For much of the twentieth century, Western architecture treated raw earth as a material "waiting to be replaced" — a poor technology, tolerated only where cement hadn't yet arrived. Francis Kéré and Anna Heringer belong to a generation of architects who overturned that hierarchy, not out of nostalgia but through precise technical and social calculation: both built their international reputations — Kéré won the Pritzker Prize in 2022, the first African architect to receive it — by showing that raw earth, if designed with rigour, can be the smartest material available in a given context, not the fallback of those who can't afford anything else.
Francis Kéré: building the community alongside the building
The project that made Kéré internationally known, the Gando primary school in his home village in Burkina Faso, uses locally produced compressed clay bricks, structurally stabilised and reinforced, covered by a corrugated metal roof raised on a secondary structure that creates a ventilated air gap — a decisive technical detail in a hot climate, because it keeps the overheated roof away from the clay ceiling below, which thereby retains a cool thermal inertia by exploiting the material's mass. For Kéré, choosing local earth was never a purely aesthetic or symbolic decision: his European technical training (Kéré trained as an engineer and architect in Germany) let him calculate and reinforce a local material with modern engineering criteria, while also structuring the building site as a professional training process for the village's residents, who learn construction skills usable well beyond the single project. It's a model in which the building and the community that builds it are formed by the same process — here, raw earth isn't just a material, it's the instrument of an explicit social project.
Anna Heringer: mud trodden by animals
The METI school in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, designed by Anna Heringer with engineer Eike Roswag, uses a combination of raw earth and bamboo — the same two materials the region's local tradition had always used separately, brought together here in a hybrid structural system: the ground floor is built with massive cob walls (earth mixed with straw, with no formwork or bricks), while the first floor is a lightweight bamboo structure. The cob mix for the walls was traditionally prepared by walking oxen and cows in a circle over the mixture of earth and water — a manual-animal working method that replaces mechanical energy with extremely low-impact labour — and one that, in Heringer's project, was deliberately kept, not replaced with faster industrial techniques borrowed from the West.
The choice had a second effect, perhaps more important than the strictly architectural one: the building site employed and trained local village labour in improved earth-and-bamboo construction techniques, with the explicit aim of transferring skills applicable to improving the area's informal housing, not just to building this one school. As with Kéré, architecture becomes the pretext for a transfer of technical skill that outlives the project itself.
What they share: technical rigour, not an aesthetic of poverty
What makes both architects relevant to a technical, not merely aesthetic, reading of contemporary raw earth is their shared refusal to treat the local material as a constraint to be passively accepted. Both Kéré and Heringer apply formal engineering skills — structural calculation, climate detailing, reinforcement systems — to a material that vernacular tradition had already optimised empirically over centuries, but without the ability to verify it with the tools of modern engineering. The result isn't a return to the past but a hybridisation: local techniques validated by contemporary calculation, in a process that restores technical dignity to a material industrialised architecture had dismissed as primitive.