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Team SUM
Danny: From the Netherlands. Master of Architecture since September 2019. Discipline: Communication & Branding.
Adriano: From Chili. Master of Architecture & Engineering since August 2019. Discipline: Architecture. Team expert on solar integration & circularity.
“We are not fixing what is broken; we need to relearn how to live” In the last edition about Abstraction I interviewed Thomas Rau about circularity in the architectural world. He stated that students can ‘forget everything they learnt’ when they would show up at his architectural firm. I wanted to get another perspective on this subject and decided to interview two members of the SUM team. They are going to participate in the Solar Decathlon 2022, during which they will create a circular design. How will they do this and what is their opinion on circularity?
You started with six people during the summer, and now you are growing by the day. Consisting of 42 committee members today, what does this start-up phase look like? Danny: “In September we started with the concept. We wanted to make clear our vision on this competition. At the moment, we are focusing on brainstorming and creating the first drawings. We are doing a lot of research and case studies as well. We have a lot of meetings in which we discuss this research of all the disciplines. We are not only learning what we want to design, but also how to work together as a team. Our team consists of 42 people with 15 different nationalities and backgrounds. We all have our own experiences. By combining all those experiences, we want to come up with the best plan possible.” Working together as a team must be hard with so many people. You consist of disciplines that differ from Communication & Branding to Engineering and Partners & Budget. How do you keep those disciplines in balance? Danny: “I think integrating these disciplines will be one of the greatest challenges. It is even more difficult since we are fully working online due to the corona crisis. Communication is key, in my opinion. This is quite a challenge because we want to create
a solution not only for the competition, but for the challenges we are facing today and in the future. The first major challenge is that we will have to create a climate-neutral economy by 2050, according to the Paris agreement. The other challenge we face is the population growth. We need to build a million new houses before 2030. That is why we looked for an area in the Netherlands with those two challenges in mind.” Adriano: “Yes, our main goal is to find the biggest challenges and to find the most sustainable solutions for the maximum amount of cases possible.” “We definitely don’t want to find the most comfortable building example for us to develop; we want to find the most adaptable solution in order to establish the biggest impact in the Netherlands. ” So that is the reason you started looking at tenement flats in The Hague. Adriano: “Exactly. It is also important to realize that we are not building something new. All the buildings we are looking at are post-war buildings and we are trying to find a way to renovate them. When you create a new building, you waste a lot of energy in the process. When you renovate efficiently by using the existing embodied energy of the materials, you are adding less carbon emissions to the process of design, manufacturing, transportation and construction.”
