I have spent most of my career trying to understand how large systems work, then redesigning them so they work for more people and fewer landfills.
I founded Except in 1999 in Rotterdam, at a time when "sustainability consultant" was not yet a job title anyone recognized. Twenty-five years and roughly 700 projects later, the field has grown enormous. The work has not gotten simpler. But the math has gotten harder to ignore.
Some of that work I can point to. The ecological systems inside Salesforce Park in San Francisco: 2.2 hectares of living rooftop above a transit center. Seven years helping IKEA redesign supply-chain energy use, which cut 484 GWh annually, enough to light 145,000 Swedish homes for a year. A circular roadmap for more than 100 Heineken breweries worldwide.
I wrote Symbiosis in Development, a 468-page open-source framework for designing whole systems toward regeneration. It took twelve years and became the basis for ThinkSiD, a teaching platform where practitioners learn to think in systems rather than sectors.
I am an architect and engineer by training (Yale School of Architecture, TU Delft). Since 2021, I have been based in Ho Chi Minh City, where I run ViCo, the Vietnam Sustainability Center.
What still holds my attention: the relationship between design decisions made at the scale of a building and their consequences at the scale of a watershed, a supply chain, a climate system.
