Luzie Rück

Luzie Rück calls both Germany and Denmark home

Throughout her life, Luzie Rück has been torn between Denmark and Germany. She grew up on a farm on the German island of Sylt, just south of Rømø. Conversations with friends and family were in German, but her schooling was in Danish. Her parents now live near Flensburg, but she has spent her entire adult life in Denmark.

“I probably see myself as German, but I would miss Denmark if I lived in Germany. Now that I live here, I miss the large German organic supermarkets and the greater political activism in Germany. Maybe one day I’ll move back to Germany, but I don’t know,” says Luzie, who now lives in Østerbro, Copenhagen.

Away from the Island, Into the “Big City”

As a 14-year-old, when she moved away from home to attend school and high school in Flensburg, she didn’t think about how growing up in the Danish-German borderland shaped her.

“I just thought it was super cool to get away from the island and into the ‘big city,’ where I lived in a boarding school with my friends. Sylt is a beautiful place with miles of lovely sandy beaches, but it was also village life, and especially in the winter without tourists, it’s pretty dead.”

Sustainability in Childhood

Today, Luzie can see that she was probably influenced early on by thoughts of responsible consumption and sustainability when she saw her aunt watering plants with collected water from the shower and visited her uncle’s organic shop.

“I try to live as sustainably as possible, buy second-hand when I can, and generally consume as little as possible. I know that my efforts are just a drop in the ocean, but it makes sense to me, and I couldn’t imagine living any other way today,” Luzie asserts.

But it wasn’t something she thought about when choosing her field of study after a couple of years backpacking in Australia. She knew it had to be something related to architecture and buildings, and she chose to pursue a degree in building design engineering in Aarhus.

“I had started to get intellectually bored after traveling for so long. I searched online and saw that there were open study spots, and two weeks later, I moved to Aarhus, a city I had never visited before, and started the program,” she says.

Sustainability as the Common Thread

Her bachelor’s project focused on recycling old concrete in the production of new concrete, with CO2 analyses and pressure tests to ensure safety properties. Since then, working with sustainability has been the common thread in Luzie’s academic and professional life.

First, with a master’s in environmental management and sustainability science at Aalborg University, and later at what is now the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs, Housing, and the Interior, where she worked for four years on implementing requirements for the climate impact of buildings in legislation.

“I found it incredibly exciting to help set limits for CO2 emissions from buildings. But I also increasingly wanted to be on the other side of the table and help bring it to life. So, I jumped at the chance when I heard that Viegand Maagøe was looking for employees with my profile,” says Luzie, who was hired in October 2023.

When Luzie isn’t geeking out on sustainability in buildings at work, she finds peace on the yoga mat or indulges in her newfound passion for climbing with friends.