News

Many of the outdated typical Dutch tenement flats are large consumers of energy and therefore often end up on the demolition list. However, these typical flats do not have to disappear from the city scene. Symbiotic Urban Movement (SUM) - a team of students from Delft University of Technology - has developed a plan to sustainably transform all 847,000 tenement flats in the Netherlands and create more housing.

Teachers, students and construction practitioners experience a gap between the architect at the desk and the craftsman/woman on the construction site. The novice architect has a great gap between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge that is applied on the construction site, and therefore finds it difficult to maintain himself in contact with contractors and foremen.

The book Reglazing Modernism, written by Uta Pottgiesser, provides 20 in-depth case studies of Modern architectural icons in both Europe and the Americas. Focusing on interventions to steel-framed glazing assemblies, the book offers a critical assessment of historic building envelopes, their values, damages and potentials, while also exploring emerging technologies that may offer higher performance of the building envelope and the building in the future. Using a selection of 20 iconic buildings in Europe and the USA, the book documents the current technological status of the three most common strategies used today: restoration, rehabilitation, and replacement. 

Despite the perception that glass is 100% recyclable, the vast majority of everyday glass products are not reused or recycled. The "Re3 Glass" project shows that this can certainly be done differently. With specially cast glass components made from glass waste, the "Re3 Glass" project has now been selected to represent the theme of "climate change" in the Parlamentarium - the European Parliament's Visitors' Centre in Brussels.

During Dutch Design Week (DDW), two of our faculty's projects will be on show: a sustainable circular partition wall made of mycelium and a glass truss construction to make forces visible.

The air in an operating theatre is continuously refreshed with HEPA filtered air. The idea is that this prevents infections. For many years, air treatment systems have been used to purify the air in almost every operating theatre in the same way for every type of procedure. Scientists from various scientific disciplines, including Peter Luscuere of Architecture and the Built Environment, investigate in the Medical Delta Living Lab Research OR whether this can be done differently, better and more efficiently.

The heat from the Amsterdam canal water could be collected in the summer, stored in the subsurface, to use it in the winter. Aquathermal energy from surface water could be a feasible alternative to natural gas, since this city counts a large number of canals and open water. AMS Institute, with research fellow Maéva Dang of the faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, focuses on solving Amsterdam’s energy challenges.

The value of the European data economy has been assessed to be €739 billion, and highly likely to grow significantly in the coming years. Especially when data is shared openly with the public, more value is expected to be created. However, current developments in the field of open data are characterised as highly fragmented. The TU Delft project ‘Towards a sustainable Open Data ECOsystem’ (ODECO) has been granted as one of the 147 projects funding by the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie action Innovative Training Networks.

More than thirty per cent of the Dutch housing stock was built between 1965 and 1985. These homes are due for renovation in the next few years in order for them to meet current demands and requirements in terms of energy consumption, aesthetics, comfort and liveability. How can we ensure a sustainable future for this large, diverse and complex housing stock while respecting the current values of these homes and the living environment?

Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Eric van den Ham and Tess Blom (Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment) are the winners of the 2020 edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning, with their online course “Zero-Energy Design: an approach to make your building sustainable”. Their MOOC is designed to help participants figure out which energy measures can be applied to make their buildings (more) sustainable and zero-energy consuming.