourced materials.
National Geographic recognized architect Francis Kéré in its 2026 edition of “33,” honoring changemakers worldwide committed to positive impact in the spirit of the organization’s 33 founders. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect joins a distinguished cohort of visionaries, creators, icons, and adventurers shaping the future across disciplines and continents. Kéré expressed deep honor at the recognition of his work in developing creative, impactful solutions for communities around the globe, including his acclaimed projects that combine traditional building techniques with modern design to create sustainable, climate-responsive architecture, primarily in Africa.
What started as one man building a school for his village with clay bricks has grown into a global conversation about how humanity constructs its future. The principles behind Kéré’s climate-smart building design are not new. They are centuries old, embedded in African building traditions developed out of necessity in some of the world’s harshest climates. The question now is how quickly the rest of the world is willing to learn.
