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News: 15 May 2023

Holbein Gardens won a 2023 Wastebuild Award

Associate Laura Batty went to Wastebuild 2023, a 2-day sustainability conference held in a repurposed shipbuilding warehouse in Amsterdam. 

We are delighted to announce that whilst there, Holbein Gardens picked up an Award  in the Commercial Building category.

Holbein Gardens provides 25,000 sqft of high quality, flexible workspace and sets a new benchmark for sustainable office buildings. The project hits the LETI Pioneer Project embodied carbon target of 500kgCO2e/m2 and will contribute to our goal for all managed buildings to be net zero operational by 2030.

A couple of key takeaways from Laura were:

  • "CircuLaw, a collaboration between the city of Amsterdam and Dark Matter Labs, to accelerate the transition to circularity using existing laws. The platform aggregates existing public, private and tax laws, figures out how they can be combined to drive change, and presents them in an understandable way. "From law as text to law as a service". This is such a clever idea.
  • The groups able to deliver projects with actual circularity, sustainability and social benefits, are usually a departure from traditional project teams. They are in the words of Marthijn Pool from Common City "project ecosystems" where contributors acknowledge sometimes conflicting priorities/solutions and address them early on - the collaboration and team structure is something we may not pay enough attention to but it seems to be a common thread in driving and realising change.
  • I asked Muyiwa Oki what radical thing he'd like to achieve in his RIBA presidency. His response: fixing the working conditions of junior architects and making the profession more attractive. "I think this is a great example of regenerative practice - built environment professionals are humans not machines (yet) and we can't be expected to deliver on all these massive challenges from a place of burnout and panic."

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