On Sunday night I headed to Geneva airport to take a late flight to Copenhagen for a special Sustainability-focused APS Accelerator.
I knew something was up with my flight when at 7:49pm the gate information that was promised to be shown at 7:25pm still wasn’t posted. (This is Switzerland. Something was badly wrong with this scenario.)
It turns out the inbound flight from Nice was delayed by an hour, which meant our flight to Copenhagen would arrive at midnight rather than 11pm.
Walking through Copenhagen’s beautiful airport at that time of night was highly surreal. It was completely deserted.
After a short night’s sleep at the Scandic Spectrum – the team opted to stay in the centre of the city rather than our in Ørestad where the event was hosted – I headed to Copenhagen Central station to hop on a train.
Ramboll’s HQ building is an impressive structure a short walk from the Ørestad train station.
It’s really quite the building.
The inside of the building is as impressive as its outside.
Looking out from our conference room the weather was fairly gloomy.
But the room was basically full, with lots of really interesting projects being worked on.
Each day there was at least one presentaion.
Jacqueline Rohrmann – that many of you will know as That BIM Girl, and who has now started her own consultancy named TBG Consult – gave a great talk about sustainability on Tuesday.
On Wednesday I gave a talk about our research into digital twins.
On Thursday we had a talk from Marta Bouchard from our Impact team. I talk regularly with Marta, but it’s rare that we get to see each other in person (even though we’re both Swiss-based).
One nice surprise from the first day of the accelerator was bumping into David Fink from Henning Larsen. He invited me to visit their office in downtown Copenhagen the following morning to meet with their computational design team.
Henning Larsen is part of the Ramboll group: from what I understand they’re the group’s architecture arm, although they have an “open” relationship (they do work for other clients and Ramboll similarly uses other architectural firms). Their office is very different from the Ramboll HQ – for one thing it’s much more central, and you wouldn’t find it unless you knew to look for it.
It’s a lovely office, but as usual when visiting architectural customers I didn’t take pictures, as I never know what’s confidential from all the cool stuff on display.
I did take some photos from their roof terrace, though, as it was one of the rare moments during the week that the sun was out.
Here’s a quick panorama.
Inevitably during the week there were dinners. We had to eat, after all.
While I did miss Sunday’s, we had a very nice sushi dinner on Monday.
The main celebration was on Tuesday night. It was a very nice evening.
We went for a couple more drinks afterwards, too.
On my last night we went to a quirky Danish-Italian restaurant.
It was a lovely few days. I really enjoyed catching up with the attendees and the members of the APS and Impact teams who were present.
The next Accelerator is being held between Nice, France and Medellin, Colombia (what a great concept!) at the end of April. I may get to be in Nice for a couple of days, but we have to see (we have our annual TechX event in Dallas the week after, so it might be a bit too much).
I’m now leaving Copenhagen to attend an event at EPFL in Lausanne, which I also expect to be very interesting. More on that next week!
