We spent 15 years at EFdeN building prototypes.
Houses that actually work. Measured in real conditions. Competing against teams from MIT and Delft and winning

For most of that time our job was research, education and awareness. Show what’s possible. Train people. Change the conversation. More than a thousand young professionals went through our projects and some of what we proved ended up in Romanian legislation

But we learned something uncomfortable along the way: prototypes inspire and only systemic interventions change anything at scale.

A prototype proves it can be done. It tells you nothing about how to do the same thing ten thousand times, with money that isn’t grant money, with teams that aren’t volunteers, in institutions that don’t have the capacity to repeat it

So we’re moving from demonstrating to building the process, the audits, the baselines, the standards, the delivery capacity. The unglamorous machinery that public-private partnerships actually need in order to work and that almost nobody is building

This week we took that argument to the Economic Forum on the panel about Europe’s housing crisis. I shared the stage with Tomasz Lewandowski, Undersecretary of State at Poland’s Ministry of Economic Development and Technology, responsible for housing and spatial planning, Laszlo Balogh from ingatlan.com one of Hungary’s largest property platforms Moderated by Sarah Bomba, INALCO

Five things we left with
Europe is debating the one percent it will build, and barely debating the ninety-nine percent it will inherit. Between 85 and 95% of the buildings standing today will still be standing in 2050. Deep renovation runs at 0.2% a year

Ownership is not housing. Romania has the highest homeownership rate in the EU, around 94% and the highest overcrowding rate, around 40%. We solved housing the way you solve a Rubik’s cube by peeling off the stickers

In our part of Europe the real landlord is the building itself. And it collects its rent in kilowatt-hours. A household pays two bills, not one. Europe argues loudly about the first and is almost silent about the second

Technology stopped being the constraint a long time ago. The constraints are land, capital, time and the capacity to deliver. The highest-return innovation available right now is not a material. It is a process

Jane Jacobs called the city a hope machine. I would add that it is also a scaling machine: whatever we design, multiplies. Right now Europe is preparing to scale construction while leaving the existing stock exactly as it is. That is how you end up with a modern Europe built on top of a cold one

Two million new homes is the visible half of the answer. The invisible half is already built, already owned, and already waiting

That’s the direction i’m working in now. Not one more, better demonstration building, but the mechanism that gets an ordinary building renovated without it being an event

A few things are coming on this. We’ll talk about them when they’re ready