Question, Research – and Act
At the end of the 1980s, the German government decided to introduce a take-back obligation and recycling quotas for the automotive industry. Werner Sobek then began to research whether there were comparable quotas for the building industry – after all, our built environment causes enormous amounts of resource consumption and waste generation. He came to the sobering conclusion that even dumping construction waste in pits and burning it passes for “recycling” – a key experience that stuck with him and was to become an important impetus in his search for alternative forms of construction.
In an interview with aed, Werner Sobek describes why, for him, design and functional perfection have only been justifiable with sustainability in mind ever since – and how he has tried to take this insight into account in teaching and research as well as in his projects.
Incidentally, Werner Sobek records the results of his decades of research and his findings in his trilogy “Non Nobis“. The second volume of this series will be published in early summer 2023.
