If you look at the project credits for any notable sustainable building these days, chances are you will come across Transsolar. Founded in Germany, the company is active worldwide, bringing its brand of climate engineering — or KlimaEngineering — to public and institutional works. Recent high-profile credits include Winnipeg’s Leaf, by KPMB Architects with Architecture49, and Toronto’s own Limberlost Place, by Moriyama Teshima Architects and Acton Ostry Architects; as well as globally notable projects like the CERN Science Gateway in Geneva by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Brodbeck Roulet Architectes. These architecture firms bring on Transsolar to help them derive solutions for making their projects as sustainable as possible.

Tommaso Bitossi, an Italian-born and -educated architect and Associate Partner at the firm, describes its ethos as one of innovation driven by a passive design–first approach, which he terms “sufficiency before efficiency.”