(Archive) Our Common Guide

Change to better.

With several changemakers from the building industry an initiative has been taken to form a complete team to create a place in which learning and innovating is number one. Our Common Guide uses a different way of building, thinking and interacting with each other. All for one reason, to make the built environment a better place for people and nature.

Time is running out. Both ecological and social problems are piling up, and the construction industry is partly responsible for this. If we want to innovate in the right direction, we have to look at the overall construction process and the entire chain, from a different perspective. Now is the only time to make changes for a truly sustainable world. Our Common Guide explains the required systemic change for the built environment, shares the knowledge and possibilities to make these changes, and shows through case studies of a groundbreaking project that building sustainable and social is possible!

Building differently, for everyone!

In order to build better for people and nature, we look at the problems of the current way of building. For example: the needs of people change over time, but why can a building not simply adjust to the needs of the user? Inspired by Stewart Brand's Shearing Layers model, we create a new and learning building system that is adaptable. Different layers of a building are taken into account, each of which has its own life cycle. Think of: a structure that can last more than 100 years, but the insulation that should be changed after 20 years due to e.g. deterioration.

The goal of Our Common Guide is to make our knowledge accessible to everyone. The exposition shows our motivations as a collective, how we can make certain design decisions based on impact, and what we can already show from the innovation that we make in practice. During this week we will have several presentations and activities, all based on our common interest and goal to make the built environment a better place. Showcasing our way of working both in ‘hardware’: the prototype of our building system, and ‘software’: the ways of working on organizational level as a collective.

An impact playground: our contribution to a better built environment.

A fully circular and demountable pavilion will be made from the building system itself. This pavilion, constructed as a kit, is able to continuously adapt to new insights, needs and innovations. To actually further learn about how we truly can build sustainable and social, the first goal of the pavilion is to make impact: to improve the place and its environment. The pavilion will be located on a place where social impact is needed. The building system ensures that the pavilion is given the function that is really necessary for the place. This allows the environment and its stakeholders to be involved in co-creation in which they determine what is really needed to make their place better. This means that one can actually participate in the design: spatially, functionally, but also aesthetically. The new insights deriving from this pavilion, as a playground for impact, will be immediately incorporated into our current practice of building. And with that, we want to challenge and inspire others, but also ourselves, to push forward in order to create a built environment that serves people and nature.

Curious? Ideas? Want to contribute as well? Visit us!