Meet… #25 | Willem van Genugten
In the series ‘Meet…’ employees of GROUP A answer a number of questions about their work and personal lives. This time it is Willem van Genugten’s turn, sustainable business developer and driver of CARBONLAB at GROUP A since April 2022. Willem graduated as an architect at TU Delft, and lives in Rotterdam with share dog Mano and occasionally commutes to Paris to visit his partner.
The biggest challenge within architecture to me is…
The transition to CO2 negative=climate positive design. In THE challenge of our time, designers can play a key role in making better and different choices. By being able to inform clients based on knowledge, we can motivate them to make other choices. It goes without saying that it should look beautiful and attractive. It’s about how we can use design steps to reduce the footprint, and make projects a net storage of CO2.
My ideal living environment is…
An apartment in the city and as a counterbalance a place somewhere in the countryside. I live in the middle of Rotterdam near the Erasmusburg and my partner in Paris so we have covered the city. The big dream is to eventually transform a piece of land from uniform grassland into a biodiverse food forest, with a place to cook and sleep. Dig into the soil, experiment with what grows where and when, and eat it too. Southern Netherlands, northern France, something like that. It will take some time but we really want this. So does Mano.
In 10 years the architecture will be…
Moving very fast towards climate positive.
With this architect I would like to have a good conversation…
Louis Kahn. In the movie “My Father, the Architect,” I.M. Pei says, “I have designed many times more buildings than Louis, but there is not 1 that comes close to what he could do. And Bangladeshi with whom he worked on the government building in Dhaka tell in the same film that Louis Kahn was always available for a good dialogue, a pleasant conversation. A lesson in modesty as a means of achieving top results, something that architects are not very well known for among the general public.
Anyway, Louis Kahn is no longer alive. So then it will be a conversation with Edouard Francois, not very well known in the Netherlands. His team creates buildings as a total biotope. Vegetation, animal life and living coincide perfectly. In the middle of the city. The results I have seen are amazing!
What to read…
‘The inventor of nature, the adventurous life of Alexander von Humboldt’ by Andrea Wulf
‘The Ministry for the Future’ and/or ‘New York 2140’ by Kim Stanly Robinson
‘The hidden life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben
And my blogs on linkedin, of course.
The building material of the future is…
Climate-positive and circular. In this there are no dogmas and there is no holy grail. We must move towards alternatives for everything we use, down to the last screw.
On weekends I love to go…
Having an aperitif with my partner on the terrace of Le Vingtième Art, and then dinner a little further down the road at Des Terres restaurant in Paris.
