• News
• Newsletters

The feel good deception”

Thomas Rau, an architect in Amsterdam, wrote a column with this title in the magazine VastGoed Personality. In this winter 2010 edition, Anne Marie Rakhorst from Search was Guest Editor-in-Chief.

The magazine is full of quality articles, including a fascinating interview with Hermann Scheer, the German equivalent of Al Gore, entitled “What we need is a Ministry for A Sustainable Future”. The interesting point he made is that a coherent vision is being created that goes a lot deeper than the discussion as to whether to use wind energy or not. Imagine what would happen if the conventional producers (including oil producers) were to lose the basis of their power, or if it turns out that the traditional energy companies have created their own prison.

Anne Marie Rakhorst says she has been “brought up with a love of nature”, but she is primarily a business woman with a vision. Could she be the perfect Minister for the Sustainable Future cabinet? Incidentally, a job has already been set aside for her – to help ensure that our Environment Minister is given greater scope to develop an actual policy.

Thomas Rau is putting the cat among the pigeons as far as sustainability labels are concerned. He refers to a “building” with maximum GreenCalc and minimum EPC as “a coffin”. What he means is that “compliance with” and therefore “the sticking of labels onto” does not achieve an optimum result. He cites the Elithis Tower in Dijon as an example, where sustainability labels were consciously ignored, and the result is a surplus of energy and a healthy internal climate. By meeting the EPC standard of 0.8, the question is how many health complaints this will give rise to. Rau also explains that the Tower can function as “an open source”, which means that anyone is welcome to test it and its users, in order to improve the next generation of buildings.

I would like to conclude by quoting Thomas Rau: “I plead passionately for a value-based economy, in which the fewer patients a GP has, the higher the income they receive. In that value economy, people will be aware that we only have one planet and that raw materials must be treated sparingly. The earth is faced with an energy demand and raw materials problem, as opposed to an energy problem and raw materials demand. This conviction must form the basis of what we do and don’t do, even in the real estate sector, where the ‘feasibility’ rather than the ‘sustainability’ of a building should be the starting point.”

Anton Sinke – CasaMundus Vision - Amsterdam