So, let’s start right away. Could you please give me three words or adjectives to describe your company?
“Three words to describe PLP: innovative, adventurous, social… caring, maybe, is the better word.”
All right, all right, we’ll take caring. Thank you. This says a lot already about it. Now, we read that the creative idea of “The Edge”, the smartest office in the world, was to shape a “social condenser” where relationships and connections are the primary goals. Why this creative insight, and when did you realize that it was the right path to follow?
“The Edge in Amsterdam as a project, for us, has many layers of interest. The best buildings are addressing all of these layers in their own way, and are being innovative in all of these layers, and then eventually they come together. And in The Edge, the layers were initially very much sustainability.
It’s a building that’s designed around the path of the sun. It uses the groundwater at 130 meters deep as a thermal battery to use the heat of the summer to warm in the winter, and the coolness of the winter to cool in the summer. At the time, it was the most energy-efficient building in the Netherlands.
It was also a building that was designed using all the new digital technologies that were available, even inventing some of them. It’s a building that’s using computers at various different ways to streamline the process of communication, the process of running a building, and the energy in the building.
But the third thing, which was really at the root of the design of The Edge, is that the main tenant for the building, occupying 60% or so of the project, felt that in their other buildings in the Netherlands, their company was split up on different floors and different types of people and different experts would not meet. So they did two things:
They freed up the choice of workplace for their employees; they could work wherever in any kind of setting or workspace they wanted. We created a building that is almost like a theatre, where there are social spaces that are like a stage set, and the traditional office space is looking at it as if it were a theatre.”
Thank you so much also for talking about the social connections fostered by these new ways of thinking about spaces. Now, diving deeper into the sustainability aspect, in 2016 BREEAM prized it with the new construction certification of “Outstanding” and a score of 98.36% for sustainability. Now, can you tell us more about how you achieved these incredible results?
“Yes, the high BREEAM score was a result of a few things that came very happily together. BREEAM is a very long checklist of various issues and various chapters, and they are all to do with sustainability, but they are different areas: some of them to do with water, some to do with people’s well-being, some to do with energy, some to do with the materials and carbon content of the materials.
You also get innovation credits, and they are the hardest to get. Typically in a small country like the Netherlands, there are maybe five or six innovation credits each year. I think they are 1%, so they are very meaningful, and in the end, we got two of those.
What happened in The Edge is that the building was developed by a project developer. Deloitte signed up a tenancy agreement for 15 years, which is quite long, and an investor bought the building in the end. The developer could kind of have additional investment as long as it paid back in 10 years; that was the measure.”
Now Ron, on your website, you write something that we find really interesting and relevant: “Sustainability as a purely technological narrative has been exhausted by its overuse,” you say. Now, which is the different approach of PLP Architecture in searching for materials and establishing a new way of intending architecture?
“Sustainability has been a bit of a hot word in the real estate business for about 10 years, and in that time has been somewhat overused and somewhat more spoken about than acted on. And we feel it is important to not only discuss various parts of the idea of sustainability, but also to work very hard on actually doing them.
The discussion about sustainability has been sharpened very much by climate change. We also know that about 41% of the carbon issue, which creates overheating of the planet, is caused by the construction industry.
A very concentrated focus on carbon has become much more at the forefront of our thinking about sustainability on the one hand; on the other hand, we have also added people’s wellness and mental and physical happiness to the equation. It makes no sense producing very sustainable buildings if people don’t thrive in them.”
Which are some of the results that smart technologies and AI have helped you achieve in relation to sustainability goals?
“The achievements of digital technologies in buildings are still very much being worked on. Example: at The Edge, you have to protect the workspace from direct sunlight because it warms up the building. In the morning, it’s better to work on the west side of the building when the sun is on the east; in the afternoon, it’s better to work on the east side of the building when the sun is in the west.
If you have a building that discusses actively the position of people to work in the space, you can favor the west side in the morning and favor the east side in the afternoon. That already saves energy and improves the working conditions in that space in one whack. It costs no money and it only achieves really good goals.”
The Edge is a majestic project and something to be proud of. Achieving the remarkable sustainability standards you’ve achieved is undoubtedly challenging. So, in the context of envisioning architecture for a more sustainable future, what guidance would you offer to architects and interior designers globally? Specifically, how can they design more eco-friendly buildings by leveraging digital innovation and conducting thorough research on materials?
“We’re going to stop using concrete; we’re going to stop using freshly made steel. We’re going to be focusing on recycling steel. We are very much going to be focusing on using bio-based materials, materials that nature grows for making buildings.
The easiest one is wood. Wood is available if forestry is well organized. We’re doing a project in Rotterdam now, a 37-story tower, and it’s clad with a cladding material that’s made from the waste of sugarcane plantations, and the insulation material is made from PET bottles fished out of the Pacific Ocean.
We need 10 billion houses, I think, to build in the next 50 years. In the next 50 years, we’re going to build something like everything that we’ve ever built as mankind on this planet again. If we do that really badly, then the result is clear. If we do it really well, I think it increases our chances of survival on this planet.”
