Architects have long traveled to far-flung corners of the world in search of inspiration, information, and work. But few places remain as unfamiliar to most architects as Africa—a continent with an area equal to the United States plus Europe and half of Asia.

The late German film and theater director Christoph Schlingensief convinced Berlin-based architect and Burkina Faso native Di'b'do Francis K'r' to build the Opera House for Africa, a music-education complex, in the landlocked country known as a center of African film and music.

The village of Gando is more than a three-hour drive from the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, on occasionally unpaved roads that thread through a landscape of scorched orange dust and isolated trees buffeted by sub-Saharan winds.

In addition to designing the Girubuntu school, MASS Design Group founders Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks helped select its site, get approvals, and build the organizational infrastructure to support it.

Each year, countless migrant laborers travel from Mexico, Honduras, Haiti and other economically challenged countries to rural areas in the Southeastern U.S. to harvest fruits and vegetables, often with children in tow.

In 2001, while still a student at Dano, Burkina Faso the Berlin Technical University, Diébédo Francis Kéré completed his first project: a small primary school in Gando, his native village in Burkina Faso.

The massive, 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti one year ago, on January 12, killed an estimated 230,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless.