It was late morning in Gando, a rural community in the West African country of Burkina Faso, and the fierce sun was beating down on the arid, ochre-colored landscape.

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 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.

Photo © David Heerde Diébédo Francis Kéré’s story is remarkable: He grew up in poverty-stricken Burkina Faso, won a scholarship to study carpentry in Germany, and went on to earn an architecture degree from the Berlin Technical University. While still a student, he built his first project: a school in Gando, his native village, which received a 2004 Aga Khan Award and starred in the recent MoMA exhibition Small Scale, Big Change. Today, Kéré lives in Berlin but remains focused on designing (and raising money for) sustainable buildings in Africa. His work isn’t going unnoticed. In addition to receiving the