04/11/2026
When The Edge opened in Amsterdam in 2014, it was hailed as one of the world’s most connected and sustainable office buildings. More than a decade later, the man behind it is still pushing the industry to catch up with its own ambitions. 🏢
We sat down with Erik Ubels, former Deloitte CIO and visionary behind The Edge, to talk about what has changed since then and what hasn’t. His diagnosis is refreshingly direct: the fundamentals of building technology have barely moved, integration is still the single hardest problem, and most building automation systems remain stubbornly old-fashioned. Any heating system still running on a clock, in his view, has already missed the point.
He also shared what genuinely excites him about the next decade: AI that optimizes what people cannot, wood construction built like Lego, and “function-free” buildings designed to be repurposed from offices into housing, schools, or whatever a city needs twenty years from now.
