Superuse Studios

“At Superuse Studios we believe we can make a difference… We think ingenious, beautiful and functional architectural and social design solutions can be created using existing resources, materials and systems. Everything is already there, we just have to see and utilise it. In this way we can transform to a sustainable society and limit the impact of architecture and design. To make optimal use of locally sourced ‘waste’ in new design solutions is what we call SUPERUSE. Functionality, sustainability and aesthetics are our guiding principles.”

Superuse Studios was founded in 1997 by Césare Peeren and Jan Jongert and has become a pioneer in the field of sustainable design. The firm is renowned nationally and internationally for its innovative design approach as well as for providing ‘open source’ methods and tools to the design community. All with the aim to make effective use of frequently wasted resources and energy.

The Rotterdam based studios are currently run by 5 engineers all specialists in their own fields; interventions, design, architecture, urbanism and research. They team up in different combinations to match a projects needs. This is what makes their design approach flexible and easy to apply at different scales and to concepts such as social design, urban farming, the circular and the blue economy.

Superuse studios researches, designs, builds innovative products, interiors and buildings and develops strategies for smart urban transformations.

Nature is a cyclical and dynamic system, typified by diversity and ever-changing interconnections. Generally processes grow and shrink, but diversity is always maintained.

By contrast, our society is a linear and rigid system, typified by homogeneity and a desire to fix existing connections. As a result parallel processes grow in scale and diversity is minimised. This leads to huge amounts of waste and to a waste of resources. Unemployment, mountains of trash and energy loss are accepted down sides of our current system.

We believe we should interconnect the systems of our society and include the systems of nature. For 21 years we have been working on methods and tools to do so. With our tools and methods we aim to transform our current society into a more sustainable one, and make more effective use of resources, energy and manpower.

Looking at a building, neighbourhood, city or region as a system, we can see how much resource, energy and manpower flows in and out of the system. And most comes out of it as ‘waste’. By connecting parts of the system we can make effective use of these waste flows. These connections are what we call ‘CYCLIFIERS’. They drive offer and demand and are not only sustainable solutions but offer business opportunities too.

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