The ICO Museum has become a benchmark for some of the best architecture exhibitions in Madrid, and it seems that it will do it again on October 3 when the exhibition "Francis Kéré, primary elements" is inaugurated at its headquarters. It is curated by Luis Fernández-Galiano and organized by the ICO Foundation.
The exhibition aims to be one of the most ambitious of those made so far in the ICO Museum with 29 projects and six artistic installations, carried out in three different continents, showing the beauty stripped of its buildings. A journey through the architect's life.
The plot line of the whole exhibition relates the work of Kéré with the "primary elements of Architecture" proposed by the German architect and scholar Gottfried Semper in the 19th century: the stereotomic floor, the tectonic roof and the textile wall.
These "primary elements" have been recognized and reinterpreted in the work of Kéré and have been built on a real scale in the ICO Museum with the same techniques that he uses to build his buildings.
The visitor will find a textile wall made with fabrics brought from Burkina Faso; a concrete platform; a wooden platform (which is the reproduction of the Louisiana Canopy, a marqusina made by Kéré at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, in 2015); a reduced reproduction of the Pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery built in London in 2017; and a wall and an adobe platform built by the students of the "Architecture with Earth" Workshop, which took place in Boceguillas (Segovia), during the month of July, and was specifically organized on the occasion of this exhibition by the ICO Foundation.
These "primary elements" have been recognized and reinterpreted in the work of Kéré and have been built on a real scale in the ICO Museum with the same techniques that he uses to build his buildings.
The visitor will find a textile wall made with fabrics brought from Burkina Faso; a concrete platform; a wooden platform (which is the reproduction of the Louisiana Canopy, a marqusina made by Kéré at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, in 2015); a reduced reproduction of the Pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery built in London in 2017; and a wall and an adobe platform built by the students of the "Architecture with Earth" Workshop, which took place in Boceguillas (Segovia), during the month of July, and was specifically organized on the occasion of this exhibition by the ICO Foundation.
In addition, the workspace of the Kéré Architecture studio in Berlin will be reproduced, with various materials that visitors can manipulate.
Francis Keré is from Burkinabe and Berlin. He was born in 1965 in Gando, a town in one of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso. He managed to train in Germany thanks to a scholarship to study in Berlin, (as the first son of the leader of his village, his father allowed him to attend school despite the fact that many of the inhabitants of his village considered that Western conventional education was a loss) there, he trained and ended up opening his own architecture studio, Kéré Architecture in 2005. His work is deeply rooted in his native country, but he makes use of universal elements and principles that allow him to be inserted in contexts as different as Berlín, his city of adoption.
Author of an exemplary architecture in the use of limited resources and sustainable techniques, this Burkinabe has become the leader of a new generation of architects, reaping great recognition, with awards such as the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the BSI Swiss Architectural Award , the Marcus Prize, Global Holcim Gold Award, and the Schelling Architecture Award. Kéré was appointed a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2009 and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects in 2012. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Swiss Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio.
From the school built in his native village, which won the prestigious Aga Khan prize (2001) for the combination of ethical commitment and aesthetic excellence, to the pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2017, which marked his cosmopolitan consecration, "Kéré has traveled the path that separates the arid plain of Burkina Faso from the leafy vegetation of Kensington Gardens, maintaining its personal integrity and its community conscience," says Fernández-Galiano.
