Internationally Renown Architect will Speak at the Arsenal Center on April 30

The following information was provided by ArsenalARTS:

ArsenalARTS presents the next installment in Text & ConText, a free Monday night series that brings artists and authors together. On April 30 at 7 p.m., architectural designer Anna Heringer will speak about her craft and the creative process.

The evening will include a slide show and much audience give and take. The Arsenal Center for the Arts is located at 321 Arsenal Street in Watertown. Text & ConText is sponsored by Peggy S. Rice and the Rice Family Foundation.

Anna Heringer, an architectural designer from Salzburg, Austria, is currently a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work focuses on the use of local materials, skills and energy sources to create buildings that are distinct and undeniably from their place.

In 2005-2006 her diploma project, a school in Bangladesh built from mud and bamboo, was realized in the village of Rudrapur. The construction of a vocational school and a pilot project on rural housing in Rudrapur with students from Bangladesh and Austria followed in 2007-2008.

The time in Bangladesh was a great learning process where she experienced at a grassroots level how architecture is a tool to improve lives. Building the confidence of people – the craftsmen, the local community, the youth - and revealing the trust in their endogenous potentials, strengthening cultural identity, supporting local economies and fostering ecological balance through architecture is the main aim of her projects.

Heringer has received a number of awards such as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2007), AR Emerging Architecture Awards (2006 and 2008), the Archprix – Hunter Douglas Award (2006) and most recently the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2011.

Her work was shown at MoMA in New York, la Logein Brussels, Cité d`architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, the MAM in Sao Paulo, the Aedes Galery in Berlin and at the Venice Biennale in 2010.

From October 2008 to May 2011 Heringer led the studio BASEhabitat, architecture for development, at the University of Arts in Linz, Austria. She lectured worldwide and conducted international workshops in both Bangladesh and Austria. Since 2010 she serves as honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair Earthen Architecture. She is a keynote speaker at the prestigious Banff Session 2012.

At Harvard’s GSD, Heringer will study construction methods based on natural materials and human labor focusing on their impact on society, environment and building culture.

For more information call 617-923-0100, x309 or visit http://arsenalarts.org. More about Heringer is available at http://www.anna-heringer.com/