Aerial view of a braided river delta at dawn

Tom Bosschaert

Design for the living world.

Who

I design systems that let human settlements work with living ones. I have been doing this for 25 years through architecture, strategy, writing, and teaching. I founded Except Integrated Sustainability in 1999 and created the SiD framework for whole-systems regenerative design.

Tom Bosschaert

Tom Bosschaert
Architect and urban planner
Yale MArch, TU Delft

The work

Most of what I do falls into three kinds.

Timber gridshell structure lit at dusk
Built work

Architecture and urban planning, from a single building to a district.

I trained as an architect and urban planner, Yale MArch and TU Delft engineer. The work runs across scales: a San Francisco transit center roofed with 2.2 hectares of working ecosystem, a Utrecht rail depot rebuilt as an energy-neutral circular community, masterplans drawn around how water, energy, and people actually move through a place. Each building is one part of a larger system, and I design it for that.

See the practice
Macro view of mycelium and roots in dark soil
The systems we have built are extraordinary. The ones we have failed to build are even more so.

from Symbiosis in Development

Selected work

Twenty-five years, about 700 projects. A few of them.

The framework

SiD: Symbiosis in Development

A way to design and steer whole systems toward regeneration. SiD treats a place, a supply chain, or an organization as one living system. It shows how the parts move together, and how to change them without breaking the whole. I built it over twenty years of practice. It runs underneath the work at Except, and ThinkSiD teaches it.

Read the book
SiD: Symbiosis in Development
25Years
700+Projects
6Ventures
40+Countries
Misty wetland at dusk

I work across design, ecology, and systems. If that is your terrain too, write to me.

Get in touch