There was a time when Exmouth Market was the epicentre of London’s architecture scene; certainly the architects still seem to like it here, even though they’ve mostly moved east. But someone else in Diébédo Francis Kéré’s office must have chosen the venue because he isn’t familiar with Moro.
I’ve arrived five minutes early for lunch. It turns out Kéré is stuck in traffic, and the restaurant is getting noisier by the minute. When he arrives he is apologetic. “Traffic!” he says. “Construction everywhere.” I apologise on behalf of London which, I realise, feels very English. “Next time,” he says, “I’m going to make sure the hotel is right next to the restaurant.”
Kéré is the best-known and most feted African architect of his generation. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s most prestigious award, in 2022. His work ranges from carefully wrought but low-budget schools of mud brick in his native Burkina Faso to huge national symbols such as the under-construction Benin National Assembly. And his current proposals straddle the planet, from Las Vegas to Rio de Janeiro and Zhoushan in China to Munich. Nothing in his background suggested that he would become a globetrotting starchitect.