Anna Heringer has won the second annual Obel Award for Anandaloy, a community center in rural Bangladesh. The Obel Award is an international prize that honors recent, outstanding architectural contributions to human development, with the winner receiving €100,000 and an artwork by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. (The first Obel Award went to Japanese architect Junya Ishigami last year for his design of Water Garden.)
Anandaloy, which means “Place of Deep Joy” in the local Bengali dialect, is a curved, two-story bamboo and rammed earth structure. It was created of local materials and craftsmanship for a unique purpose: the ground floor is a therapy center for people with disabilities—some of whom were also involved in the construction process—and a fair-trade textile manufacturing workshop for local women is housed above. In 2007, Heringer won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture for a school she designed in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, also made of bamboo and mud.
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