The Waldhaus is the latest project by Anna Heringer and Martin Rauch. In this interview, we talk to them about architecture and health.
Baumeister Academy winner Catherina Wagenstaller writes for Baumeister alongside her internship at Henning Larsen Architekten in Munich. In her series “Architecture in Bavaria that makes a difference”, she highlights projects that bring added value to society – whether digital platform, architecture firm or building. This time, she visited the Waldhaus and spoke to Anna Heringer and Martin Rauch about healthy architecture.
An exciting project by Anna Heringer and Martin Rauch was completed in April 2021: the so-called Waldhaus. It is the new guest house of the RoSana Ayurveda spa center in Rosenheim. RoSana focuses on the individual and develops treatments according to their needs. To this end, the Ayurvedic spa center applies Western medicine, Eastern healing traditions and natural healing methods.
The Waldhaus continues the holistic and therefore sustainable approach to health by using healthy materials – clay and wood -, treating the property with care and offering the option of adding a yoga room. In future, it will offer space for four more spa guests and include a staff apartment.
Together with one of the founders and the managing director Heidi Gutschmidt, I was able to experience and feel the building with all my senses during the construction work, which I talked about in an interview with the two architects Anna Heringer and Martin Rauch.
It’s about the special features of this project, but also about the importance of local craftsmanship, an expanded understanding of health and femininity in architecture.
This post marks the end of my Baumeister Academy scholarship and thus the series “Architecture in Bavaria that makes a difference.” However, you can continue to follow my journey on my Instagram account gedanken_architekt_in.
Catherina Wagenstaller for Baumeister: The two of you designed the new guest house at the Ayurveda spa center in Rosenheim – the Waldhaus. What were the most important framework conditions for this project and how did you go about designing it?
Anna Heringer: It is an incredibly sensitive site between the two bodies of water and the riparian forest. We started with a “clay storming”. We got involved with the building plot on site and designed it in an intuitive process. We built the site, including the neighboring houses, out of clay and looked at how much mass and what shape the plot could take. We repeatedly withdrew and brought the clients in to continue working and discussing the wet clay model with them.
Martin and I have different priorities when designing. It’s not that one of us is the pragmatist and the other the chaos. We just work on different things at different times. The nice thing is that they flow into each other. We’re constantly changing perspectives when modeling and everyone gets to touch what the other has built. When you work with your hands, you can follow the impulses from your gut incredibly well. Designing through language and analysis is so top-heavy. That’s not always helpful. We let our feelings guide us and in the end it has to feel right.
Martin Rauch: The interface was then to present the Waldhaus model to the city. This joint approach to the city was very important in order to get people on board. There was already a willingness on the part of the city of Rosenheim.
Anna Heringer : That certainly depended on the fact that we prioritized local craftsmanship and worked with sustainable materials. Another important point was that the Waldhaus should blend harmoniously into its surroundings.
“The straight line does not occur in nature” – Anna Heringer
The building is a wood and clay construction. How are these materials used?
Martin Rauch: Originally, the rear body was to be a rammed earth structure and the other, which functions like a bridge, was to be a timber construction. The clients wanted wood and clay to play a supporting role when they commissioned the project. As little concrete as possible was to be used. In the end, it became a timber construction because it was easier to implement in this complexity, in this time frame and within the budget than a load-bearing rammed earth construction. Clay and wood were deliberately used differently here.
Anna Heringer: It was very important to avoid using as much steel and cement as possible and all foams.
Martin Rauch: The entire Waldhaus is designed and built with honest materials. It is a timber construction with panels – very complex for the carpenter, as the building has sloping parts. Inside the rooms, it is planked with clay for acoustic and climatic reasons. In the access area, the wood is left natural as a structural element. The insulating material is a soft wood fiber board. On the outside, the building has a partially solid timber façade and its top is a wattle and daub façade. This ensures that the building blends in with the alluvial forest and does not appear as a foreign body.
Anna Heringer: We realized that it was important to avoid straight lines. It was to be a building that “slips in”. There are no straight lines in nature and you can tell that the building has been sculpted into the terrain by hand.
Martin Rauch: The different earth building techniques are also important: casein and rammed earth floors, earth plaster and rammed earth walls.
Why do these two materials harmonize so well together and what do you need to bear in mind?
Martin Rauch: For me, wood or plant-based materials and clay are the building materials of the future. Clay is nothing more than eroded rock that sediments. The finer it gets, the finer the loam becomes – right down to clay. Our wood also grows on this eroded rock. It cannot grow on stone. When both are returned to nature, they have not polluted the environment. Wood and clay are an ideal match. They create a synergy. That’s why good houses can be built from these materials.
Anna Heringer: One is based on compression, the other on tension. And the wood needs mass – also in terms of the indoor climate. For me, one is rhythm and the other is sound. They are two materials that complement each other incredibly well. The same applies to the atmosphere.
Martin Rauch: It’s not actually the wood, but the plant. Everything that grows on the clay can be combined well with the clay. Moisture regulation is also important. Clay is drier than wood and therefore dries it out. It’s like a symbiosis.
“You feel safe and secure.” – Anna Heringer
RoSana is all about holistic health. This also includes healthy rooms and materials. Clay is used and processed in a variety of ways here. For me, it was an experience to walk into the Waldhaus. It smells and I had to touch everything. What creates such a good indoor climate and sense of space?
Martin Rauch: Clay is healing earth. Theoretically, I could get into a clay bath and I would feel good. A building is like a person’s third skin, and if it is comfortable, healthy, even healing, then there is nothing better.
Anna Heringer: We notice the desire to caress and touch the clay in all our projects. You don’t just react visually to materials, but also with other senses. Especially with clay. It speaks to something elemental in us, an ancient connection between humans and the earth. Mother Earth, there is a lot of relationship in it. You can feel that and feel safe. This is essential for getting healthy.
We wanted to bring this feeling into the building. That’s why all the surfaces in the Waldhaus are made of a clay material. There are the rougher components of rammed earth – the archaic, purist and strong. The fine clay surfaces have something velvety, almost sweet. This overall tone makes you feel at ease with all its elements and moods.
“Everything that is perfect is actually stressful.” – Anna Heringer
Why is that?
Martin Rauch: The rooms are relatively small, even sub-standard. You can only upgrade this if you use really good and honest materials. I want to feel comfortable in the room at the Ayurveda center. When I look at the rammed earth walls, it’s like looking at the landscape, a piece of nature. That makes a big difference to the character. The way these rooms and materials feel has a big impact.
Anna Heringer: I also feel that you need more distance from walls made of materials such as concrete or glass, which are not so physically appealing. But you can cope well with smaller rooms if the surfaces are good. That’s something we need to learn. Quality is often measured in terms of square meters. But you can achieve quality of life just as well by using high-quality and natural materials. That’s where we need to go in high-density construction. When I walk through a narrow clay alley in Bangladesh or Morocco, I don’t feel as oppressed as if I were walking through a concrete alley.
It’s about naturalness and imperfection. Everything that is perfect is actually stressful. These usual, monochrome surfaces in healthcare facilities make you feel rather alien as a human and natural being. I don’t think that’s the right approach to getting healthy. It’s much more about allowing naturalness, letting go and accepting transience and imperfection.
The rammed earth floor was tamped down on site. What was it like with the walls?
Martin Rauch: The walls are prefabricated as a panel construction. These are panels weighing several tons. This weight has a very good acoustic effect. The great advantage of clay is that it is water-soluble. You can wet the joints and retouch them so that only a monolithic wall is recognizable.
To go back to the small scale: The floor of the bathrooms in the Waldhaus is made of special tiles and the walls are made of Tadelakt, a Moroccan lime plaster. What is unusual about this?
Martin Rauch: You could also use clay plaster in bathrooms. But because this is a room that is used a lot and by different people, it is important to find a material that guarantees a certain level of usage behavior for hotel operations. At the same time, it has to meet health requirements. The karak tiles on the floor are made of baked white clay with beautiful ornamentation. The walls are made of Tadelakt. This is pure lime and absolutely natural, antiseptic, hygienic, easy to clean and seamless. With natural materials and appropriate craftsmanship, you can achieve a quality that is even sufficient for a hotel and healthcare facility. That was also the challenge. Each bathroom has natural daylight thanks to light chimneys, which also increases the sense of well-being.
“The clay also has an effect on the soul.” – Anna Heringer
We have already heard a lot about the extraordinary nature of clay. In addition to the statement that the building is a person’s third skin, why should clay earth be used more often in the healthcare sector?
Anna Heringer: I believe that transience is much easier to accept when you are in nature. The process of becoming and passing away is simply omnipresent there. That’s basically the same with clay. It consists of eroded rock and at the same time it is the humus, the material that gives rise to life. I believe that this is very reassuring for the psyche. We place a lot of value on perfection, but that doesn’t actually do our soul any good.
Martin Rauch: Here at RoSana, the rammed earth walls, the beautiful, extremely sensitive clay surfaces, the casein flooring and the rammed earth flooring are all very craftsmanship-intensive. We really had a lot of excellent craftsmen on the building site, such as the Gärtner family. One worker was busy for three days with a bathroom made of Tadelakt. That’s a massive input of human labor and that’s also the energy that goes into the room. I think sensitive people can sense that. The Waldhaus can be described as healthy for people and the environment with a clear conscience.
Anna Heringer: I would also say that it is healthy for society because it creates jobs. It’s good on all levels – the harmony that you perceive more deeply than on a formal level. One of Martin’s first projects was a rammed earth wall in a hospital that you could walk along. The chaplain at this facility observed that he had the best conversations along this wall. Health not only has something to do with the body, but also with the soul. Clay as an elementary material also works on these levels.
I noticed it in myself. When I left the Waldhaus, I felt really good. So what does it take for such a valuable material to re-establish itself in the construction industry and why is local craftsmanship so important?
Anna Heringer: A material that is healthy for people, for the environment and for society is more expensive than materials that cause damage to the ecosystem and widen the economic gap, for example. At the moment, everything is based on voluntariness. If clay is a third more expensive or twice as expensive, then that’s difficult. But it doesn’t make sense that a material that is available locally and can be processed either high-tech or low-tech on site costs so much. This is due to our economic system and the lack of cost transparency due to subsidies.
We need fairness and political decisions to promote materials that are crucial for our future. Clay is one of them. One tool to achieve this is clearly theCO2 tax, which can simply establish true costs. In contrast, I think human energy should also be included. When it comes to alternative energies, we only talk about wind, solar and so on, but human labor is an important source of energy that is growing worldwide. The skilled trades should simply be taxed less.
It can’t be that people no longer want to afford it. Instead, people buy cheap furniture from mass production. This is an imbalance that needs to be countered politically. It’s not as if the system is a force of nature. It’s man-made and that’s why it can of course be readjusted – and that’s what we have to do.
“This meaningfulness of work is important.” – Martin Rauch
Martin Rauch: We need to promote the image of local trades. Not just financially, but also in the education and training system. That has gone wrong in recent times. Craftsmanship is no longer seen as such. Construction is very industry-oriented. Materials are assembled by the industry. This means that craftsmanship is more of an assembly job than a construction job.
Craftsmanship and building with beautiful surfaces also have a purpose. It is not only healthy for the indoor climate, but also for the people who implement it. Emmanuel Heringer, for example, who made the wattle and daub, is rightly proud of his work and we enjoy the rammed earth floors and walls. This sense of purpose in the work is important.
The series “Architecture in Bavaria that makes a difference” looks for projects of socio-cultural and ecological value in which women were also involved. Ms. Heringer, what advice can you give us young women in the construction industry?
Anna Heringer: I think it’s important that we focus not just on women in architecture, but on femininity in architecture. The architecture industry is so exploitative and always conquering the new – further, bigger, faster, higher. The focus is insanely much on the “masculine qualities”. This leads us to this incredibly destructive attitude towards the world around us.
I would simply like to see more “feminine qualities”, which of course men can have just as much – preserving, building on old knowledge, nurturing. There needs to be much more focus on what the potential is on the ground and how the end result and the process to get there can be harmonious. For me, these are “feminine qualities” and we need to name them more – also in architectural education.
We need to give more space to intuition and not just to analytics, argumentation and strategy, but also to feeling and intuition. I hope that women don’t always try to be like men, but instead bring in this femininity with confidence. We must not allow ourselves to be confused and really need to return to our core competencies and potential. I believe that this is how sustainable architecture – in the sense of harmonious with society and natural resources – comes about naturally.
We – or rather editor-in-chief Fabian Peters – also spoke to Anna Heringer at BAUMEISTER Curated Talk One. Here you can find a recording of the entire conversation with her and Snøhetta founder Kjetil Trædal Thorsen about “Concept and Context”, two terms that are central to the work of both Snøhetta and Anna Heringer.
