Pioneers
Long before biobased building became a contemporary concern, a group of architects, designers and researchers in Eindhoven explored how buildings could become healthier for people and the environment. They connected architecture with natural materials, a healthy indoor climate, ecological responsibility and human scale. Professor Peter Schmid played a central role in this movement. His teaching and research provided important foundations for the Association for Integral Bio-Logical Architecture (VIBA), founded in 1976. Historical drawings, publications and realised projects reveal a surprisingly rich legacy, with many ideas that have become relevant again today. Since graduating in the Netherlands in 1990, Barbara Wojtkowska-Guicherit has remained connected to this tradition. Together with Dutch partners from Professor Schmid’s circle, including sustainable and healthy-building adviser Mieke Weterings, a long-standing VIBA member, she brings dispersed knowledge and materials together again in Eindhoven.
The Spiral
The Harmonicale Ellips working group emerged within VIBA in the early 1990s and continues to explore the relationship between harmony, proportion, nature, intuition and spatial experience. Professor Peter Schmid considered harmony an essential part of bio-logical architecture and saw the group’s work as a continuation of this search. The spiral form of the exhibition refers to this tradition. It is not a neutral backdrop, but an open route through drawings, publications, projects and material samples. Between the curved walls, spaces emerge for encounters, presentations and practical work. Form, knowledge and matter come together in a single spatial experience.
Nature Builds
Nature provides almost everything needed to build: earth, wood, straw, plant fibres, lime and even waste streams that can become raw materials again. The architects and researchers around Professor Peter Schmid experimented with materials that mainstream construction had lost sight of. They built with clay and straw, investigated agricultural residues and explored applications for fast-growing plants such as miscanthus, even in India. What seemed experimental then is now returning as biobased building. It took almost fifty years for these ideas to begin flourishing on a wider scale. Today they are no longer marginal, but the beginning of a new building culture. Through material samples, demonstrations and small workshops, the exhibition makes this knowledge tangible and passes it on to a new generation.
