Architecture as a Tool to Improve Lives
How can architecture elevate our communities? Join Notre Dame’s School of Architecture and architect Anna Heringer, honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building, Cultures, and Sustainable Development, for a discussion about leveraging sustainable, locally sourced materials and traditional techniques. Heringer’s globally recognized projects, like the METI Handmade School, demonstrate the social and ecological impact of community-led, place-based design.
Experience the Event
Wednesday, December 4, 2024 12:00 pm
How can architecture elevate our communities? Join Notre Dame’s School of Architecture and architect Anna Heringer, honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building, Cultures, and Sustainable Development, for a discussion about leveraging sustainable, locally sourced materials and traditional techniques. Heringer’s globally recognized projects, like the METI Handmade School, demonstrate the social and ecological impact of community-led, place-based design.
Speaker:
As an architect and honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building Cultures, and Sustainable Development Anna Heringer focuses on the use of natural building materials.
Meet the Speaker: Anna Heringer
Anna Heringer, born October 1977, grew up in Laufen, a small town at the Austrian-Bavarian border close to Salzburg. At the age of 19 she lived in Bangladesh for almost a year, where she had the chance to learn from the NGO Dipshikha about sustainable development work. The main lesson was the experience, that the most successful development strategy is to trust in existing, readily available resources and to make the best out of it instead of getting depended on external systems. Eight years later, in 2005, she tried to transfer this philosophy into the field of architecture.
For Anna Heringer 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 she is focusing on the use of natural building materials. She has been actively involved in development cooperation in Bangladesh since 1997. Her diploma work, the METI School in Rudrapur got realized in 2005 in collaboration with Eike Roswag and won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2007. Over the years, Anna has realized further projects in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Together with Martin Rauch she has developed the method of Clay Storming that she teaches at various universities, including ETH Zurich, UP Madrid, TU Munich and GSD/Harvard.
She received numerous honors: the Obel Award 2020, 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. Her 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 she initiated the Laufenmanifesto where practitioners and academics from around the world contributed to define guidelines for a humane design culture. In 2017 she was invited to give a TED talk.