Erkki arrived to ABUD from Estonia, the land of no paperwork. However, working with BREAAM still means a lot of documentation. Erkki applied for spending his month in ABUD reviewing our work on a BREEAM assessment project.
He highlighted critical points where lack of efficiency was found, or challenges with the Hungarian language, and introduced some new point of view regarding the system of drawings and data collection. At the end of his placement he held a fantastic presentation explaining his work and his useful conclusions. After that, we took the opportunity, and made a quick e-mail interview with him, asking about his experiences in our ABUD-world.
Why did you choose ABUD while you were looking for your Host company?
ABUD’s company profile and field of activities was the closest match with my own experience and interests. It was by far the closest match with my preferences. Furthermore, several projects ABUD has been/is part of where impressive. Hungary also seemed a nice destination for the placement.
How do you see ABUD now, from the inside, is it different than expected?
I assumed the company is larger or at least occupies larger premises 🙂 I was also surprised of the average age of employees as there are very young design team members. Was expecting more co-operative working among the employees, but I think this actually is the case, just as I was not part of any integrated design process I did not get the feeling 🙂 I was hoping to see some state of the art approach to sustainable building assessments (weather BREEAM or LEED), but got confirmation that there are same problems in Hungary as in Estonia. That is, it is difficult and time consuming to attain correct evidence documentations from the stakeholders.
What do you think, what will you take with yourself from ABUD after the placement?
Firstly, the impression that what I am doing in BREEAM assessment field in my own company is pretty much the same done in ABUD. Thus, I am on right track and not doing anything utterly wrong. I got good insight of the design process ABUD is practicing, different design tools (e.g Meteonorm and Climate Consultant). Also I hope for co-operation in the future, in which whether I can be of use to ABUD or visa-versa.Â