At a certain level of busyness and visibility, luxury has less to do with price tags than with something genuinely priceless: time. Precisely because there never seems to be enough of it. Which makes it all the more special when some of it is shared with you. In that sense, the meeting that came together at short notice with Dr. Christine Lemaitre for the fourth episode of my podcast “Maßstab Mensch” – in a hotel in Cannes during MIPIM, of all places – was a real luxury. You do not need much imagination to assume that the CEO of the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB), already busy by any standard, would have very little of that precious resource to spare at the world’s largest real estate trade fair.
Resources, and how we handle them, were naturally part of the conversation. So were the “Yeti effect,” the fact that a building is not a washing machine, and the many a bivalences that sustainable building tends to produce. We agreed, of course, that emissions and material consumption need to come down – but also that the number of sacred cows paraded through the village of sustainability could stand to be reduced. One more shared trait emerged over the course of our hourlong conversation: a mutual aversion to extreme positions.
