Transcript: Lessons Learned from the Most Sustainable Building in the World

To have a building that helps attract talent is quite valuable. The application that as people send in something like 75 or 80% of the people writing in for a job actually mentioned as one of the reasons for applying that they liked work in the building. We also know that there seems to be a real drop in sick time. Some people have said 40% compared to modern office buildings in the Netherlands. And when you talk about construction costs, that means nothing anymore.

As you know, the cost of talent and staff almost 10 times as high as the cost of real estate for companies like that. It's worth it. It's kind of a new notion as well. And it's really bizarre that it is. People are now talking about people when they talk about buildings and the buildings actually are there for people.

But we haven't actually built many buildings yet that are designed as productive places for people or healthy places for people. If you really start focusing on what works for people, the success of the edge is because everything was integrated. We've made a connection between the users of the building and the systems of the building. We can get enormous productivity out of this relationship. And also you spend half your life working.

If that was a wonderful experience with new things happening and new ways of doing things, new ways of communicating or expression, that's something that I think we have not really started with yet. We're on the beginning of a very interesting path. There's lots to do. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, The Best Way to Build in, episode number 58. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects.

We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. Last week, we spoke with Kimon Onuma. He builds architecturally informed environments for the digital and physical world. He is the creator of BimpStorm. We spoke about what a BimpStorm is and how it pursues the culture of an always growing technological AECO industry, appreciating the wisdom we have in the minds of our global practitioners and how that can make sweeping impacts on how owners standards and specifications can be created.

So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out at Constructor.com. This week, we talk with Ron Backer, founding partner at PLP Architecture. Ron was involved with designing the world's most sustainable office building, known as The Edge, and it's located in Amsterdam. We discussed the different elements of the building lifecycle from design to occupancy and operations, including over 30,000 sensors collecting data on a moment by moment basis. We go on a journey of reviewing the lessons learned of the design and how the occupants are affected in their work lives.

We discuss how their work experiences are enhanced through the integration of technology and sustainability. This is an incredible discussion. And with that, let's get into the interview. Welcome, Ron. Welcome to the Constructor podcast.

Happy to have you on today. Very happy to be on today, Brittany. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm looking forward to it. Ron, you are a founding partner of PLP Architecture and you've been involved with designing The Edge, which is considered the world's most sustainable office building in Amsterdam.

We're going to talk a little bit more about that, but I do want to first just ask you, what drove you to become an architect? What keeps you excited and motivated about contributing to the AEC space? I think about that quite often. And I have a teenage son who is now going through the same kind of considerations that I was when I was his age. What am I going to do?

Am I going to go study? What am I interested in? And I don't remember there being a moment where I thought, you know, I've always wanted to be an architect and finally I get to go and study architecture. So it wasn't a decision like that, but it was also, I didn't consider anything else. I felt architecture was very interesting.

I have an uncle who's an architect who I used to talk to about architecture. And I ended up doing a bit of work with him very early in my studies, which I really enjoyed. What I liked about architecture is that it covers so many different disciplines. And it's a very kind of very broad field. And I think when you're young, the last thing you want to do is sort of tie yourself down into one very specific direction.

Anyway, that was me. I think some other people may have, you know, wanted to look at tiny little niche area in quantum physics that they wanted to deep dive into, but I wasn't like that. And I was interested in art, playing music. I loved debating things with people. I felt socially quite conscious.

It was a time where we debated issues in Holland of nuclear powers, abortion, euthanasia, drug use and war and peace. It was a time I still feel very positively about the way things were discussed. And I thought in architecture, you could be part of that discussion because it's really about a very large chunk of the world and the way we see it and the way we look at it. The idea of leaving a small town and going to, for me was a big city. It's actually a tiny little city in the Netherlands, beautiful medieval city.

It's like a tiny version of Amsterdam. You know, positively dinky has something like 150,000 or 200,000 people. It's nothing, but for me, it was a much bigger city and leaving home at the age of 18, that was all far more exciting than what I was actually going to study. I really, really enjoyed it. I enjoyed design.

I enjoyed the technologies that we learned about. The architecture school is part of the technical university. So the education is very, very broad. It's produced very many quite famous architects. My professors in Delft were Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hetzberger, and later on Rem Koolhaas.

And I studied with Vinnie Maas of MVRDV and with the Meccano people. And the architecture was very much alive when I was there studying in Delft. But I also really enjoyed the technology of materials, the technology of putting buildings together and physics and acoustics. And I actually just really enjoyed everything. And I bumbled along, never, never really specializing in anything specifically until I finished my studies.

I took a long time studying just because I was doing all these different things in between, you know, organizing summer schools and traveling. And I did lots of exchange programs with universities, mostly in England. I think not specializing, but being very interested in very, very many things is quite a good way to go around life. I'm really enjoying it. I don't do the same thing ever for more than an hour or something, it seems like.

And then there's something totally new. And I enjoy that. I enjoy that. Definitely speaks to how you've attached yourself to innovation, because there's always something new and exciting with design. And you're exposed to that and can get your hands dirty with that.

I think that must probably be the thing that keeps you excited. And that's one thing I'm excited to talk with you about. Especially because of some of the things that have been incorporated into the edge. The edge is considered a smart building for those who have not heard very much about it. We're going to get into the reasons as to why.

What would you consider a building? Growing up, I would watch lots of shows about like smart home. But what first comes to mind when you think about what makes a smart building? And you know, the word smart is helpful in a way, because it's not just about technology, but it's about perhaps broadly oriented way of looking at our built environment, the way we can improve it. Most of my studies and my career, the main focus built environment has been about design and about organizing spaces and dealing with light in terms of master planning, dealing with prevailing winds and the orientation towards the sun, underlying physical organization of movement of people in space or of goods in space or traffic.

This is kind of what the traditionally the architecture is. And the other part of the architecture is to design things that are pleasing, exciting, beautiful or well proportioned or with nice colors or with good acoustics. There are very many aspects to well designed piece of environment, buildings or cities or bridges or anything. It's just that when the world is moving along, we have added some issues to that list of ingredients to good architecture. And one that my colleagues and I have pursuing for about 20 years is sustainability.

I'm super excited. In the mid 90s, when I was a young architect in London, we worked with engineers who were combining structural engineering with mechanical engineering, and they had a real sort of drive to combine and integrate technologies to make more sustainable buildings. And people didn't really know what that meant yet. And we knew already, of course, if we use too much fossil energy, we're going to eventually suffocate the planet. But it wasn't quite on people's focus yet.

But that grew over the last 20 years. And now everybody's, of course, talking about sustainable buildings and the importance of reducing the effects on our planet of the things we build. And the infrastructure that we use, it was an additional ingredient to the big bucket of issues that we were dealing with as architects. And it became something that also part of the aesthetic of buildings, because we started making buildings that were responding to solar conditions and to the wind. We made buildings with wind chimneys on the top that would use the prevailing winds to either generate energy or to make buildings breathe ventilation.

We were making basements on the buildings that were used to cool the air in the summer, because the basements are cold and we'd make labyrinths of concrete and drag the air through to cool the air before it was put into the building, not using any energy. We found that in winter it was the same thing, because it's very cold outside. You drag the air through a basement, you can pre-warm the air. We were looking at passive ways to make buildings function better energetically. We did many projects for 20 years that had really quite good behaviour in terms of the environment and in terms of sustainability.

And that was before the accreditation systems came along. And then suddenly there was LEED and BREEAM in the UK and Estadama in the Middle East, and people started to attach value to sustainability issues relating to the built environment. And that became quite a rich game, because all of these systems have long lists of targets, all to good purpose, all really good things to want to try and do. To reduce energy or to use better materials or make healthier spaces for people. The key is that this was adding to the complexities of architecture.

And through designing of buildings we got used to thinking about issues of sustainability. But then also they became readable on buildings. So we found buildings with shading systems on the outside to cut out the sunlight, or buildings that were very open towards daylight. Because daylight is very good for places and for inside buildings. And they became an aesthetic part of the considerations that architects go through designing buildings.

I don't think a building has been designed in our studio for 10 years that hasn't got some really strong environmental issue as a background to the design. That cuts you a little bit because I want to talk about that. But if we can talk a little bit about what the drivers for sustainability were, for the Edge particularly. And then let's integrate that a little bit with the technology as well. Tell us a little bit about those focuses.

And then when we were doing the Edge initially, and the Edge was an initiative by Deloitte, and best known for being accountants and tax auditors and things. But they're actually global. They are consultancies that advise businesses and people, but mostly large businesses on the way they do business. Often that is their organization that has legal aspects and marketing and auditing and accountancy. Those are the biggest ones.

It's been told to me very many times by people from Deloitte. It's not something they shout over the roofs, but there is probably an end to tax auditing and accountancy because of machine learning and AI. The scope of that is kind of reducing. Deloitte for 10 years have been increasing their consultancy in other parts of the business. They're very, very interesting.

And they felt as a company, they don't own buildings. They have at the moment 18 offices in the Netherlands. They don't own any of them. They rent space, but they tend to initiate developments by inviting developers to come up with ideas for locations. And the question at the time was, do developers can find a society in Amsterdam to consolidate the people that work in three or four different buildings in the region and make a building for us, which we would like to make a project for our future.

And it's not headquarters in the Netherlands. They don't do headquarters. It's the Amsterdam regional head office kind of thing. We were approached by OVG, Dutch developer, very young, ambitious and fast growing with ambitious targets in terms of quality and sustainability. They approached us and we helped them to win this competition.

So we won that. The deal was a location and an idea for a project and financial bid. And Deloitte were then going to be the tenant for the building. They'd sign up for a long period for a certain percentage of the space within the building. They're never the single tenants in the building.

They like to share with other tenants, mainly initially because kept them flexible. They would need to grow. They have somewhere to grow into without building another building. And if they needed to shrink, they could do that too within the building that they were in. And but actually over the years, they found that there were synergies themselves and other tenants in the building.

They were starting to kind of feel they could use those synergies. It was good for them to be among other companies. In the process of the competition, I had access to Deloitte as a potential future client. We had really interesting discussions about their notion of what their building ought to be. They had just built a tower in Rotterdam, really beautiful building on the river, the tallest office building in the Netherlands, I think not massively tall, 150 meters or something.

Nice building, but it was really a building with an entrance and conference facilities and a company restaurant and some exhibition space on the first floor and the ground floor. Then it was office floors above and people used to work in an apartment, either their own office or their own desk in an open plan situation. What they missed was the feeling that they were all together. They were part of this organization. In the very first meeting, in terms of sustainability, when we first looked at the project, which is now almost 10 years ago, in Pockets, there was a realization in the real estate business that sustainability was going to be a real driver of value because companies that tend to invest in large office projects in the Netherlands were showing more and more potential of sustainability as one of the qualities of the projects they would like to buy.

There's definitely among people in the country much more feeling of responsibility towards the environment and more than in other countries. I don't think at the time we didn't feel that was the case in the UK, certainly not in the States, definitely not in the Middle East and the Far East. In Western Europe and in Scandinavia, there was starting to be the feeling that people would actually prefer to be in a sustainable building than in a building that was not as sustainable. So it became part of the choice.

The developer, OVG, were the first in the Netherlands to really pursue this idea, part of the qualities that we attached to buildings. The client of sustainability as a commercial issue, quite drastically, and they just made a decision to do only very sustainable buildings, and that became one of the drivers. In the end, actually, in the case of the Edge, it became also one of the perceived qualities of the building. People were really excited about sustainability credentials. It turned out to be what, 98.5 on the Brie M scale.

That's really high. Yeah, it's almost entirely there. It's actually, it was 98.36. The new building for Bloomberg in London, which is almost completed, is allegedly going to get 98.5%. We're going to be tipped, which is only good news.

That's right. So what happens when you need to do that is, you start with a really good energy diagram for the building, which has to do with the winds and the sun and the orientation. Very simple formula that says daylight is good and sunlight is bad for office space in Western Europe. This, you know, not in the tropics, but in Western Europe, you need to allow as much daylight into the building as possible and as little sunlight as possible. So the building was designed to do that.

It has a north-facing atrium. To the north, we don't have to shade. The east, south, and west of the building are shaded because of the way the facades are designed. The balance between the two makes easily 20, 30% saving on the energy used to cool buildings for three quarters of the year and to light buildings. So that was a big gain that you don't pay for because if you orient your building properly and the massing is well considered, then the building already does that passively.

So that was a big step. And then the client really wanted to reach Briem Excellent, which is a very high standard. We found that when we tottered up all the credits that we thought we had a chance to reach, we found that it was quite easy to get to Briem Excellent. So we raised the bar to Briem Outstanding. And then from that moment on, we started to really sort of consider almost everything that one could do to make buildings more sustainable.

So we looked at the energy production of the building. The building uses groundwater at 130 meters below the surface as an annual battery by storing heat in the aquifer in summer and pulling out cold water for cooling and the reverse in winter. So warmer water comes out in winter and cooler water goes in. So over the four seasons, the energy use of the building is zero for heating and cooling. There's no energy added process apart from a little bit of electricity to pump the water around.

It's not a new system, but if you use it properly, normally it takes care of part of the heating and cooling of a building. But if the building is really well conceived, in other words, if it uses very little energy anyway for heating and cooling, then you have a chance to cover this amount of energy by the aquifer system. So we managed to do that. That was a big gain. You can imagine the Briem list of credits is almost like an Excel file.

You know, you can all the issues on there, you tick them off, which ones can we do? They have a cost column to them. There's some things you can actually do, but very, very expensive. There are credits for innovation, which are very, very hard to get. If you invent a truly innovative of looking at, you know, anything from a material to a way of managing construction on site, if it's purely innovative, you can get credits for that.

And typically, you know, a country like the UK gets maybe 10 or 15 of these credits per year in the whole country. But in that building, we had many, many innovation credits. And I think that's an interesting way of looking at sustainability, too. Development ideas. What would you say is the most innovative of the innovative credits?

What would you say is most impactful? We're getting to the core of this, the overlap of sustainability and smart building. That's where the biggest innovation took place because the smart building part of the design came from a different angle. Initially, it came from an organizational perspective, a realization that Deloitte as a provider of consultation services felt they needed to be the first to really understand what it meant to do business in the digital age. Internally, they invested lots of energy in their consultancy, but they also wanted their building to be part of this.

We invented with them new ways of working that were relying entirely on digital systems to organize them. And in the end, it created a digital hub in the building, which connected loads of different aspects to the building. The building aspects, pure building aspects, the lifts, the way the lifts work and the air conditioning and the lighting system and the coffee machines and the photocopiers, they're all connected through this hub through the internet. This is real IoT stuff. But then there are the tenants parts to smart system, which have to do with allocation of seats, finding your colleagues, booking a meeting room, lockers, lunch, the gym, anything that has any technical or any chip in it, which is pretty much everything we have these days has a little bit of a brain in it.

They're all connected in the building and they're all functioning together. They all come together in an interface that people deal with, and it's either a web interface or it's a smartphone interface. All these technologies are connected in the end. I'm going to give one example of this innovation part of it. People in building work flexibly, which means nobody has fixed seat and you discuss your workspace needs with the building through your application.

Come in in the morning, the building has a copy of your diary so the building knows when you're going to be there. And when you have meeting rooms booked, for instance, it has the capability of learning a bit about your habits. If you always have lunch at 12.15, then the building will actually understand that and know that you're not going to be at a desk. But in a company like Deloitte, where people are often on the move and in meetings and they work at their clients, the use of space is very sparsely.

And they found that only 25% of people typically are ever at their desk. By making workspace flexible, they could use space much more productively and efficiently because the spaces are allocated to people who are actually there to work. And then the benefit was that you could then make a variety of spaces that were better for work. Sometimes a desk is not the best way piece of your work. Sometimes you need to be in a comfortable chair.

Sometimes you're in a meeting room or in a quiet place or in a busy place. And because people work flexibly, we can make that decision. People can discuss that decision with the building. But what it also means is that the building, everything in the building is connected. Each ceiling panel has sensors, measure movement and temperature and lighting levels and CO2 and humidity.

And so the building knows exactly what happens everywhere on all the floor plates. So it can make decisions about the most efficient energy use of the project. So it will favor areas of the building that need less energy to function. And on a very hot day, in the end of the morning, the south east of the building is less populated. It's actually the part that needs most cooling because of the solar heating of that space.

The northwest of the project, where the daylight is particularly good, you don't need to switch the lights on to be able to work. Building can, by placing people different parts of the day in different positions, can save energy just by doing that. This is the total overlap of sustainability and smart buildings in a nutshell. It doesn't stop here. There are hundreds of these things.

Sometimes I try and put it in a few sentences and it's very difficult. Because we've made a connection between the users of the building and the systems of the building. We can get enormous productivity out of this relationship and learning. There's a huge mass of data that's collected by the building 24-7. And that data is full of things we can learn about the use of office space and the behavior of people and the comfort qualities and the people's enjoyment.

You mentioned gathering spaces and just the mere fact that you have so much data from, what is it, the 32,000 sensors in the building and then plus the preferences in the application that people are using on their smartphones or on their computers. You have loads of data that you can analyze. And like you said, people are having higher levels of enjoyment. Now, how that has influenced how people work in this space. And it sounds like Deloitte is having higher recruiting levels for this building.

And the retention is lasting longer. Could you share with us a little bit about that? I must say that there is a big debate going on about who owns the data. On the one side, the data on the floors that are occupied by Deloitte is owned by Deloitte. I would say actually it's owned by the people who create the data, partly.

And not by the people who could collect it. I think that's part of the big legal discussion that's happening in the Netherlands about this kind of data. And for the moment, the data can't be used commercially. You're not allowed to use data as a product or as a means to creating a product because it actually belongs to everybody. The ownership of the data is tested all the time, which is a shame because once this discussion has been had and decisions have been taken, there is a real rich, big batch of data that can be analyzed drastically.

Deloitte is analyzing some of it and most of the data is anonymized, so there's no personal data that people might worry about. But what we do know is that there is appreciation of the quality of the building. Parking the building is quite famous. So even in the Netherlands, everybody knows this building. People say all the time that they really enjoyed being part of this innovative and revolutionary use of the technology that is available at the moment.

People enjoy that, partly because of what I was saying before. People would prefer working in a building that's more sustainable. It's like a personal responsibility. People are excited about the project because of the sustainability credentials, but also because of the smart aspects of the building. That is also a big story, you know, that we read about and want to be part of.

And I think the third one is that the building really feels like an active hub. It has a great big atrium as the center. It's daylit. Mostly there's almost no artificial lighting. It's north facing.

The daylight in there is really quite beautiful. It has totally amazing acoustic. People sometimes don't know what it is. They sit in the atrium, talk to each other, and they say, something about this space, and I can't put my finger on it. Then you start talking to them about acoustics and then they get it.

It's a space that doesn't sound clangy or hollow like most atriums really do. It's also a space that's not too quiet so you can sit and have a conversation and not feel that you're overheard by the people next table. Sort of comfort and excitement and lighting of the space is beautiful. And people really like to be there. And they say that partly because there are different tenants in the building.

People like to be with other tenants. There's energy that's really actively happening in the building. And the combination of the three has shown a big increase of applications to Deloitte. They do these open days. Once a year they have two days where they invite people, soon to be post-graduates from universities, to come and look at Deloitte.

And obviously this is where they try and get their claws on the best talent around. Companies like Deloitte and many other companies are thriving entirely on the people and the talent and that they get into the door. It's very important. That's called the big four, right? All the big accountancy firms.

They really compete with each other for people talent. They have to, yeah. Yeah, it's important. And to have something like the building helping in that competition, rather than just career prospects or the brand, to have a building that helps attract talent is quite valuable for companies like these. So they have many more people coming to those open days, twice as many as in the past.

They also have application letters people send in. Somebody told me the percentage, something like 75 or 80% of the people writing in for a job actually mention as one of the reasons for applying that they like to work in the building. And when you talk about construction costs, that means nothing anymore. Yeah, absolutely. As you know, the cost of talent and staff, almost 10 times as high as the cost of real estate for companies like that.

It's worth it. We also know that there seems to be a real drop in sick time. The amount of time people are off work because of illness is reduced by, some people have said 40% compared to modern office buildings in the Netherlands. It's a pleasant place to be. The comfort levels are very high.

The air quality is very high. The daylighting is really excellent. And we underestimate the importance of daylight, I think, for people. We have in office space, which we have been designing for about 100 years or something. Most office space in the world actually doesn't have good daylighting, apart from the few people who get to sit by the window, if the window is big enough already.

But actually, there are countless research pieces that have shown that people are really positively affected by good daylight and by plants. I haven't seen that in the UK yet and also not in the Netherlands. In Denmark now, it's a workspace regulation. Each workspace has to have daylight and it has to have a view of green, either out of the window or in an atrium or big plant in the building or something. Just the combination of good daylighting and green just makes people function better and more productive and happier.

That's something, isn't it? It is. It is very much so. I spoke with an architect and author, definitely go back to this episode, the author of The Healthy Workplace. She definitely talks a lot about daylight, fresh air, and different ways of working and having the opportunity to change what you're doing, whether it's standing or getting up and walking, just utilizing the environment to work instead of the environment kind of holding you hostage and making you work in a particular way.

And obviously, she talks about food and mindfulness and things like that. But I think it is certainly a testament. It's a case study. It's a business case study to incorporate lots of these design elements. When you're thinking about recruiting and retention, and I hope that the owner, operator, audience finds this information valuable because it's not so hard to do some of these small things and they can make a big impact.

It's very much a sign of our times as well. We hear this often, work-life balance, and it's an easy principle and we can always agree, yeah, that's a good thing. But actually, in practice, it doesn't exist yet in many parts of the world. There is no real consideration. People go to work and that's number one.

And then what their work-life balance has to be done in the rest of people's life. Whereas actually, in the Netherlands, more people work four days a week than five days a week. And it's because people actually take a small pay cut to take a day off every week and spend it with their kids or their garden or whatever. People make these considerations because the work-life balance is understood better. The upside for businesses, of course, that people are happier and healthier and brighter in the four days that they do come to work, they are so much more productive.

They have to be there every day. What would be the things, I mean, OVG came to you and worked with you and they had initiatives later already as to why they wanted to embark on building a sustainable building. And Deloitte had their initiatives as well. What would be the top things that you'd recommend for our owner operator to design if they're considering even just renovating or starting from scratch in order to make their buildings IQ increase, make them more smart? The success of the Edge is because everything was integrated.

It's a pilot project. So everything doesn't work. And we're learning from everything all the time. The next one will be loads better and the one after will be even better. So it's the beginning.

But the overall sense that I have is that you can't really do these things by half. You can't make a building where all the machines are connected and there's no daylight. That would make sense to me. I think you start with the daylight. Kind of a new notion as well.

And it's really bizarre that it is. People are now talking about people when they talk about buildings and the buildings actually are there for people. There's a lot of research about productivity, people's comfort and environment and the relationships between those. But we haven't actually built many buildings yet that are designed as productive places for people or healthy places for people. That's now happening.

That's a massive jump forward. And I think if you look carefully at existing buildings, you can make changes that will benefit the quality of the place. You can improve the quality of the air. You should definitely improve the quality of the lighting. It may not be possible to have more daylight just because the existing building sometimes doesn't have that opportunity to do.

But with additional investment in good lighting systems, you could change the colour of the light at the right moment or you could make sure the lighting levels are perfect. You mentioned just now the idea that if you can adjust or adapt your space, that seems to have a big impact on people's productivity. Psychologists who work this out, it's cognitive. Performance is better if you have the opportunity to change things around your workplace. Not even sometimes people do that, but if you have the chance to do it, it feels you're a bit more in control and it gives you better performance.

If you look at the people in your building and you start with them and then you see what needs to be changed to the fabric of the building to accommodate that, then you have a good start. If that means you need to put lots of technology in the building, then you do that. If it means you should really break out the windows and make them operable so people can have some fresh air and light, then you should do that. I think you have to make that decision each time about each of these things.

But if you really want to do the full whack as we did in the Edge, then you have to do everything. You create a new type of building that does things that other buildings have not done in the past, then it becomes an object that you can learn from. Some of the technologies are being applied in other buildings and some of them are not. As an architect, I do understand the effect of space and light and organization and material and acoustics on workspace. If you'd ask me, the biggest part of the success of the building in Amsterdam is the big atrium.

People love coming there. It feels like coming home. I've had five or six people tell me that often they come to work and they sit down in the atrium with their laptop and they log onto the Wi-Fi so they can work anywhere. They never make it to their office space. They just stay there and it's nice and you meet other people.

Somebody comes for a chat. Some people work really well in busy environments. We're learning a lot about workspace itself because we're trying different types and because of communication going on between the building and the users, we are learning that people have a preference for certain workspaces. In the past, we just give them a desk because we thought that was the best. Now, actually, people choose workspace.

We know what they like. My favorite example, there's a bar of three or four levels high around the atrium and the atrium sort of happens above it. There's a roof in this bar of office space, which I was always worried would not be considered proper workspace and they wouldn't attract the full amount of rent for it because it's open to the atrium. There's no ceiling that has a draft from the atrium facade. It's noisy.

Everybody can see you. It's basically everything that we think we need to provide as proper workspace is not there. But because this is an option for people to choose, we now know it's one of the most popular workplaces in the building. People choose that space. Not everybody.

Some people want to sit in a corner where it's peaceful and quiet. Nobody knows that they're there. But actually, a lot of people like to be in a social environment with people they don't know. If you can learn from this, then for the next one, we can apply these types of ideas to make work buildings much better. It doesn't stop with work buildings.

We know there's a huge connection between people's health in care homes or hospitals and their physical, architectural, environmental comfort. It's massive. Hospitals should be the most beautiful places on the planet because you don't have to spend the money on medication or health care if people already get better because they have daylight implants. It's much easier to find people these days than it has been in the past. Sometimes I don't know why I'm sort of taken on a ride here because there's so much interest in the building.

There is a lot in the building that we think is an improvement. We can watch and see what will happen to it and we should learn from it. I'm invited very often to come talk about it, to write pieces about these issues. It's really interesting to be part of thinking and it's going very, very quickly. People are jumping on the bandwagon.

But it makes me feel, and talking to you as well, it really makes me feel again that we're really just at the beginning. There's still so much to learn. We added sustainability to the palette and we added technology to the pieces that make a successful building. If you really start focusing on what works for people, which we are now doing, the well standard and there may be art. Talking to somebody recently who works for a very large international company in Europe, and she said they talk about the economics of trust and they feel that in the relationship between the company and people who work for the company, it's the trust which is the most valuable asset in their relationship.

It's quite amazing, empowering people, making them part of the organization, giving people responsibilities and a voice and a place to express themselves. Absolutely. I definitely second that just given the series that I've wrapped up, the utilization of blockchain and construction is a really interesting subject and it gives the opportunity for people to have trust, have transparency about how they interact and how they transact. Then obviously the integration of Internet of Things like obviously Dun and the Edge or AI, we're embarking on some interesting utilizations of technology.

Then when you combine that with the economics of trust, like you mentioned, it's really opening up to a new era. There's lots of dark stuff going around. It's not a happy place, our planet. I'm very positive and optimistic about our chances, but it's a funny time. Things are changing quickly.

People are abusing trust a lot at the moment. People are cheating and lying and taking benefit from other people when they can. It's not new to mankind, but it goes in waves and I think at the moment it's not so good. I think sometimes I wish I was in the 60s. I could be a hippie and sit in a field with flowers and be perfect, but I guess I can't.

Well, we're getting back to that when we have to see green. Right. Also, you spend half your life working. If that was a wonderful experience with new things happening and new ways of doing things or new ways of communicating or expression, that's something that I think we have not really started with yet. The architectural profession is quite well placed because we deal with so many aspects and in tandem and we try and work out which ones are more important than the others, which ones we can afford, which ones people are going to understand.

We go through these considerations all the time. The architectural world is quite well placed to orchestrate this sense of connection between people and the environment. We're on the beginning of a very interesting path. There's lots to do. Wow, that's just so powerful.

I gained two things. Obviously, they're the architectural elements, but it's really studying the people that are working within your space and giving them that flexibility and studying that. I think you almost have to turn into a student and rethink work a little bit. Rethink based upon the feedback that you're getting from the people that are in your space working and living and breathing in your space, but also take in some of these reputable studies about what works and why. The psychologists who've done the work, take a look, get a good understanding.

Don't be afraid to embark on that. This has truly been a pleasure, Ron. I really enjoyed speaking with you and I don't want to not give you the opportunity to share where people can find you and or learn more about you and PLP architecture. Always email me directly at rbackerplparchitecture.com or through our info at plparchitecture.com, which is on our website. If anyone has a really specific question, just feel free to email me.

And if somebody wants a wonderful next fantastic building designed, we're open for business. Doing our first live project in Philadelphia, we are a very international company. Half my partners, more than half my partners are Americans. We sort of have an American background, so I may be Dutch, but my partners are Americans and we travel well. I really just want to work together with people to make things better and that's really what gets me up in the morning.

Thanks so much, Ron. This has truly been a pleasure. You're welcome. It's been my pleasure too. Thanks for listening to this delightful interview with Ron Bakker.

If you learned something valuable in this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know if you enjoyed it by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn or you can just email me too at Brittany at constructor.com. That's B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E at construct double R.com. Next week, I'll be speaking with Kevin Flanagan. He's also a partner at PLP architecture.

Kevin will be speaking with us about the Oakwood Timber Tower feasibility study that demonstrates the viability of building a timber tower high rise constructed with cross laminated timber. He was also the lead designer of the edge, so we cover some of the drivers of design innovation regarding technology from his perspective. I know you'll enjoy this interview, so I look forward to sharing it with you guys next week. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, and Heart Radio.

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