Jaap Wiedenhoff

With an education in aerospace technology I was and still am, after 30 years, kind of an outsider in building engineering design. Whereas the typical approach to engineering design, my approach over this period has always been from physics to systems and concepts. Then use existing (or new) components to make the systems work. Challenging the assumptions that our traditional design are based upon is crucial to bring building engineering design into the next century, a century governed by smart use of advanced design tools creating interactive personalized environments. Buildings that will do much much more for it’s users with much less material and energy. Through the years this has been my mission, designing buildings that exhilarate people not just architecturally (visual aesthetics) but as a full sensory experience. This way we have managed to create several projects that stand out through a combination of high societal output with low economical and ecological input. All these projects and more became possible through using common sense, challenging the assumptions but most of all by learning from best practices from over the world and through time. So for my full personal benefit I am more than curious to see new innovative ideas to help valorizing them in practice as well as helping the forward with my experience with unconventional design in a world that seems to have two principals: this is how we always do it and we have never done it that way.