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Construction project of the Tridos bank: Despite the curved façade, only two types of glass panes
Photo: Ossip van Duivenbode
MIRROR: We wanted to talk to you about building a modular apartment building in Amsterdam. You said that you would rather talk about its demolition. Why?
Rough: It torments me to see how we keep building without realizing how we deal with finite resources. Architects are often awarded prizes for their designs. What happens during construction and in the decades afterwards is of less interest. We need the materials that are used in today's buildings in order to be able to build at all in the future. With this project, the apartment building, we gave a lot of thought to how this could be done. When the house is no longer needed, it will be almost completely recyclable. I want that to become standard.
MIRROR: If building material can actually be recycled well, why hasn't it worked so far?
Rough: Because the construction of new buildings has so far mostly been a one-way street. One designs something, another builds it, the next rents it out. And later, someone comes with the excavator. Everyone is only responsible for a part. No one for the whole. This currently works as a business model for everyone involved, but it ruins our planet and the climate. In truth, every building is part of a cycle, the building materials do not come from nowhere. The Earth is a limited edition.
MIRROR: You became famous because you persuaded the lamp manufacturer Philips to sell you light instead of lamps for your office: "Light as a Service". From then on, the company had to pay for the electricity itself and organize a certain amount of light per year in a certain brightness. What happened then?
Rough: Philips understands that they don't earn anything with disposable products or inefficient bells and whistles here. Instead of the conventional lamps, we hung completely new industrial luminaires. The result was 30 percent less energy consumption. We then brought the idea to Schiphol Airport. It worked in a similar way there, too: because the airport knew that a general renovation was due every 15 years and that it was open for a certain time every day, it was able to say very precisely what it needed in terms of lighting. 125,000 hours of light. And that's what he got, with lamps that were more durable and used much less energy.
MIRROR: You've almost become famous with the concept, but your current office still has normal lights hanging again. Why?
Rough: This has to do with the landlord and the fact that we are only subtenants here...
MIRROR: How are such concepts supposed to work in everyday life if even you fail at them?
Rough: The idea did not fail, we also extended it to tiles and furnishings at the time. Even today, companies come to me and say that they want to offer me their toilet bowl as a service. And it also works outside of the office, which is important to me. Poor people suffer particularly from the fact that they can often only afford cheap things that are less energy-efficient and break down more quickly. Here in Amsterdam, we have supplied 200 households from the social housing sector with washing machines that continue to belong to the manufacturer. And now guess what happened. People had lower energy bills and appliances broke less! I want us to get away from the one-way logic. That doesn't go well.
MIRROR: Back to the house: How do you have to build in order to be able to dismantle later?
Rough: For example, by putting the ego on the back burner and building in a standardized way instead of extravagantly. Anyone can plan in a complicated way. The real challenge is simplicity. That doesn't mean you become undemanding. On the contrary. We have built the headquarters of a bank in the Netherlands, for the façade of which there are exactly two standardised types of glass panes. That's enough. Only if components are repeated can they be reused later.
MIRROR: Where did you learn that?
Rough: In the automotive industry. Hardly anyone builds standardized technical systems as complex as Porsche, Mercedes or Toyota. When you buy a car, you can choose hundreds of variants, but everything is firmly standardized. It wouldn't be possible otherwise. To build more sustainably, we need to become more like Porsche. Do you know what an engineer told me about seat heaters?
MIRROR: Tell us.
Rough: That there is a heater in every seat of his vehicles anyway. It is only connected where someone pays for it. But for the manufacturers, it's much cheaper.
MIRROR: That doesn't necessarily sound like a model for sustainable construction.
Rough: That's right. But we have copied something from it: In the building of this bank, almost all the load-bearing wooden beams are exactly the same size. In some places, this may not even be necessary. But if the entire building can no longer be used in 40 years, there is much more likely to be a buyer for it. Look at this screw...
Rau points to a 20-centimeter-long wood screw lying on the table in front of him.
... we installed them 156,000 times in the bank building instead of gluing them. Always the same so it's easier to disassemble later.
MIRROR: The sustainable use of wood is one thing. What about other raw materials?
Rough: If you need coarse sand for a building, then you already have problems getting it today. There is already a shortage of certain materials. We will only be able to deal with this if we consciously reuse and achieve a circular economy in construction.
SPIEGEL: "Waste is material without identity," is one of your mantras. That sounds more like philosophy than architecture.
Rough: It takes self-critical reflection to understand what we are doing wrong. Every person has a passport that often decides their future and accompanies them throughout their lives. There is a land registry entry for each plot. But there is nothing for millions of tons of resources that we recycle, use and later demolish. We often don't have a plan of what's in old houses, let alone what we can reuse. That's why, together with various partners, I founded ›Madaster‹ some time ago, a cadastral system for buildings and their individual components. Look...
Rau has an employee show an online platform that at first glance resembles a virtual photo album. He clicks on an example image and goes further and further into the system, like opening a matryoshka. First comes the building in a 3D view, then the roof, and finally the structure underneath. In the end, there are long lists and tables. What do you see now? "LOD 300," says the employee, the project's three-hundredth level of detail. How many are there? "600," he says, "so you can see not only every screw, but also its alloy."
MIRROR: What are the benefits of this system for the climate?
Rough: With Madaster, we can show exactly what resources are in a building, how much emissions were released for construction, and how much is expected to be released during demolition. And if you want, you can use this data and reuse the components and raw materials. Recycled materials usually have a significantly lower CO₂ footprint. The system calculates the data for this on its own. The files are created in new buildings anyway.
MIRROR: This is of little use for existing buildings.
Rough: Yes, but it's not about the exact number of screws either. We're talking about millions of buildings. And if we take a closer look at certain types of houses from a certain time, we can already assess relatively well what was built into them. Even if that's only 80 percent true, that's still an improvement.
MIRROR: Even if that works, so far only 3506 buildings are stored in their system.
Rough: It always takes time for a new system to arrive. And it takes time to integrate the regulations in each country. Our goal is to reach 10,000 buildings by next year, and there are already seven offshoots in Europe and Japan in addition to our charitable foundation.
MIRROR: If the task you describe is so big, is a voluntary initiative even enough?
Rough: Every idea needs pioneers. In Germany, we have already registered 900 existing buildings, 325 of them in Heidelberg, where the city is in the process of adding all public buildings to Madaster. Many companies come forward on their own because they understand that recycling buildings can be worthwhile to think of buildings as a mine for building materials.
MIRROR: If only because the residual values of buildings can be used to beautify the balance sheets. Companies such as Vonovia or Kaldewei are certainly not involved in your initiative out of a guilty conscience.
Rough: So what? I don't think that's a bad thing. From a company's point of view, it would be negligent to ignore these values. If the building materials are at least recycled, that's better than a quick, reckless demolition.
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