Tom Bosschaert
Design for the living world.
Design for the living world.
I have an unfortunate affliction, to see all we are part of as a system.
Cities, businesses, ecosystems, economies, films, and dinner conversations all seem happier once you understand how their parts combine to make a greater whole.
That journey led to me founding Except Integrated Sustainability at 19, in 1999, and later the Symbiosis in Development (SiD) framework. Now, I've spent decades helping design more regenerative places, organizations and industries. In this time, I've learned to appreciate my growing collection of questions over answers.
I love cinema, music and art, and try to make some of it. They remind me that not everything valuable can be measured. Some things are better understood than explained.
Tom Bosschaert
Architect and urban planner
Yale MArch, TU Delft
Frameworks, books, and essays on systems design, regeneration, and the architecture of sustainable societies.
Explore 02Selected work from 700 projects across architecture, urban planning, circular economy, and systems design.
Explore 03Keynotes, masterclasses, and lectures on systems thinking, regenerative design, and leading transitions.
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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.
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The systems we have built are extraordinary. The ones we have failed to build are even more so.
from 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.
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I work across design, ecology, and systems. If that is your terrain too, write to me.
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