Design as a
systemic
act.
Architecture, urban design, and landscape across 52 countries. Every project begins with what is already there.
Practice
The studio is the design arm of Except Integrated Sustainability, founded in Utrecht in 1999. Except Design applies the SiD framework across architecture, urban design, and landscape: a methodology developed over two decades and published as an open resource in 2019.
Projects are stress-tested against ecological limits, regulatory structure, and social reality before a line is drawn. Design follows from evidence. The result is work that holds: across climate events, across tenure changes, across the first decade of use.
Selected work
All projects
Architecture
Created the world's largest ecosystem rooftop, transforming urban biodiversity in downtown San Francisco.
Architecture
Delivered a pioneering circular building design housing 180+ sustainable entrepreneurs in a historic depot.
Architecture
Designed a catalytic multi-tenant office that functions as a self-sufficient, circular business ecosystem.
Architecture
Conceived a regenerative spiritual center that heals its ravine ecosystem while serving the community.
Urban Planning
Developed the world's first regenerative real estate framework achieving 140% net-positive carbon reduction.
Urban Planning
Designed the world's largest self-sufficient greenhouse complex, saving 9.2 billion liters of aquifer water.
Urban Planning
Produced research-by-design scenarios for future-proof urban expansion using Orchid City principles.
Urban Planning
Planned Europe's most innovative 1,500-hectare circular agro-park on former industrial land.
Disciplines
The SiD framework covers energy, water, biodiversity, economy, health, and social resilience across each discipline. Every project draws from the same integrated model, at a different scale and program.
Masterplans, public realm strategies, and city-scale frameworks that hold complexity without flattening it. Density, mobility, and ecological infrastructure designed as a single system.
Buildings that function as part of their neighborhood metabolism: energy, water, food, and community woven into the program. Performance targets set before the brief is written.
Outdoor spaces designed as living systems: drainage, ecology, microclimate, and the kind of beauty that deepens over time. Water and biodiversity are the same design problem.
Structured processes for designing with communities, not for them. The methodology is documented and transferable. Participation that shapes outcomes, not just validates them.
Thinking
Every project starts
with a conversation.
Tell us about the place, the constraint, or the problem. We will tell you where the system is already trying to help.
Start a conversation →