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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/mud-building-sustainable-cities-construction/>
"When Anna Heringer invited her architecture students to an excursion into the
Austrian Alps, she waited until they had reached a high plateau in the
mountains before she revealed a surprise: She hadn’t booked a hotel for the
group. Building a shelter for the cold October night was the purpose of the
trip.
“Immediately, the egos shriveled,” Heringer remembers. “Groups formed to
distribute the tasks, and the students forgot their classroom competition.” The
excursion happened during the European refugee crisis of 2015, and Heringer had
assumed at least half of her students at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Zurich would want to design emergency housing. To her surprise,
“they all wanted to design prestige projects, business centers and the like.”
She shakes her head. Thus the trip to the mountains. “I wanted to bring them
back to the essentials,” she says with a smile. “When you design for prestige,
you choose a place where the building can be viewed from the best angle. But
when you’re exposed to wind and weather, you choose a place that protects you.
From time to time, you have to come back to what matters.“
This anecdote perfectly illustrates Heringer’s building philosophy. She had
experience building forts in the forest because she had grown up as a Girl
Scout in the Bavarian countryside. To her, sustainable, ethical construction
means relying on what nature willingly offers as construction material. And it
means focusing on the essential benefits for a building’s inhabitants instead
of on the builder’s ego.
Heringer is simultaneously an internationally revered pioneer of sustainable
construction and an outsider; a trailblazer who combines traditional clay
buildings with innovative technology and yet she never tires of emphasizing
that she is following in the footsteps of the most ancient builders. After all,
clay cities have lasted for centuries in ancient Europe, Asia and Africa.
One-third of the world population lives in clay buildings but most architects
in the West disregard it as dirt."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
