IEN had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ecogradia, an online platform devoted to sustainable architecture and urbanism. The 1-hour podcast appears on Ecogradia's 2nd season, where Dr. Nirmal Kishnani interviews experts and practitioners on the sustainability frontlines of the built environment:
All podcasts are available on the Ecogradia webpage and on your favourite podcast streaming apps. It is worth checking out the Ecogradia webpage, as it includes much additional information (images, illustrations and videos) about the building projects being discussed by its guests on the podcasts. For more information about this particular podcast with IEN Consultants, see the Ecogradia newsletter inserted below:
Is a building’s high performance mainly a matter of technical efficiency? Or is there something else at work beyond the mastering of mechanical and electrical systems and subsystems? For energy building consultant Gregers Reimann, our guest on the next episode of Ecogradia coming up Tuesday, performance is truly an act of calibration between engineering and how buildings are ultimately experienced.
Gregers is from Copenhagen, Denmark: a place that for climate, history and environmental outlook, could not be more different than Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where his award-winning consulting firm, IEN Consultants, is located.
There, he is the proverbial voice in the wilderness, selling Green to an industry that, not so long ago, wasn’t really that interested in it. In fact, he began advocating building performance long before the current jump on the sustainability bandwagon. IEN made headway first with a couple of public commissions that are now regarded as breakthrough projects of the early Green movement in Malaysia.
Today, the firm is in high demand, sought by developers across Asia. Gregers himself has even become a bonafide social media influencer by single-handedly making cycling on the warm, humid and crowded roads of Kuala Lumpur look cool.
I’ve known Gregers since the early 2000s. I was then consulting on a project in Manila, in the Philippines, and needed an environmental expert who could help me design a daylight redirecting system for a large financial building. That joint effort was a success: not only did it yield the results we were after, but these gains also transformed the everyday lives of hundreds who work on those premises.
The lesson we learnt — and that has stuck — is that energy and engineering are really about the human experience. In my upcoming conversation with Gregers, I find out how much further he has travelled on that road since then and what are the markers of high-building performance, he believes, everyone should be shooting for today.
That second episode, 'Building higher performance' with Gregers Reimann, will be out next Tuesday. Don't miss it.
Until we meet again,
Ecogradia website podcasts:
