Kéré Architecture designs the new Goethe-Institut headquarters in Dakar: a building sustainably rooted in its place

The Goethe-Institut in Dakar is the first building that the German cultural institution — active in more than ninety countries for over seventy-five years — has commissioned from design to completion in its entire history. For that inaugural gesture it chose Francis Kéré, the Burkinabé architect awarded the 2022 Pritzker Prize, whose practice has spent decades demonstrating that building with rigour and with conscience are compatible.

The building rises in a residential neighbourhood of Dakar, set within a garden of dense vegetation that preceded the project and that the design accepts as its primary condition. The site borders the Léopold Sédar Senghor Museum, and that proximity imposes a responsibility of scale and tone that Kéré Architecture translates into formal restraint: a compact two-storey volume whose silhouette mirrors the canopy line of the trees that have long inhabited the place. Architecture takes shape from its surroundings.

A structure of compressed earth blocks

The entire structure is built with locally sourced compressed earth blocks (CEB). The material appears in the load-bearing walls, in the interior partitions, and in a translucent second skin that wraps the building on the exterior, filtering light and lending the whole a presence that is at once solid and permeable. This second skin also performs an acoustic function: it shields neighbours from the noise generated by an institution of intense activity — concerts, exhibitions, classes, informal gatherings — and offers visitors a threshold of calm from the street traffic. Material and geometry work together; each constructive decision produces spatial, climatic, and relational consequences at the same time.

The ground floor concentrates the building’s public life: the auditorium, the café, and the library are organised with a logic of openness and accessibility, conceived to welcome a wide and diverse community. The upper floor houses the classrooms and administrative offices, separating the institute’s daily rhythm from its more permeable dimension toward the city. Above both floors, a cantilevered roof — which extends the logic of the tree canopies in the horizontal plane — provides shade at every level, reduces thermal gain, and protects the exterior spaces from the rain. The building breathes through its section: natural ventilation moves through the double skin, and the roof regulates temperature without depending on mechanical climate systems.

Architecture as collaborative act

The Goethe-Institut in Dakar opened in April 2026, four years after construction began and eight since the design process started. That extended time says something about the nature of the project: a work that required coordination between teams in Berlin and Dakar, local engineers and international collaborators, the West African tradition of earth construction, and the standards of a cultural institution with global reach. The director of the Goethe-Institut Dakar, Stefanie Peter, put it with precision on the inauguration day: architecture as an act of translation, as a practice that emerges from negotiation, mediation, and sustained cooperation over time.

Kéré, for his part, recalled: “My first building was a school. I have always understood that where people come to learn, they also come to meet one another, and where people meet is where culture is created.” The Goethe-Institut in Dakar exists at that intersection: a building rooted in the place where it stands, constructed with the earth of that place, and open to the city with the assurance of those who know that beauty, when honest, is also hospitable.

Project: Goethe-Institut Sénégal.
Location: Dakar, Senegal.
Area: 1.800 m².
Design: 2018–2021.
Completed: 2026.
Architect: Francis Kéré.  Kéré Architecture.
Project architects:: Jaime Herraiz Martínez, Andrea Maretto Equipo · Fabiola Büchele, Léon Bührer, Javier Mola Cardenes, Linda Franken, Juan Carlos Zapata.
Collaborators: Worofila, André Poretti, Delta Ingenieurs Conseils, Dial Consulting, Scat Internationale s.a., Elementerre, Matthias Middelkamp.
Photograph: Iwan Baan.
Source: Goethe-Institut.

Francis Kéré

Francis Kéré was born in Gando, a rural village in Burkina Faso without electricity or running water, and grew up with the conviction that beauty has transformative power. That conviction is a certainty forged within his own community: in the heat that crushes bodies beneath zinc roofs, in the absence of schools that forces children to learn in the open air, in the early understanding that built space can dignify or degrade a life.

He left for Germany on a scholarship to train as a master builder and went on to complete a doctorate in architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. Before he had even finished his studies, he designed and raised the funds needed to build the Gando Primary School together with the residents of his hometown. When the building was completed in 2001, it was the first the village had ever had. Three years later, in 2004, the project earned him the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, one of the most important prizes in the Arab and African world, and placed him at the centre of the international architectural conversation.

In 2005 he founded Kéré Architecture GmbH in Berlin and, simultaneously, the Kéré Foundation e.V., a non-profit organisation dedicated to continuing the work in Gando. Both were born of the same conviction: that formal rigour and social commitment are not opposing terms but conditions of one another.

Since then, Kéré has built across four continents. His work includes the Burkina Faso National Assembly, the Lycée Schorge in Koudougou, the Léo Surgical Clinic and Health Centre, the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in London, and Xylem, the pavilion for the Tippet Rise Art Centre in Montana. The scale varies; the underlying logic holds: each project takes the specificity of its place — its climate, its available materials, its collective ways of life — as a point of departure.

He has taught at TU München, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, and Yale. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Museo ICO in Madrid, the Architekturmuseum in Munich, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2022 he received the Pritzker Prize, the highest distinction in the profession, becoming the first African architect to be recognised with it.

The practice of Kéré Architecture, with teams in Berlin and Burkina Faso, maintains the dual orientation that has defined its identity from the outset: constructive excellence understood as a moral obligation to those who inhabit the buildings, and the conviction that it is possible — and necessary — to build with beauty in the places where it is needed most.

Project by Francis Kéré