The American Academy of Arts and Letters revealed the big winners of its 2017 Architecture Awards, which includes the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize for Architecture and four Arts and Letters Awards. This year’s winners were chosen from a group of 27 individuals and practices nominated by the members of the Academy.

Not long after being invited to design the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in LondonDiébédo Francis Kéré was honored with the 2017 Brunner Prize. Awarded since 1955, the Prize awards €18,752 -$20,000- to an architect of any nationality for their significant and influential contribution to architecture as an art. Previous winners of the Brunner Prize in the last few years include Phyllis Lambert, Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey, Alberto Campo Baeza, Kathryn Gustafson, and Merrill Elam and Mack Scogin.
 
Juror Billie Tsien described Diébédo Francis Kéré as “an alchemist working with local materials and technology — mud and hand labor — he has designed buildings of meaning and beauty.”

The jury awarded the four $10,000 Arts and Letters Awards to: installation artist Theaster Gates, founder of the Rebuild Foundation and director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago; esteemed author, critic, and lecturer Paul Goldberger; Walter Hood, founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA; and Chicago-based architect John Ronan, best known for designing The Poetry Foundation.

The awards will be presented in New York City in May at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial. Work by the winners will be featured in the Exhibition of Works by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards, on view in the Academy’s galleries on Audubon Terrace.
 
The jurors were Elizabeth Diller (chairman), Henry N. Cobb, Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Hugh Hardy, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, James Polshek, Robert A. M. Stern, Billie Tsien, and Tod Williams.
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Diébédo Francis Kéré (b.1965, in Gando, Burkina Faso, west Africa) trained at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany, started his Berlin based practice, Kéré Architecture, in 2005. Kéré Architecture has been recognised nationally and internationally with awards, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2004) for his first building, a primary school in Gando, Burkina Faso; LOCUS Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2009); Global Holcim Award Gold (2011 and 2012); Green Planet Architects Award (2013); Schelling Architecture Foundation Award (2014); and the Kenneth Hudson Award –European Museum of the Year (2015).

Projects undertaken by Francis Kéré span countries, including Burkina Faso,Mali, China, Mozambique, Kenya, Togo, Sudan, Germany and Switzerland. He has taught internationally, including the Technical University of Berlin, and he has held professorships at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Accademia di Architettura di Mendriso in Switzerland.

Kéré’s work has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions: Radically Simple at the Architecture Museum, Munich (2016) and The Architecture of Francis Kéré: Building for Community, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2016). His work has also been selected for group exhibitions: Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010) and Sensing Spaces, Royal Academy, London (2014).

Among his main works are the Primary School (2001) and the Library (under construction) of Gando, Burkina Faso; the Health and Social Promotion Center (2014) and the Opera Village (under construction), both in Laongo, Burkina Faso; the Satellite of the Volksbühne Theater at the Tempelhof Airport, in Berlin (temporary installation, 2016); or the Pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery of the year 2017.

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