Pritzker winner Kéré's European debut: Munich daycare with prison-like facade opens

Fully barred: Daycare center of the Technical University Source: picture alliance/dpa/Sven Hoppe

For the Technical University of Munich, Pritzker Prize winner Francis Kéré designed a daycare center that avoids looking pedagogically cute. The nevertheless sensual result is intended to challenge one thing above all in children.

A Building That Irritates

In this environment, between the unadorned perforated facades of Gabelsbergerstraße in Munich's Maxvorstadt — where a building gap had yawned since the end of World War II and cars were last parked — it would have been easy to simply stand out pleasantly. But this building wants more. It irritates.

With its louvered veil of elegantly rusted Corten steel, the house appears defensive and hermetic. It glows a bit showily from inside through the all-around grille, without immediately revealing everything about itself. And this is supposed to be a "children's oasis"? Some might rather think of a children's prison.

A Place for Play and Imagination

But here, at the Technical University of Munich, no one is being incarcerated. It is more likely that the 60 places in the new daycare center will be more coveted than the demographics of an increasingly low-birth-rate society would suggest.

The Burkinabe-German architect Francis Kéré designed the daycare center as a place of play that does not impose rigid rules on children and frees their imagination. Its architecture is intended to promote their creativity in appropriating the house. Such a space, if it succeeds in its high ambition, may at least be protected by grilles.

Daycare center "Children's Oasis" at TUM Munich Source: © Iwan Baan

Francis Kéré at the opening in July 2026 Source: picture alliance/dpa/Sven Hoppe

About the Architect

Francis Kéré, born in 1965 in Gando, in what was then Upper Volta, became known in Germany as the architect of the Opera Village Africa in Burkina Faso, which goes back to an idea by Christoph Schlingensief. In 2022 he received the Pritzker Prize, which is considered the Nobel Prize of architecture.

The TUM children's oasis is his debut for a permanent building in Europe. Previously, he built, for example, a temporary pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London.

"This project was supposed to be my first building in Germany," explains Kéré in his book "Building Stories", which presents his entire oeuvre — including schools, community centers, but also parliament buildings for Benin and Burkina Faso as well as an art museum in Las Vegas — and his design philosophy as a richly illustrated first-person narrative (Taschen Verlag, 444 pages, in English). "I did not want to compromise on the values that have always guided my work: sustainability, site-specificity, and humanity."

Design and Construction

Behind the initially forbidding steel shell, by the way, hides a wooden construction that, with the exception of the foundations and the emergency stairwell, does without concrete and uses regional woods.

Building with wood, however, "requires compliance with strict German standards regarding energy efficiency, thermal comfort, fire protection, and acoustics," says Kéré, which is why the building was created in close collaboration with Hermann Kaufmann, the long-time professor of timber construction at TUM.

But wood also has a sensual character, as usually distinguishes Kéré's designs.