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 focused 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, was realised in 2005 and won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2007.

Over the years, Heringer has built projects in Asia, Africa and Europe. Together with collaborator, Martin Rauch, she developed ‘clay storming’, a method that she teaches at various universities, including ETH Zurich, UP Madrid, Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

She has received numerous honours: 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 has been widely published and exhibited in the MoMA New York; the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in London; and at the Venice Biennale, amongst other places. In 2013, she co-initiated the Laufen Manifesto where practitioners and academics from around the world contributed to define guidelines for a humane design culture.

In a conversation with FuturArc’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr Nirmal Kishnani, she speaks about her work and activism.