Anna Heringer

“The children all signed... the doors. ...[T]hey ...helped building the school.”

“[T]he METI school after 6 months of construction... load-bearing earth walls that really ground the school and large bamboo structures that bring the lightness in. ...The classroom on the ground floor, attached are the caves ...for reading, for snuggling, for solo work, for meditation, for playing, and the classroom on the top.”

“[E]xcept a small team of consultants like my partner for realization, Eike Roswag and my... cousin, Emmanuel, it was... built... [by] craftsmen from the village.”

“Electricity in remote Bangladesh is rare, but we didn't need it. We had human energy, and people were happy to have the work. Tools were an issue too, but we had... water buffaloes. We had also tried it with cows, but interestingly, they were too intelligent. They were always stepping in the holes of the previous round. They wouldn't mix the mud, the {{w|straw}}, the sand, which are the ingredients in the walls.”

“In terms of suitable building materials for my school, I didn't have to look far. They were right under my feet: mud, dirt, earth, clay, however you call it, and bamboo that was growing all around.”

“When I was an architecture student about 13 years ago, I went to Bangladesh, to a remote village called Rudrapur with the aim to design and build a school as my thesis project. I had lived in that village before when I was 19, and a volunteer at Dipshikha, a Bangladeshi NGO for rural development... [W]hat I had learned from them was that the most sustainable strategy for... development was to cherish and to use your... own resources and potential and not get dependent on external factors... [T[his is what I tried to do with my architecture, as well.”

“[T]here are a lot of resources given by nature for free, and all that we need is our sensitivity to see them, and our creativity to use them.”