Rutger Huiberts is an architect and design director at Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), where he has led commercial, residential, mixed-use and master planning projects for more than 11 years, many of them in Asia. He studied planning in Florence and architecture at TU Delft, then worked at MVRDV before joining KPF. He is worth hearing because he sits in KPF's BIM and visualization leadership groups and uses simulation throughout design, not only at the end.

Rutger Huiberts, KPF

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In this conversation

What Rutger learned from Florence's historic fabric and from Japan's Metabolist movement about buildings that are never finished.

Why remote work held up for a global team, and why face-to-face time still builds the trust a design needs.

The Comcentre redevelopment in Singapore: calibrated facades on the office towers and a passively cooled, naturally ventilated podium.

How embodied carbon and early environmental analysis have made design far more data-driven than 10 or 15 years ago.

Why single-use downtowns struggle, and why adaptive reuse projects in New York have done well commercially.

You should always design them in such a way that there is some form of flexibility to be adjusted later on.

Rutger Huiberts

Chapters

Amsterdam, Florence, Delft, New York

A path through planning, architecture school, MVRDV and KPF.

Buildings that are never finished

Lessons from historic places and the Metabolists on flexibility and touch.

A team across time zones

Working globally, and why continuity from start to finish matters.

High-tech towers, low-tech podium

How the Comcentre redevelopment in Singapore was tested as it was designed.

Design that has to prove itself

Embodied carbon, thermal comfort and daylight analysis from day one.

By the numbers

37%

Share of global energy and process-related CO2 emissions from buildings in 2022

Rutger says regulators now focus on embodied and operational carbon, so designs must prove their performance early. Buildings are the largest single source of those emissions.

Source: UNEP and GlobalABC, 2023 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction ↗

Mixed-use cities and second lives

Proximity of work and home, adaptive reuse and AI that tracks where materials come from.

No one really wants to work in what looks like a deserted wasteland for most of the week.

Rutger Huiberts

Takeaways

Run environmental analysis continuously during design, not once at the end for certification. Checking daylight, solar gain and thermal comfort at each step avoids going back to the drawing board.

In hot, humid climates, traditional passive strategies such as outdoor circulation, recessed facades and shaded, ventilated spaces can cut cooling loads alongside high-performance towers.

Mixed use is what keeps districts alive: places where homes, offices and retail sit within a short walk are doing better than office-only downtowns.

Compelling design shouldn't only be just beautiful, but it should also be able to explain how it mediates between all different stakeholders.

Rutger Huiberts