The School That Cools Itself

Francis Kéré grew up in Gando, a village with no school, and built one there in 2001 using the material everyone already had: clay. The bricks are local earth stabilised with a little cement, giving thermal mass that holds the night's coolness into the day, and the corrugated roof is raised clear above a perforated clay ceiling so the air trapped between them heats, rises and escapes, drawing cooler air up through the room below. There is no air conditioning and no electricity required to run it — the physics does the work. The school's roll grew from 120 pupils to 700, and the project pulled a cluster of buildings after it: teachers' housing in 2004, an extension in 2008, a library in 2019. Kéré became the first African architect to win the Pritzker Prize in 2022, and the foundation continues building school infrastructure in Gando.