REINHARD ARENS
"Certainly, all of my activity as a designer has been strongly influenced by the various surroundings I happened to encounter throughout my career. The time I spent in Africa (the "cradle of mankind"), in the Middle East (the "cradle of civilization") and in central Europe (the "cradle of enlightenment") has not failed to shape my perception of human life on this planet, and has helped me to develop an understanding of the deep relations between humans and the natural habitat they dwell in...
...Living for years in close neighborhood to the famous Leakey-family on the outskirts of the Nairobi National Park in Kenya -a location that was one of the most magical places imaginable before it was (and still continues to be) destroyed by uncontrolled urbanization- I came in touch with what I could call the most basic lifestyle imaginable: Being surrounded by traditional Masai herdsmen who protect their cattle against lions with spears and piled-up heaps of thorns, and who sleep in simple shelters that consist of nothing but branches and mud - and yet carry themselves with the joy and pride of a truly free people, helped me to understand where natural landscapes end and where a protective, well adopted, minimalist architecture begins...
...In Egypt, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity of living in the house of one of the disciples of Hassan Fathy, the master builder who re-discovered parts of the great and ancient architectural heritage of the Nubians, the old Pharaos, and the Copts and who strived to re-introduce it in islamic architecture in the Middle East. On the outskirts of Cairo, I fell in love with the exotic spirit of this architecture that consist of domes and vaults, columns, alcoves, stairs and windows all downsized to human scale and all hand-shaped out of mud and stone alone- reducing the carbon footprint of this kind of building activity to virtually nil. Later, I found the same spirit in Dir´iyah, the old Saudi town, next to which I lived for many years and which has now become a UNESCO world heritage site. Feeling the healthy coolness, that thick mud walls or a shady grove of date palms provide in the harshest desert climate, here too, I felt the strong sense of deep satisfaction and inner equilibrium that the presence of adopted human architecture and landscape design can inspire in sensible people...
...When I grew up as a child in Germany in the Seventies, I was always drawn to the countryside with its traditional, century-old farmhouses that were built only of wood, stone and mud and that looked so pretty. Very early I developed an unexplained aversion against those widely spread habits like cladding such houses with "fake masonry"- bitumen sheets, replacing the wooden multi-parted windows by huge, sterile plastic frames or laying artificial concrete tiles above intricate natural paving stone arrangements. My desire to live in a farm house instead of an anonymous town-house was so strong as a child, that I actually painted black wooden beams on the wallpaper in my childhood room, and began to find and bring home all sorts of old abandoned furniture items- very much to the disapproval of the other family members...
...Today, I continue to live and work mostly in these three mayor regions -Africa, Middle East and Central Europe- and explore the rest of the world from there. I am never tired of gaining a deeper understanding of the very nature of architecture and landscape design and continue my mission to promote sustainable materials and natural textures, human proportions and adapted traditional building techniques."