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Our company

Summum Engineering is a structural design, engineering and optimization consultancy, founded in 2017 and based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The company is a worker-owned cooperative and social enterprise. It operates in the domains of architecture, engineering and construction as well as industrial design and art. Services are provided to project developers and owners as well as architects, designers, engineers and contractors. Specialties include the parametric modelling and structural engineering of lightweight structures, natural building materials, complex geometries and sustainable buildings.

Our team

Summum Engineering has a core team of members/owners consisting of:

  • dr.sc.ir. Diederik Veenendaal (CEO),
  • ir. Rik Rozendaal (CFO/COO),
  • Alessio Vigorito MSc. and
  • Anand Shah ITECH MSc.

The company includes occasional interns and graduate students. There is a standing invitation to other like-minded and entrepreneurial people to join. Please see our contact page for more information if you are such a person.

Our core beliefs

Contemporary corporate ethics can be summarized as trying to not be evil. Indeed, Summum will not commit to projects that have a demonstrably or overtly negative impact on people or the environment, and is pleased to rely on commendable services provided by others: sustainable banking, ethical smartphones, recycled business cards, and so on.

But, unlike traditional engineering practice, Summum will not limit itself to so-called corporate social responsibility. In many firms, socially responsible business practices and guidelines are applied while at the same time, for example, executing projects in the fossil fuels industries, operating in cultures where construction workers are heavily exploited, or working for governments that patently violate human rights. Summum will refuse and has in fact refused such projects and clients.

Our overarching objective is to do good and be credible, by forming a moral and ethical corporation, affecting real change, and having a net positive impact on the world. Along these same lines of thought, the company is structured as a worker-owned cooperative and social enterprise. A worker-owned cooperative is an association with a business, with members that are both employees and owners, fostering a truly democratic workplace. A social enterprise primarily operates from a societal mission and sees profit as a means rather than an end in itself.

Our statutory goal is in fact, “to make a net positive contribution – through our projects and services – to society and the environment in general, and to a sustainable built environment in particular, as a moral and ethical consulting engineering firm.

Summum is pro-active in seeking a clientele and building a holistic portfolio in support of its vision of a moral enterprise that contributes to a sustainable built environment.

Our interests

Throughout history, mechanical limitations of construction materials and their prohibitive cost, have led master builders to rely  on structural design to develop elegant and efficient structures. As structural engineers, we too attempt to span space with as little material as possible, and this endeavor naturally leads to lightweight structural systems such as shells, tensile roofs and inflatables as well as design methods such as form finding, graphic statics, topology optimization and genetic algorithms. We enjoy immersing ourselves in such topics whenever we are able.

Recent developments in computational design and digital fabrication hold a strong fascination. There is a clear movement towards generating data within well-informed parametric models, managing that data in collaborative building information models, and giving that data physical form through direct input to computer-controlled machinery such as robotic arms and 3D printers. Perhaps new forms of cooperation will follow suit, allowing us to break the value chain and shift towards seamless processes of design, construction and operation.

While technology may offer solutions to today’s problems, looking towards natural, circular and/or biobased construction materials, some used prehistorically, some only recently developed, may yield answers as well. While computational engineering and digital fabrication on one hand, and biodegradable, sustainable materials on the other, sometimes seem opposite ends of a spectrum, we are in fact interested in opportunities to combine both worlds.

Whatever the future holds, Summum is pleased to stand witness and keen to play a modest part in these ongoing developments. Our interests extend to historical and scientific research that help us to understand how we got here, and where we might be going.

Diederik Veenendaal

Bio

Diederik is a structural engineer, passionate about innovative and complex structural designs, as well as parametric modeling, computational optimization and sustainability. He studied Civil Engineering at the University of Technology in Delft (TU Delft), specializing in building engineering. He was a visiting student in 2006 at the Lousiana State University (LSU) Hurricane Center after hurricane Katrina, working on floating structures and buoyant foundations for historical buildings. He completed his Master’s thesis on the topic of evolutionary optimization of fabric formed beams, with assistance from Prof. Mark West of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

He started his professional career at Witteveen+Bos engineering consultants in the Netherlands, working on various types of structures and materials. Notable projects include groundfreezing calculations and safety analysis for the downtown subway stations of the North/South subway line in Amsterdam and the structural design for the largest tensioned membrane roof in the Netherlands, ice skating arena De Scheg in Deventer.

He then joined the Block Research Group at the Institute of Technology in Architecture at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. While carrying out his doctoral research on flexibly formed concrete shell structures, he also served as co-editor for the book ‘Shell Structures for Architecture’ and as project coordinator for research & innovation unit NEST HiLo. He successfully defended his doctoral thesis in 2017 while starting Summum Engineering in Rotterdam.

Diederik has an Erdős number of 5 (which is a totally nerdy thing to note, and an idea he picked up from Paul Shepherd’s website): 

dr.sc. ETH | Architecture | ETH Zurich | 2017
EUR ING | Engineering | FEANI | 2017
ir./MSc. | Civil Engineering | TU Delft | 2008
BSc. | Civil Engineering | TU Delft | 2005

Rik Rozendaal

Bio

Rik is a computational designer and building engineer with an interest in structural engineering. He finished his studies in Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in 2014.

During his graduation he shifted his attention from architectural design to design optimization and form finding supported by parametric design. This is when his love for Grasshopper began. His graduation research consisted of a parametric algorithm used for structural optimization of arch and shell structures. After his studies he took some time to travel and get some hands-on building experience as a volunteer by designing and building a sanitary unit in Lundamatwe, Tanzania.

In 2015 he started working as a structural engineer at SWINN. He worked on apartment, office, school and healthcare buildings, mostly in steel and concrete, occasionally in timber. After briefly working at Summum, he then joined Synopel in Rotterdam as a designer. He then returned to Summum in 2021, while also holding a teaching position at TU Delft.

At Summum Engineering he works as a computational designer and building engineer, a role in which he combines his architectural design skills, his love for parametric modelling and his experience in structural engineering.

In his spare time Rik likes to train for triathlons. The boredom of long distance runs is said to help him find creative solutions to design problems. If only he carried a notebook during his runs.

ir./MSc. | Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | TU Delft | 2014
BSc. | Architecture | TU Delft | 2010

Alessio Vigorito

Bio

Alessio is a computational designer with a background in architecture and a passion for structural engineering. He completed his studies in Building Technology at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in 2020.

During his studies in architecture at the Roma Tre University, he found his interests increasingly revolving towards design optimization and parametric design. The desire to bridge the gap between architecture and engineering led him to the Architecture faculty in Delft, where he focused on computational and structural design. His Master’s thesis was centered on improving structural firmness and sustainability of a bridge through multi-objective optimization.

After his graduation, he worked with White Lioness technologies focusing on parametric modeling and developing systems to take advantage of Grasshopper’s functionalities in a cloud environment. He then joined Summum Engineering in 2022.

Music helps him concentrate. Every design problem has its solution encapsulated in a vinyl. Or at least that’s what he tells himself when buying more than rationally acceptable.

ir./MSc. | Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | TU Delft | 2020
BSc | Architecture | Roma Tre University | 2017

Anand Shah

Bio

Anand is a civil engineer with a specialization in structural engineering. He completed his Bachelor’s studies in Civil Construction from CEPT University, India, during which he was exposed to craft-based traditional building techniques for natural building materials. During his Master’s studies in Integrative Technology and Architectural Design Research (ITECH) at University of Stuttgart, Germany, he focused on structural engineering for timber structures built with robotically fabricated high-tech construction methods.

His interest lies in structural engineering of buildings where the design evolves from a close collaboration between the architect, the structural consultant and the construction in-charge. He is particularly interested in using computational tools to engineer environmentally sustainable, material efficient and economically viable structures. Anand is passionate about building with natural materials, designing lightweight and shell structures, form-finding and structural optimization, and architectural geometry.

In his free time he enjoys cooking, visiting interesting architectural structures and learning new sports.

MSc. | Integrative Technologies and Architectural Design Research | University of Stuttgart | 2021
B.Tech | Civil construction | CEPT | 2017

Alumni

Past employees:
Barney Salsby (November 2023-February 2024)
Emily Rackstraw (November-December 2024)
Aitor Vadillo (April 2022-December 2024)
Lena Woidt (April 2022-March 2023)
Evgenia Kanli (February-April 2022)
Niels Hofstee (October 2020-November 2021)
Francesco Verzura (February-December 2020)

Past graduate students:
Léo Bonmarchand (March-September 2023)
Chiayu Chen (January-August 2023)
Shirley Feng (January 2021-March 2022)
Alexandru Onițiu (January-October 2021)
Babje Rothe (March 2020-August 2022)
Gido Dielemans (February 2018-September 2019)
Simone Rutigliano (October-December 2018)

Past designers in residence:
Jung Ghim (December 2021-April 2022)

Past interns and trainees:
Tatsuki Fujiu (June-October 2023)
Niclas Brandt (June-July 2023)
Lisa Magerand (February-March 2023)
Léo Bonmarchand (February-March 2023)

Martijn Verroen (April-October 2022)
Robert Verbeek (March-May 2022)

Anand Shah (December 2021-January 2022)
Laura Adrien (September-December 2021)
Kendeas Koullapis (September-December 2021)
Loann Joly (July-August 2021)
Shasan Chokshi (February-April 2021)

James Whiteley (October 2020-March 2021)
Yunus Kaplan (July 2020-March 2021)
Leticija Petrova (July-August 2020)
Debora Dei Rocini (January-May 2020)

Babje Rothe (December 2019-February 2020)
Sukumar Vedhachalam (December 2019)
Gido Dielemans (November-December 2019)

Sjef Brands (July-August 2018, August 2019)