Francis Kéré appears on the screen in a loose white Oxford shirt and an enormous, slightly amazed smile. “Can you imagine?” the newest Pritzker Architecture Prize winner says. “I was born in a little village in Burkina Faso where there was no school then. And my father wanted me to learn how to read and write very simply because then I could then translate or read him his letters.”

The first African winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize had already received numerous awards in his field, but Kéré was as surprised as anyone else to be selected for the field’s most famous prize. “Francis Kéré is pioneering architecture — sustainable to the earth and its inhabitants — in lands of extreme scarcity,” said committee chair, Tom Pritzker, in a statement. “He is equally architect and servant, improving upon the lives and experiences of countless citizens in a region of the world that is at times forgotten. Through buildings that demonstrate beauty, modesty, boldness and invention, Kéré gracefully deserves this Prize.”

Kéré says his architectural practice was inspired by his own experience attending school with around 100 other children in a region where temperatures are regularly higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “You will sit and it’s very hot inside,” he said. “And there was no light, while outside, the sunlight was strong and in my head the idea one day grew that as an adult, I should make it better. I was thinking about space, about room, about how I can feel better.”

In his designs for Gando Primary School and Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School in Burkina Faso, Kéré drew on traditional building materials and emphasized shade and shadows with well-ventilated (通风良好的) spaces that reduce the need for air conditioning.

When he was twenty, in 1985, Kéré earned a vocational scholarship to study carpentry in Berlin. But while absorbed in the practicality of roofing and furniture making, he also attended night school and was admitted to Technische Universität Berlin, from which he graduated in 2004 with an advanced degree in architecture. He was still a student when he designed and built Gando Primary School. It turned out to be a springboard for his career and still guides his ethos (理念) today.

Suddenly another thought went through Kate’s mind like an electric shock. An express train was due to go past about thirty minutes later. If it were not stopped, that long train, full of passengers, would fall into the stream. “Someone must go to the station and warn the station-master,” Kate thought. But who was to go? She would have to go herself. There was none else.

In wind and rain she started on her difficult way. Soon she was at the bridge that crossed the Des Moines River, a bridge also built of wood, just like the bridge across Honey Creek. The storm had not washed this away, but there was no footpath across it. She would have to cross it by stepping from sleeper (枕木) to sleeper. With great care she began the dangerous crossing, sometimes on her hands and knees, hardly daring to look down between the sleepers into the wild flood waters below. If she should slip, she would fall between the sleepers, into the rapidly flowing stream.

At last—she never knew how long it had taken her—she felt solid ground under her feet. But there was no time to rest. She still had to run more than half a mile and had only a few minutes left. Unless she reached the station before the express did, many lives would be lost.

She did reach the station just as the train came into sight. Fortunately the station-master was Standing outside. “The bridge is down! Stop the train! Oh, please stop it!” Kate shouted breathlessly. The station-master went pale. He rushed into the station building and came back with a signal light. He waved the red light as the train came into the station. It was not a second too early.

In our family, the presents we gave one another were almost always homemade. I thought that was the definition of a gift: something you made for someone else. We made all our Christmas gifts: piggy banks from old bottles, and puppets from retired socks. It didn’t seem like a hardship to me; it was something special.

My father loves wild strawberries, so for Father’s Day my mother would almost always make him strawberry cakes. While we kids were responsible for the berries, we each got an old jar and spent the Saturday before the celebration in the fields, filling it as more ended up in our mouths. Finally, we returned home and poured them out on the kitchen table to sort out the bugs. I’m sure we missed some, but Dad never mentioned the extra protein.

In fact, he thought that was the best possible present, or so he had us convinced. It was a gift that could never be bought. As children raised by strawberries, we were probably unaware that the gift of berries was from the fields themselves, not from us. Our gift was time, attention, care and “red” fingers.

Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, a duty of sorts to give, to receive, and to exchange. The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries. When the berry season was done, the plants would send out its red runners to make new plants. So I would weed out little fields of ground where the runners touched down. Sure enough, tiny little roots would emerge from the runner and by the end of the season there were even more plants, ready to bloom under the next strawberry season. No person taught us this — the strawberries showed us. Because they had given us a gift, an ongoing relationship opened between us.