News

Urban design in complex urban projects is all about moving beyond surface needs and wishes, and uncovering common values. Designers can facilitate the creation of a shared vision among stakeholders by showing the implications and potential of these values.

RE-DWELL will train a new generation of academics and professionals to address the urgent need of affordable and sustainable housing, a major challenge for European societies. The large research project involves ten different universities and an innovative education programme across Europe.

The treatment of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and Ebola is challenging, especially on location under extreme conditions. How can you use architectural design to make such clinics both technically possible and approachable? In collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières, students of the master track Building Technology set to work on that question.

Greenhouses use large amounts of natural gas for maintaining ideal crop growth conditions. BK Alumna Liesanne Wieleman and Jildou de Jong from the start-up Thermeleon, and researcher Martin Tenpierik received a Take-Off grant from NWO to conduct a study into the technical and financial feasibility of a new screening system, functioning as a passive heat battery. First results have shown a good potential for reducing the annual gas demand of the horticultural sector in the Netherlands.

Would spatially concentrating refugees on the micro-level help stimulate their integration? Carla Huisman has been awarded an NWA Idea Generator grant of € 50.000 to study this. Over the course of a year, she will compare the networks of Eritrean refugees living in mixed projects in Amsterdam with the networks of those living more isolated in Utrecht.

After the summer, the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment welcomes Evelien Bruggeman as the new professor of Building Law. In her view, construction is above all an interaction between public and private, management and technology. "Building law brings together different legal doctrines in a practical context, that's what makes it so interesting".

Klaske Havik has been appointed as professor of Methods of Analysis & Imagination at the faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Methods of Analysis & Imagination holds a plea to pair in-depth analysis of diverse cultural, spatial and social situations with imaginative thinking about new spatial realities.

Primary school classrooms can be noisy places, making it hard for some children to concentrate and feel at ease. PhD researcher Dadi Zhang spent recent years finding out to what extent sound is experienced as noise and how it affects the well-being and performance of pupils. She’s also thought out a potential solution and decided to design a device aimed at noise reduction.

With pride we announce that BK alumnus Felipe Chaves Gonzalez was awarded the shared first prize at the Dutch Archiprix 2020 for his project ‘Permeable borders - Addressing multidimensional conflicts between polarized communities in Rio de Janeiro’.

Students Aleksandra Wróbel and Agnieszka Witaszek (Msc AUBS) and Kamil Owczarek (exchange students) designed the shelter, which can be folded and transported to the designated location on just one truck.