“Before painting a building I wonder what would happen if we all did it.
The planet couldn't take it.
That's why I don't do it.
As an architect I want to build beautiful buildings, but I have a greater ambition: to build a better world”.
Anna Heringer (Rosenheim, Germany, 44 years old) brings the Kantian categorical imperative to architecture and the way of building.
And he concludes that the land, which is everywhere, which supports basic or sophisticated technology, which costs very little or nothing and which is often neglected —when it is excavated on a site to make a basement— is not used because it does not generate benefits .
Not because it is not an optimal material for construction.
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What you cannot miss this week: from the first exhibition dedicated to Anna Heringer in Spain to the vindication of the lesser-known faces of design
Heringer, who today is a professor at Harvard (GSD), at the ETH in Zurich and at the Polytechnic in Madrid and has works in the permanent collections of MoMA or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, began by building the Meti clay school in Bangladesh. .
It was the year 1999 and it was her final year project.
She took seven years to finish it.
And only a few months to build it.
The reason?
Earlier she had to gain the trust of a Rudrapur community.
That took a long time.
And she turned her into an activist as well as an architect.
And almost businesswoman.
Of course, the maintenance of the buildings is impeccable.
They feel it from everyone and everyone takes care of them.
To build the school, and subsequent buildings such as the Center for the Disabled (2017) that she has been building in that community, Heringer employed as many women as men.
And he trained them to build with what had been done in his country for centuries: clay and hands.
That work, and a wall built with mud by students from the Polytechnic, can be seen until May 8 at
Anna Heinger.
The essential beauty,
at the ICO Museum in Madrid.
This is a unique opportunity to ask ourselves what architecture can do for the planet and how much we are paying to build with the materials and means with which we choose to do so.
The METI School, in Rudrapur (Bangladesh). BKS Inan
The exhibition exhibits subsequent works by Heringer and his four-person studio, also in Rudrapur, such as the HOMEmade houses (2007), built with mud and bamboo, as a result of a workshop for students, or the aforementioned Anandaloy Building (2017). for people with disabilities that, raised with bamboo and mud, is naturally accessible for people with reduced mobility.
In Baoxi, China, Heringer built three bamboo lodges between 2013 and 2016.
Majestic, light and circular in shape, they look like lamps.
They have, at the same time, a great beauty and a resounding vindictive force.
They are buildings and signs: China consumed more concrete than the United States in the last century.
Almost everything during the last decade.
For this reason, what Heringer and his team did was resort to indigenous materials and the construction traditions of the country, increasingly neglected.
The result is, like all the buildings of this architect, sustainable.
And dazzling.
But it is nothing like the Training Campus that she has built —again forming the community— with mud in Tatale (Ghana).
Each Heringer building is built with the cheapest possible materials locally and by people made up of their team who live in the community.
However, he doesn't just build in exotic countries and cultures.
Shelter at the Longquan Bamboo Biennale, Baoxi (China).
Jenny Ji
In Worms (Germany) he instructed the community of faithful of Saint Peter's Cathedral to build a clay altar together in 2018.
The monolith can be seen these days, in a reduced version, at the Madrid exhibition.
Last year, the architect concluded, in Rosenheim -her hometown- of her, the RoSana Ayurveda Accommodation, built with mud, branches and wood.
She and she has told this newspaper that she will soon finish a training center for the German Catholic Church.
With images, plans and models of projects, such as the Poret nursery in Zimbabwe (2014) or the meditation space in Voralberg (Austria), built in 2020 with artisans from the area, the projects of this unique architect are shown in this exhibition among the magnificent Dipdii fabrics, made by hand and in the open air by the women of Rudrapur, whom Heringer, as a businesswoman, represents in the West for the sale of scarves, shawls and shirts that, exceptionally, are sold in a store open for first time for this exhibition at the ICO.
Capable of resisting centuries —as the Alhambra or the Great Wall of China demonstrate—, earth, as a unique material, can form structures as tall as the city of Paris.
And, combined with other materials, it can go even higher.
9 years ago, the Herzog & de Meuron studio concluded in Laufen (Switzerland), the city where Heringer lives, the largest European building erected with this material.
It is a warehouse to store fresh herbs designed for the Ricola candy factory.
Sustainable, very easy to maintain, economical and quick to build, working with earth requires labor.
That is why Heringer proposes to stop subsidizing other materials and try to recover jobs to reconnect with nature and stop damaging it.
That is the better world that she aspires to leave above any dazzling building.
'Anna Heringer.
The essential beauty
At the ICO Museum in Madrid, until May 8.
Free admission: Tuesday to Saturday: 11.00 - 20.00.
Sundays and holidays: 10.00 - 14.00.
