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This year’s Christmas donation takes the form of the consulting and integrated design services that ATP architects engineers are providing to an extraordinary Swiss aid project in Cambodia.

It is a long-standing tradition at ATP to support charitable enterprises at Christmas rather than giving expensive gifts to clients. This year, however, no check will be handed over. Rather, ATP is donating the thing that the renowned architecture and engineering office can do best – integrated design: ATP’s food production specialists are providing a donation in kind in the form of the concept for a fish and meat processing facility for the social project “Smiling Gecko” in Cambodia.

Successful Swiss startup
“SG Cambodia” (SGC) was established and developed by the Swiss photographic artist Hannes Schmid. Working with ETH Zurich and other recognized institutions he established a local, holistic cluster project covering the agricultural, tourist, craft, and educational sectors in the country in 2014. Now, just four years later, the project is offering a dignified and self-determined life to more than 1,000 people from the poorest quarters of the capital and the surrounding rural areas.

“SGC enables families to help themselves rather than fighting for their existence in the brutal slums and waste heaps of Phnom Penh. Under professional guidance they can learn an ecological and economic approach to managing organic agriculture. And the money that they earn is directly invested in the education of their children”, says ATP architect Georg Lanza explaining the agricultural basis of the cluster project.

ATP food experts – fact-finding in situ
Early in November Lanza and Michael Trautwein, Managing Director of Foodfab, were able to see the scale and reach of the Agricultural Family Project for themselves during a site visit. ”In order to meet the growing demand in the capital for organic products and, hence, enable the project to operate profitably, the families urgently need a professional butcher’s and a state-of-the-art processing facility for meat and fish products”, explained Trautwein. The two experts for production buildings and the food industry will be in a position to present the concept and design within a few months.

“The idea of SGC is sustainability par excellence. Waste is already being turned into bio gas that the residents use as a source of energy for cooking. Personally, it fills me with pride to see ATP as a design company accepting its social responsibility in such a meaningful way in the form of this project”, said Lanza. “In the spirit of our company motto of wanting to change the world for the better with excellent buildings, we will also design this project according to the highest possible design criteria.