Anna Heringer's Anandaloy was the most significant building of 2020

We continue our 21st-Century Architecture: 25 Years 25 Buildings series with the Anandaloy centre in Bangladesh by Studio Anna Heringer, a pioneering project for the revival of mud construction in contemporary architecture.

Housing both a disabilities centre and a textile studio, Anandaloy, meaning "place of great joy", became the second winner of the Obel Award the same year it opened.

The project was one of several socially engaged projects by German architect Heringer in the village of Rudrapur for the NGO Dipshikha, through which she sought to demonstrate her vision of architecture as a "tool to improve lives".

Central to this vision was not simply the uses of these buildings but also the use of local labour and materials in their construction – most importantly mud, which forms the organic, cave-like interiors of Anandaloy.

This ancient material is one that all of Heringer's work has sought to place alongside modern construction methods, demonstrating its environmental and design benefits not just in settings where it has traditionally been used, but worldwide.

"Mud is regarded as a poor and old-fashioned material and inferior to brick, for example," said the studio. "But to us, it doesn't matter how old the material is, it is a matter of our creative ability to use it in a contemporary way."

In an interview with RIBA Journal, Heringer called mud the "missing link that leads to social justice", adding that "no other modern construction material has its scope or possibility".

Appointed honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building Cultures, and Sustainable Development in 2010, Heringer has, along with fellow mud pioneer and teaching partner Martin Rauch, been a key figure in the global rise of rammed-earth construction.

Writing in The Architectural Review, Jean Dethier termed their works as the "decisive contributions of a new generation of builders," which have since seen rammed earth celebrated and utilised as a low-carbon material worldwide.

It is a trend that has left some skeptical. While Heringer does not use stabilising additives in her own work, the inclusion of cement in many buildings touted as rammed earth risks undermining the material's sustainability credentials.

Heringer's relationship with Bangladesh began when she spent a year volunteering for Dipshikha, an NGO which focuses on rural development that would later become the client for Anandaloy, aged 19.

"Making a tent, kitchen, toilet, furniture; the idea of creating a small village in a couple of weeks and leaving no trace at the end of it was something that shaped me," she told the RIBA Journal. "It was my first urbanism."

Heringer returned to Europe to study architecture at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz, and it was her graduate thesis that grew into her first building in the region – the 2006 METI School, which received both the Aga Khan Award and The Architectural Review's Emerging Architecture Award.

Despite originally requesting a brick school extension, Heringer successfully argued for the use of mud and bamboo, and involved the community in the school's construction, setting a precedent for all her works in the area that would follow.

Anandaloy was able to build upon the lessons of these previous projects not only in terms of its construction methods, but also the people who built it, with the skilled-up local community able to hand down their knowledge to a new generation.

"The truth is that once you become used to building like this, everything else becomes completely unnatural," Heringer told Nripal Adhikary in an interview in The Architectural Review.

"When you have leftovers, for example, with clay, you just put them back in the ground and do not worry about it," she said.

"Any material that cannot be picked up with your bare hands, that might require gloves, feels weird. As do the waste and toxic smells."

Originally, the two-storey Anandaloy building was to be solely a disability centre, but the decision was later made to integrate a studio space for Dipdii Textiles, a women's cooperative which Heringer founded alongside Dipshikha and Veronika Lang.

The thick walls of the building were created using an ancient technique known as cob, with local earth, straw, sand and water kneaded like dough and formed into walls atop fired-brick foundations.

This technique avoids the need to use formwork, reducing the required materials but also making the work far less specialised, with the process therefore easier for the local community to participate in.

Formally, it also meant that curves were easier to create, embraced in the rounded ends of the building and a first-floor access ramp that wraps the centre's sides – an unfamiliar site in the village that Heringer felt was crucial to include as a "symbol of inclusion".

Inside, the disability centre combines more conventional spaces, with cave-like tunnels and rooms serving as areas for relaxation and solitude, while the textile studio, office and storage occupies the first floor.

"Anandaloy does not follow a simple rectangular layout," Heringer told Dezeen in 2020. "Rather, the building is dancing, and dancing with it is the ramp that follows it around."

"What I want to transmit with this building is that there is a lot of beauty in not following the typical standard pattern," she explained.

Bamboo sourced from a nearby forest frames a verandah around the centre's ground floor, while above bamboo screens provide shelter to an upper-level walkway.

It was the "multi-layered" pursuit of social ideals throughout Anandaloy's process, structure and programme that convinced the Obel Award judges, and demonstrated a commitment to the entire life-cycle of a building that continues to set a powerful precedent.

"The Anandaloy building is not only a spatial solution to a number of both basic and specific human needs, the project as a whole is a multi-layered response to the challenge of mending by cleverly interweaving sustainable, social, and architectural design," the jury commented.

More recently, these lessons have been brought closer to home in an ongoing project for two rammed-earth buildings for the Campus St.Michael in Traunstein, Germany, but for Heringer, the ambition remains somewhat larger – a rammed-earth skyscraper in Manhattan.

Did we get it right? Was the Anandaloy Building by Anna Heringer the most significant building completed in 2020? Let us know in the comments. We will be running a poll once all 25 buildings are revealed to determine the most significant building of the 21st century so far.

This article is part of Dezeen's 21st-Century Architecture: 25 Years 25 Buildings series, which looks at the most significant architecture of the 21st century so far. For the series, we have selected the most influential building from each of the first 25 years of the century.

The illustration is by Jack Bedfordand the photography is by Kurt Hoerbs.

21st Century Architecture: 25 Years 25 Buildings

2000: Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron
2001: Gando Primary School by Diébédo Francis Kéré
2002: Bergisel Ski Jump by Zaha Hadid
2003: Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry
2004: Quinta Monroy by Elemental
2005: Moriyama House by Ryue Nishizawa
2006: Madrid-Barajas airport by RSHP and Estudio Lamela
2007: Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta
2008: Museum of Islamic Art by I M Pei
2009: Murray Grove by Waugh Thistleton Architects
2010: Burj Khalifa by SOM
2011: National September 11 Memorial by Handel Architects
2012: CCTV Headquarters by OMA
2013: Cardboard Cathedral by Shigeru Ban
2014: Bosco Verticale by Stefano Boeri
2015: UTEC Lima campus by Grafton Architects
2016: Transformation of 530 Dwellings by Lacaton & Vassal, Frédéric Druot and Christophe Hutin
2017: Apple Park by Foster + Partners
2018: Amager Bakke by BIG
2019: Goldsmith Street by Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley
2020: Anandaloy by Anna Heringer

This list will be updated as the series progresses.

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