Anders Lendager is CEO & Founder at Lendager. At the Building Green Event in Hamburg 6-7 June 2023, you can hear him in a speech about KARSTADT Re-parked and how to win a competition with minimizing demolish and creating a dogma for reuse of the demolished.
An aesthetic and sustainable journey into how we harvest and reconfigure the existing materials and demonstrate the possibilities of re-use – possibly creating the most sustainable retail- and office building in the world.
The architecture of Re-parked grows from what is already present on-site in terms of materials, spatial constraints, and the unique possibilities that arise when grasping these as an opportunity to enact positive change. It is a vision of a project where all materials stay on site, recirculated and ‘reparked’ in new, aesthetic configurations.
In this article you can read an interview with him.
What is your background and how do you work with sustainability?
I’m trained as an architect and have worked tirelessly to develop actionable solutions for a more sustainable building industry. This is the foundation I built the company on and the purpose that still keeps us going today, 12 years later.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in sustainable construction currently?
The entire industry is currently at a tipping point due to the massive challenges it faces from high interest rates, restrictive building legislations, new documentation and compliance guidelines, public scrutiny of practices and global supply chains struggling to keep up. The challenges are enormous, but I believe that the reasons listed above are merely the top of iceberg – the real challenges are cultural and much more difficult to manage and change.
“Sustainable Construction” is still an oxymoron – it exists in theory and in a few pioneering projects, but not at scale. The opportunities are enormous, but we must open up the entire value chain and renegotiate every phase – not just from a technical or material perspective – but take a careful look at the incentive structures, the insurance frameworks and the investment models as well. From there, we can then add on all the solutions and technologies we have available to us, but it’s important that the frameworks and paperwork explicitly supports a sustainable transition.
This year’s theme is ‘Urban transformation – for the benefit of people and planet’, how can we
transform our cities for the benefit of people and planet in your eyes?
Short answer: by focusing on people and planet. When you have an industry that is literally reshaping and transforming the fabric of our physical environment, then asking it to comply and operate within planetary boundaries and biological requirements shouldn’t feel like a stretch. We need to get to a place where cities are structured in such a way that they optimize synergies between people in order to utilize competencies and resources in the most efficient way. If we are indeed entering a period where the elements are turning against us, we need to start looking at our cities as safety rafts and start designing resilient systems that can sustain us all.
What role can cities play to make a difference in the green transition?
Cities play a major role, and we have to start focusing on utilizing the integrative qualities of our cities rather than the current, exploitive model where cities are more like exclusive islands of consumption and excess. We need to take a much more ambitious approach energy management and resource distribution in order to get as much out of what we have. At Lendager, we have always talked about our cities as ‘material libraries’ in order to spark a conversation about what we define as resources and how we use them, and I think this image can be superimposed on many other issues such at food, energy and transportation. Remember that we in the West are responsible for the majority of the carbon dioxide in the world, and since we are incedingly packing ourselves into cities, it is paramount that we start looking at our cities from a sustainable and sustaining systems’ perspective.
How do we move away from ‘business as usual’ when it comes to sustainable construction?
By showing, proving, and documenting that there is another way – that there are valuable alternatives available. We can’t fix everything with technology – we need to look at our behavior and understand the direct and indirect consequences of the decisions we make. The EU Taxonomy is an example of something that will change things and we are already seeing it. When you are required to document, publish and share the full spectrum of your business decisions, then it creates a strong incentive to make the best descision possible. Another example is the regulatory frameworks that underpin our building codes and standards. We need to see these revised and cleaned up because there are too many intentional and unintentional barriers for a more sustainable industry. But most importantly, we have to focus on the coming generations and make sure that their education is up to date and that their questions, doubts and ideas are heard.
Which sustainable projects do you find exciting?
I enjoy all projects that start with a ‘why’. At Lendager, we always strive to ask ourselves that question – why is it like that, why do we take that for granted, why can’t it be done? We try to maintain a certain level of naivete and question assumptions before we kick off a project because it allows us to explore a wider spectrum of thoughts and ideas. Needless to say, I am very much attracted to the projects that put sustainability at the center with clear goals and a dedicated pursuit from both the client and our own team. Having ambitious clients that challenge us to realize their vision is what keeps me going, and luckily, we see more and more of these.
What are you talking about at Building Green and what do you hope participants get out of
hearing your presentation?
I want to share some of the experiences and insights we have gathered over the past twelve years while realizing this particular type of architecture. You have to imagine that we were doing this before there was even a term or a language for it – It was strange, difficult and deeply provocative to most, but we have managed to stick around and learned a lot from the projects we have done. We are fortunate that the industry is now starting to request these types of solutions and we are allowed us to speak on these stages, because we have more than a decade of experience actually doing this – and we are more than happy to share!
So I hope that the audience will realize that the most important is have a vision and to be persistent – You can’t predict the future, by you can make it!
Do you want to hear more from Anders Lendager?
At the Building Green Event in Hamburg 6-7 June 2023, you can hear him in a speech about how to win a competition with minimizing demolish and creating a dogma for reuse of the demolished. Read more about Building Green here and sign up here.
