Graham Bell did not conduct market research before inventing the telephone. Neither did Enzo, who created the first Ferrari in 1945 in a Nazi grinding machine workshop in Maranello, or Steve Jobs, who created the Macintosh in his parents' garage in 1984.

Today, we build incorrectly and poorly.

“Stupidity makes itself invisible by assuming enormous proportions.” -Bertold Brecht

My motivation was to prove that it is technically possible today to construct a zero-emission building with net-zero gray energy (CO2). Just like that.

“Every change started somewhere” - 2022 Andy Keel

I have always compared the pioneering work in the planning process and implementation to a Tour de France team. We want to win the overall classification, the individual time trial, and a mountain stage. Many fell by the wayside during the Valley Widnau pilot project. We worked day and night with a team of over 20 specialist planners, thinking, changing, and inventing. Between 2022 and 2024, we not only reimagined building with natural materials, but also the construction process itself. That's why we call Openly a building system.

Openly is ushering in a new generation of buildings. Openly buildings are better, healthier, more efficient (plus-energy), renewable, adaptable, quicker to plan and build, recyclable, safer, and offer long-term returns. The family-run corporations Leipfinger-Bader (DE) and VICAT (FR) are so far the only ones that can credibly demonstrate their path to net zero and back it up with actions (products).

2) Why build differently?

25% of global annual CO2 emissions come from the construction industry. That is around eight times as much as all air traffic. We need to understand the world as a closed cycle and not waste resources, but use them in such a way that we can reuse them again and again. In the past, it was clear to everyone that an Appenzell house left (almost) no waste behind. I myself grew up in a wooden house that was over 100 years old.

The Openly Vision: Buildings as a carbon sink

Office and residential buildings should be transformed from carbon emitters to carbon sinks. To date, no one has developed a commercially scalable construction system that focuses on carbon capture and storage. Our construction system does just that, making it possible to store up to 0.25 tons of CO2 per square meter of gross floor area. We need to put the CO2 we emit back underground and into buildings—that's how we'll solve climate change (along with avoiding emissions in transportation and industry). The technologies for doing this are called pyrolysis and photosynthesis. Unfortunately, very few scientists, politicians, board members, and lobby groups such as SIA, DGNB, etc. have noticed this yet, or they get bogged down in detailed discussions. With the Global Construction C-Sink Standard, we ourselves have created the accounting logic for these removals together with CSI and the Ithaka Institute, which will be applied under the EU's CRCF. The first TAP has just been published at a leisurely pace. With myclimate.org, a pilot project is underway for at least 10,000 tons of removals (corresponding to the cumulative sink performance of Neustark and Climeworks to date). The potential of buildings as a carbon sink is around 5 gigatons per year. Let that sink in.