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. Together with Eike Roswag and a team of Bangladeshi and German craftsmen she realized the Meti School in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, that she has designed in 2004 as diploma project at the University of Arts in Linz. The school won several international Awards including the Aga Khan Award of Architecture. The Jury of the Aga Khan Award outlines in the report on the School in Rudrapur, that “(...) the approach– which allows new design solutions to emerge from an in-depth knowledge of the local context and ways of building - clearly provides a fresh and hopeful model for sustainable building globally.”

Over the years Anna has followed this approach in the realization of further projects in Asia, Africa and Europe as well as in various workshops with her practice Anna Heringer Architecture and in her teaching. She is lecturing worldwide and was visiting professor in universities at Stuttgart, Linz, Vienna and Alghero. She has contributed essays about her reflections on sustainability to various journals like DOMUS (Germany), DETAIL and Candide. Her work was widely published in major architecture magazines worldwide and was exhibited in the MoMA in New York, the V&A Museum in London, the MAM in Sao Paulo and at the Venice Biennale among other places. She received a number of honours such as the Hunter Douglas Archiprix (world best graduation projects in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture), the AR Emerging Architecture Awards (2006 and 2008), the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2011) and was awarded with the 2012 RIBA International Fellowship. Since 2010 she has been the honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair “earthen architecture, construction cultures and sustainable development”.

This event is part of the Fall 2014 Architecture Lecture Series at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. For other lectures in the series, see: http://ced.berkeley.edu/events-media/lecture-series/arch-lectures-fall-2014/