Anna Heringer

Architect

To me Architecture is a tool to improve lives. As an architect and honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building Cultures, and Sustainable Development I`m focusing on the use of natural building materials. I have been actively involved in development cooperation in Bangladesh since 1997. My diploma work, the METI School in Rudrapur got realized in 2005 and won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2007. Over the years, I have realized further projects in Asia, Africa, and Europe. I lecture worldwide and have been a visiting professor at various universities, including Stuttgart, Linz, Vienna, Zurich. Honors I received include the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the AR Emerging Architecture Awards in 2006 and 2008, the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s GSD and a RIBA International Fellowship. My work was widely published and exhibited in the MoMA New York, the V&A Museum in London and at the Venice Biennale among other places. In 2013 with Andres Lepik and Hubert Klumpner I initiated the Laufenmanifesto where practitioners and academics from around the world contributed to define guidelines for a humane design culture.

SUSTAINABILITY = BEAUTY The vision is to explore and use architecture as a medium to strengthen cultural and individual confidence, to support local economies and to foster the ecological balance. Joyful living is a creative and active process and I am deeply interested in the sustainable development of our society and our built environment. For me, sustainability is a synonym for beauty: a building that is harmonious in its design, structure, technique and use of materials, as well as with the location, the environment, the user, the socio-cultural context. This, for me, is what defines its sustainable and aesthetic value.

Mud Works! Building with more natural materials and with more human labor and craftsmanship involved would make our planet more healthy in terms of ecological systems, more just in terms of economic systems. And besides this I`m convinced that our buildings, our cities would become more humane and beautiful.

Bamboo Structures, Earth Architecture, Sustainable Architecture and Design

Mud works. I love mud architecture and hope after hearing me talk you do too.

Riding water-buffaloes