Sustainability: Building

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In 2007 this architect, who was born in Rosenheim in Bavaria, was awarded the world’s highest honour in architecture. It was not for some spectacular, high-tech construction, but for a village school made of mud and bamboo in Bangladesh. In the meantime she ranks among the world’s most important advocates of “sustainable architecture”.

Architects design rooms, combine them into complex units – apartments and buildings – and when these units are finished, they allow other people to use them. What happens then is that, more often than not, the buildings are subjected to their environment and the will of their occupants, who make themselves at home, or more the case, who have to comply with the amount of space they have. Sometimes however it is the other way round – the architecture has to comply with the wishes, requirements and possibilities of the people who will be residing there, either temporarily or permanently. It has to seek a communication with the people, with the environment and with the past.

A school made of mud and bamboo

An example of this type of architecture would be the METI school in Rudrapur, a village with 1,500 inhabitants in the north-east of Bangladesh. The building was designed as part of Anna Heringer’s degree thesis with which she graduated from the University for Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. It was erected in autumn 2005 in cooperation with Eike Roswag exclusively by local labourers over a period of five months and cost a mere 23,000 euros – hardly a princely sum for an award-winning building. The first impression you get … not overwhelming, but friendly and inviting. First, there are the brightly coloured doors and windows that have been fitted into the solid, mud façade at irregular intervals. Then there is above all the filigree tracery of the upper floor and the roof construction, consisting of many bamboo struts.

Mud and bamboo dominate the school’s interior, too. The three orthogonal classrooms on the ground floor were built on a layered mix of straw and mud, the flat surfaces of the walls have been plastered with mud and then coated with a bright lime paint. The classrooms are connected by a narrow, organically shaped cave-like tunnel that can be entered by two gaping hatches. This is where the pupils can retire to, if they want to work alone or in a team. The upper floor that houses a classroom and a large assembly hall has been made completely out of bamboo. There is a mud bench running round the room that is to prevent the bamboo framework of the walls, along with the corrugated iron roof, from being blown away in a storm. Wall hangings made of bamboo and lengths of locally made sari fabric add the finishing touches to the aesthetically representative overall impression.

“Showing Them How To Do It!”

It was primarily local materials that were used for the construction and local building methods that were of course not merely adopted, but also improved upon technically. The most significant improvement was without doubt the foundations that were made of fired bricks and double-layered PE sheeting. Without a “damp barrier” like this, the building would meet the same fate the mud huts of the locals usually meet with – they are erected directly on the ground and often, only a few years after being built, they are swept away by the monsoon rains.

Local resources were also used in the construction of the school. A joint, communal construction process came into being - local craftsmen and labourers who had been given training in improved mud and bamboo techniques participated in the erection of the building, as well as the villagers themselves, who had been generally integrated into the planning of the project. The outcome of all this was not just a piece of successful low-cost architecture, not just a culturally sensitive building that was equally as socially acceptable as it was ecologically compatible, but more a genuine testimony to sustainable development cooperation. “Helping Them To Help Themselves” was in fact one of the declared aims of the project. Now the motto is more, “Showing Them How To Do It!” – so that the population can put what they have learned to good use and, in the long term, improve the miserable living conditions in the rural areas of the country. The school building has set the example!

Sustainable commitment

Anna Heringer was awarded numerous prizes for her debut project. And in the same spirit of sustainable development she has gone on building – between September 2007 and April 2008 she was involved in new projects, likewise using mud and bamboo, likewise cooperating with local workers and likewise in Bangladesh. First there was the HOMEmade Houses project, a kind of pilot scheme for rural living; then there was the DESI Complex, a vocational school for electrical engineers, consisting of two classrooms, two offices, two teacher’s apartments and two bathrooms. Its electricity was supplied completely by two photovoltaic panels. Both projects are part of the PhD she is doing at the Technical University of Munich that focuses on – hardly surprisingly – the importance of endogenous potential for sustainable building in the rural regions of Bangladesh.

The young architect, who in 1997/98 spent a year doing voluntary social work in Bangladesh and who, in 2004, became vice-chairperson of the association known as “Shanti Partnerschaft – Bangaldesch e.V.”, has been awarded quite a few prizes. At the moment she is a visiting professor at her home university in Linz, Austria, where she runs a project called “BASEHabitat – building in developing countries” that she herself set up. In 2010 she was appointed honorary professor at the UNESCO “Earthern Architecture” Chair.