ABSTRACT
The enterprise had a special meaning to the architect, as the beneficiary of the school was the community in which the architect had grown up before leaving for Germany to commence Diebedo Francis Kere architectural education. The importance of the participatory process was to allow the people of the region to identify with the building. France was indeed confronted with massive destructions of its social, economic and cultural infrastructure, and had to cope with a substantial shortage of schools. In 1948 the French Ministry of Education organized an architecture competition to challenge architects to design "buildings that could be obtained in large numbers, easy to mount and adaptable to any site". The dehumanizing effects of high modernism, and the authoritarian and deterministic attitude it implied, were increasingly criticized against the background of the Cold War. In the wake of May 1968, the idea of learning from the creative potential and capacities of people and communities gained prominence within architecture culture.
