To throw some excitement into the slowness and relaxation of the summer months, we bring you some news about a few remarkable new projects, new members of staff, and some interesting shifts in organization at Except.
Project: Sustainable Schiebroek-Zuid
One of our most inspiring recent projects has been to develop a strategic vision for how to convert a 1950s neighborhood of social housing flats into a self-sustaining, beautiful, and equitable neighborhood.
With a team of around 25 people, including members from all parts of the world, we generated a variety of technological and programmatic options for achieving this plan within the next 20 - 30 years.
The Schiebroek-Zuid research has resulted in a truly integrated, realistic plan that addresses not only renewable local energy and water, but also basic food production, employment, social programs, education, community facilities, and more. The project report, comprising over 250 pages of information on phasing, energy and material flows, management structures, agricultural methods, building design, and much more, will hopefully serve as a guide towards a brighter future for Schiebroek-Zuid as well as an example for social housing everywhere.
Our primary client is Vestia, a social housing corporation (and proprietor of the neighborhood), with additional funding from InnovationNetwork, innovator in agriculture and sustainable development.
The project book will soon be released to the public.
Project: the Dandelion Project
In response to a request from the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Ordinance, and the Environment (VROM), Except worked with Storrm Consultants on developing new strategies for moving towards an "economy of abundance."
The resulting multimedia platform, Dandelion, is a tool for knowledge sharing, active international and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as information navigation and organization. It aims to resolve the information management bottlenecks that are, in many cases, the main roadblocks to sustainable development. We are now working with Storrm CS to further develop the Dandelion concept.
Project: Sustainable Conversion of Existing Buildings
One of our greatest challenges for achieving long term sustainability is to convert existing building stock to a sustainable state. Physical upgrades are often complicated by managerial, economic, and other intangible limitations that need to be resolved concurrently.
The Dutch Government Building Agency (Rijksgebouwendienst) commissioned Oneplanetarchitecture institute (OPAi) in cooperation with Except to conduct a study on this topic. We initially investigated 30 buildings in order to develop a functional tool for effectively communicating about and managing building conversion projects. The tool was subsequently applied to five example buildings.
We are conducting research for InnovationNetwork and SIGN on developing a new agricultural method for greenhouse food production.
We aim to design a greenhouse production system that has a radically reduced resource footprint, and even environmental benefits, while remaining financially attractive. The method focuses on combining permaculture design principles with a range of high-tech greenhouse developments. We're excited to be working with a great number of partners on this project, which is slated for completion later this year.
Other Projects...
Meanwhile, we are continuing our work with de Zwarte Hond Architects on describing and establishing the architecture company of the future (sounds good, doesn't it?), and we are co-operating with the Conscious Company on teaching a new set of Corporate Social Responsibility workshops, most recently for Smurfit Kappa Group. We're also working on a long term trajectory with a large chemical manufacturer in Germany regarding sustainable chemicals guidelines, and working on light& smart sustainable transport methods and infrastructures.
Except goes Creative Commons
We believe that working towards a sustainable society requires a high degree of cooperation and information transparency. To give our fundamental support to this idea, Except has switched from a closed, traditional Intellectual Property (IP) system (with copyrights and patents) to Creative Commons rights management.
This means that our work and projects can now be copied and used by anyone with only minor restrictions. We hope that this will lead to our work being used wherever it is most valuable. All of our new projects have already been released under Creative Commons, and older projects are being retroactively converted. We hope you'll join and enjoy the open-source information community with us.
The Except Principles
We've always worked according to strong principles. The Except Principles have now been formally written out and become part of our contracts. These are performance-based and qualitative principles that capture some of our core ideas about what it means to work sustainably. They are available for viewing on our website.
In other news...
... Michiel van der Vight has joined Except, and was a key member of the Sustainable Schiebroek-Zuid core team. Michiel's remarkable qualities and communication skills have proven to be a great asset in project management and development.
Rebecca Blum, Kerry Harwin, and Stephanie Carlisle have also joined us this summer from, respectively, Barcelona, India, and the USA, to work on a variety of autonomous projects. But those are still secret, so you'll have to come by in person if you'd like to find out more about those...
The Rotterdam Collective is still going strong. We're now nearly full, and many Ro-Co projects are underway. We are in the process of designing the first rooftop food garden in Rotterdam (to be located on our spacious roof). Every Thursday we continue to host our weekly dicussion and movie nights, (19:00, at Roodkapje) and there are many exciting projects to come. You're always welcome to visit us in the Collective in our haven of plants in the center of Rotterdam.
Hello everyone, and our best wishes for a great new year from Except.
It's been over six months since our last update, and we thought we'd share some of the exciting things happening here lately. There's so much news worth sharing, we broke it down into three parts for you...
New Offices & People:
One of the exciting new developments is our new office right in the center of Rotterdam - we are re-using a building that has been sitting empty for more than a decade. We're moving there in the next few weeks, and we're in the process of designing and building most of our own furniture from waste materials, our own LED lighting solutions, and more. The Except offices are co-sited with the Rotterdam Collective, our next big news item.
After several years of work we finally launched our collaborative office, the Rotterdam Collective, in cooperation with with Richard Boeser of Sparpweed. The Rotterdam Collective (Ro-Co) establishes a large inter-disciplinary workplace focused on environmental and social projects. The Ro-Co features shared workspaces and facilities and hosts consultants, graphic designers, event managers, programmers, architects and many more in a truly collaborative setting. The official Ro-Co opening is scheduled for March 1st at 18:30. Join the mailinglist at www.ro-co.nl to be updated about upcoming events such as the film series, opening party, and more.
We have some new people joining us at Except. Ariana Bain, MESc, a recent graduate from the Yale School of Forestry, has joined us in the role of Industrial and Urban Ecologist. Also, Matthew Eckelman, PhD. has joined us as Environmental Engineer and Life Cycle Assessment Professional. Both are representing Except in New Haven, CT, USA.
Projects:
We've been completing our planning work on an advanced greenhouse area in the eastern Netherlands, featuring symbiotic energy, water, and waste systems. The development is in a beautiful setting where people can come and experience the greenhouses, visit a central pavilion, or just explore the expansive natural setting via its integrated bicycle routes. The details are still confidential, but we hope to soon be presenting it on our website.
We recently designed a two-day integrated sustainability workshop for the Zwarte Hond Architects, a sizable architecture firm in the Netherlands. The workshop focused on fundamental sustainability issues and new ways of thinking about this complex topic. It offered new strategies for both management and design teams, and led to new, long-term strategic directions for the office. The workshop is now available both to businesses and government offices. Find more info about the workshop here.
We continue to work with OnePlanetArchitectureInstitute, RAU Architects and Octalix on finding integrated sustainability solutions for old government buildings, including a prison, several 60's office blocks, and a monument from the 17th century.
We have also been working on the development of a new system for evaluating the sustainability of food products for a large US-based food distributor. Among some of our numerous communication projects, we've helped make some materials for Evelop's Railwind project, which provides a strategy for building windmills on top of railroads. See the short promotional video here.
Another exciting project has been our work on a new form of area development and planning called Growth Planning. It's a second generation planning strategy that optimizes economic, cultural and environmental performance in a performative system. Read up about some of the details of Growth Planning here.
Publications, research & events: Eva Gladek spoke at the IUCN Leaders for Nature Forum as an expert on Life Cycle Assesement and its integration with business strategies, and Tom Bosschaert won 1st prize at the Urban Land Institute's on-site competition.
We are continuing to do research for the Green Electronics Council. Except also became a partner of the Dutch Green Building Council, and joined the VVM, the main organization of environmental professionals in the Netherlands.
Except is also in the final stage of training a BREAAM-NL Expert and Assesor, the new Dutch environmental evaluation system for buildings in the Netherlands. Once finalized, we'll be able to consult and assess BREAAM-NL projects in addition to consulting on the place of such assessment systems within the sustainable development trajectory.
Finally, we published a first peek of our in-house developed integrated methodology Symbiosis in Design (SiD). SiD has been developed to make more integrated sustainable projects possible. It's a set of accessible and powerful tools that organize any development process, be it policy, design, development, or management. The power of SiD lies in its simplicity and ability to be applied to virtually any subject or area, making it perfect for strategic long-term analysis and development. Read more about SiD here.
It's been a busy but thrilling couple of months, and we're planning more exciting things in the near future. Thanks for your continuing support and we hope you'll come check out our new office in Rotterdam soon.
Best wishes,
the Except Team.
Rotterdam, 15th of June 2009
It's summer, and as we welcome the days of warmth and the arrival of stinging insects, we can also reflect on the first two great quarters Except has had in Rotterdam this year. Despite the economic downturn, we've experienced many positive developments since our last newsletter went out at the beginning of the year, and we believe the next two quarters will be even better.
We're looking at establishing new offices in the HAKA building in Rotterdam, in conjunction with the city planning department, 2012 Architects, Vestia housing cooperation and others, using our concept of a new way of working together. We hope to co-locate and share resources with a range of individuals and small companies from designers to planners, scientists, artists, psychologists, and more. In this new type of professional work collective we aim to achieve both independence for the members of the initiative as well as increase our ability to address large problems by drawing on the various skills of the members of the collective.
We've completed the visionary CO2040 project together with one of our partners, POSAD. This project addresses a question posed to us by the Ministry of Housing, Spatial
Planning and the Environment: How can we make the Netherlands CO2 neutral by the year 2040? Of course that's not an easy task, and thus our recommendation is an integrated, strategic approach and methodology, exemplified by five projects in the built environment. A beautiful booklet summarizing this project is available and fully downloadable in PDF form on theproject page (in Dutch).
In the last month, two public lectures were given by Tom on Except's sustainable design vision. The first was at the Zwijger in Amsterdam during "Sustainable Design Day," organized by O2, BNO, and Tuttobene. The other lecture took place just yesterday at the Smart and Sustainable Built Environment conference (SASBE 09). The lectures also included a sneak preview of our new design methodology, Symbiosis in Design, which we will continue to develop this year.
Earlier this year we completed a sustainability vision for a region in the Netherlands as part of the Maasterras urban redevelopment project. The project provided the City Councils of the Drechtsteden, project developers, and planners a tool they can use to develop an integrated sustainable vision of the region as time goes on.
A preview of the booklet summarizing this project can also be downloadedon the project page, with the full digital document available via email request.
We also recently worked with RAU architects on a radical sustainable community development in Amsterdam, using a planned-growth model of development rather than relying on traditional investment structures. This plan drew on new insights and lessons learned from current economic downfall and focused on performance-based measures to stimulate autarktic development. This exciting project was completed in close cooperation with RAU, housing cooperations: Stadgenoot, de Kei, Bouwfonds, and Parteon, as well as construction firm Ballast-Nedam.
Meanwhile, we keep working on the design various private homes, communication and visualization projects, and continue to do research. We've also established a new partnership with the TU Delft and became a member of KEI, a knowledge centre for urban regeneration in the Netherlands.
As always, if you'd like to know more about any of our work, you can look through our projects on this site or give us a shout.
Press Release, Rotterdam, 27rd January 2009
Except forms strategic alliances with key partners in the industry
As a result of its unique structure as a sustainability think-tank, consultancy, and architecture & urban design office, Except has continued to form strategic alliances with international leaders in the fields of architecture, engineering, consultancy, and project development. Except's newest partnerships will allow a better interchange of knowledge across different sectors, furthering the company's core philosophy of broad collaboration and "working better together" to apply the most innovative strategies in the design of the built environment.
Key partners, chosen for excellence in their respective fields, include:
Art, Urbanism & Economic Consultancy: experienced in offering innovative insights on the functioning of society & business
Except's founder and CEO, Tom Bosschaert, explains that while many firms in the industry are facing difficult times, companies and governments are starting to realize the unique benefits a firm like Except can offer. Integrated, responsible, and socially aware planning and design represents a vast improvement over slow, traditional, linear development models, particularly in economic terms.
"It's a very exciting time for us," says Bosschaert. "We are performing sustainable, integrated projects on a wide variety of scales – from individual homes to whole city districts. Our new partners broaden our potential for beneficial industry collaboration in these ventures."
Except has recently expanded its operations beyond its established presence in the Netherlands and the USA to Istanbul, Turkey and Zurich, Switzerland Projects in 2009 include urban sustainability research and consultancy for the city of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, zero energy building designs for private homes, new typology designs for integrated-program urban buildings, investigations on BREEAM, LEED and EPC standards, the development of communication and visualization tools, and various visualization and presentation projects.
