This year, Dutch Design Awards (DDA) works with ten former winners or nominees in the Young Designers category. Each of them highlights one young designer and promising name in the current design field working on the same mission as themselves.
Auke Bleij
Young designer spotlighted by Bob Hendrikx
Dutch Design Awards 2024
With Respyre, Auke Bleij is pioneering a new frontier for urban greening. At the heart of this start-up is an ingenious concrete specifically developed for spontaneous moss growth. Respyre provides simple, green solutions that can transform vastly unused urban surfaces into green infrastructure that harbours moss’s air-filtering and temperature-regulating properties. Their bio-receptive concrete can be seamlessly applied to existing surfaces or integrated into new constructions, contributing from material sciences and engineering to pressing issues linked to urbanisation and global warming. Made from up to 70% recycled cement, it cleverly repurposes a challenging waste product. Creating the conditions for moss to thrive can improve air quality, provide a habitat for insects and microorganisms, and reduce traffic noise and heat retention. By weaving the ecological value of other species, Respyre presents a nature-inclusive approach to the future city.
Auke co-founded Respyre, driven by a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a background in civil engineering from TU/Delft. What started as the university’s research on why mosses grow on railway-adjacent surfaces has led to a pioneering approach that reconsiders the value of moss to tackle environmental and urban issues like air quality and overheating cities to offer concrete applications. Their bio-receptive concrete innovates the accessibility and scalability of green solutions, proving market-ready initiatives can be applied in unexpected locations in a seamless and affordable way. D’Groene Citer, a renovation of social rental flats in Purmerend, is a pilot case testing their quick and simple solutions on a larger scale. Respyre is turning a facade of 300 square metres into an autonomous and natural respiratory system for the neighbourhood while researching the resilience of moss at varying heights, reaching up to 20 metres. Utilising 420 square metres of prefab concrete as part of a cutting-edge green office building, the Office building Hoex in Ooostrum is another noteworthy collaboration. The exterior layer of the building incorporates Respyre’s bio-receptive concrete to significantly reduce CO2 impact significantly, demonstrating the scalability of their solutions and the value of the right partners in testing and daring new applications that continue to lower the threshold for either small or large nature-inclusive projects.
Bob Hendrikx
Young Designer Dutch Design Awards 2021
Bob Hendrikx is a bold, practical designer who presents clear, sustainable solutions for the future in an accessible way. He demonstrates the regenerative potential of life investigating the use of living materials (which include our remains after death) through time. The inventor, architect, and bio-designer is a trailblazer in the field, integrating non-humans into our everyday realities to harbour their ecological value into much-needed solutions for how cities can tackle climate change. With strong entrepreneurship, Loop demonstrates how to go further than working together with living organisms, restoring the parasitic relationship between humanity and its surroundings into an attainable reality. With ingenuity, nature meets the demands of the modern day.
Bob’s an entrepreneurial designer that, having gained fame as creator of the world’s first living coffin, continues investigating sustainable solutions for the future. He graduated from Delft University of Technology in 2019 and is currently affiliated with MIT Media Lab (Cambridge – Massachusetts, USA). He does not only investigate sustainable solutions by working with living organisms: Loop is evidence that he sees his ideas through from concept to action. His portfolio finds solutions by harbouring life, ranging from mycelium urns to a growing house. His projects cleverly combine the speculative with the executable, demonstrating vision and cohesion: whether it’s a living bin that seeks to eliminate traditional waste management using specially grown sea anemones to eat our organic waste or roadblocks made from specially developed concrete to grow moss for the city’s breathability.
Dutch Design Awards
Dutch Design Awards (DDA) has been a leader in interpreting Dutch design for years. DDA’s goal is broader than rewarding the best design: we want the conversation about Dutch design to continue. With great openness and curiosity, we therefore facilitate exchanges between designers and curators, public and professionals. In order to continue emphasising the essential impact of design on society and to contribute to the development of the profession.
Portrait photo Auke Bleij: Respyre, Ronan Kok
