Meet Jan, Lead Architectural Engineer Data Centres

Residential versus non-residential buildings

“When you work as an Architectural Engineer, you can generally work on residential or non-residential buildings. For me, working on non-residential building projects, is one of the aspects that makes my work exciting. Residential construction projects are often on a smaller scale. Factories, data centres and other buildings, on the other hand, can be huge and they have a different function each time. This means, for each project, you must understand all the processes going on inside the building. So, you investigate questions such as: what will this building be used for, what do the people who will work in this building need, which materials and products will have to be transported through the building and how will that have to be done? These questions are all things you have to consider when working on such a project. And further particulars such as clean rooms, pharmaceutical requirements, fire and explosion safety.”

The interesting aspects of data centre projects

When designing a data centre, the focus is more on the technology rather than on the people who will work in the building. However, that does not make data centre projects any less interesting. “Especially the collaboration with other disciplines, those of the special high-quality technical installations, makes designing data centres a challenge. There is a certain amount of repetition in designing data centres, but the trick is to use this to optimize your design process. And it is also interesting because it often concerns data centres abroad, where the official language is English and where being able to speak a word of German also has its advantages.”

“I have always seen the international character of the projects and the occasional trips that go with them as fun and challenging. When you're on vacation, you get to experience the people, but you won’t always really get to know them. However, are you abroad for a while on a project and working with the local people? Then you really get to know the culture.”

The benefits of a big organisation

“Because Royal HaskoningDHV is such a large company with several offices in the Netherlands, you can work in many different places within the Netherlands. I work a lot in Eindhoven and Nijmegen, but sometimes also in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Amersfoort or, of course, from home. And in the past, I also worked at some our offices outside the Netherlands, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Frankfurt. That variety is nice."

However, the various locations are not the only advantage of a large organisation, you also have many colleagues. “When you work on a project, you always do this in multidisciplinary teams. And these teams are different per project, so you get to know a lot of people. The nice thing about this is that you also learn a lot from all the other disciplines involved in a project.”

Your role as an Architectural Engineer

“As an Architectural Engineer you usually take care of the preliminary design, the final design and the specifications with tender documents. But sometimes you do more than that. Such as drawing up a programme of requirements on behalf of the client. This answers questions such as what is the purpose of the building, what functions should be in the building, how big should it be and where should it be located? And after the tender, you are sometimes also involved in the execution phase in the form of checks or construction management.

“Depending on the size of the project, you work in the architectural design team, usually together with an architect, architectural engineer and a few modelers who put all the information in a 3D model. And do you like modelling yourself? Then you can of course also do both.”

The role of sustainability

“More and more attention is being paid to sustainability in the projects. As an Architectural Engineer you do not certainly have to be a specialist on this topic, but you do have to know something about it since you have to include it in your projects. Circularity is part of sustainability: making a design in such a way that you can reuse its parts in a subsequent project. But you can also think of using sustainable materials and opting for green roofs and green facades.”