News

The goal of housing corporations and the Dutch government to ensure an average quality at label B level for the non-profit housing sector by 2020 is far from being reached. More extensive measures and better plans are needed to somehow catch up on the backlog. Faidra Filippidou reached this conclusion in her doctoral thesis.

The job of the architect has changed significantly through the years. Marina Bos-de Vos has examined the role of architectural firms in the chain and how they create and capture value on the basis of different professional roles. She concludes in her doctoral dissertation that awareness of different values is necessary for better project strategies at architectural firms.

The majority of the residents in Rotterdam’s Zuidwijk district value the changes that the restructuring of recent years has achieved. Newcomers to the neighbourhood are positive about their move to Zuidwijk. However, all residents are critical about the large influx of residents with a migration background to rented social housing, concludes André Ouwehand in his dissertation.

A canal lined with trees sounds slightly more attractive if you call it a ‘green tunnel’. Neologisms help urban planners to sell designs, but also offer retrospective insight into failures, as MaartenJan Hoekstra discovered in his PhD research. He also reveals how the meaning of urban concepts tends to change over the years.

In the field of architecture, urbanism, and building sciences, many questions are still unanswered. The research programmes at BK City are devoted to answering those questions with ground-breaking projects. This month, no less than seven PhD-candidates defend the results of their work.

From 9 to 24 June, the ZigZagPavilion will serve as an urban marker at the architecture festival ZigZagCity in Rotterdam. Master students of the Chair of Interiors Buildings Cities designed and built the two-part pavilion.

The Housing 4.0 Energy consortium will build pilot projects of affordable low energy dwellings. Researchers from OTB will be working on the research part of the project, exploring possibilities for upscaling of the pilots. This includes the development of an open source platform, in which regional stakeholders work together to make low energy housing solutions a reality.

On 2 June, the jury announced this year’s national Archiprix winners. The second prize was awarded to BK alumna Barbara Prezelj for her project Unfamiliar Territory. This design proposal focusses on a landscape near Paris, aiming to find ways of dealing with places of friction without reducing their complexity.

The first ‘Cities Report’ from research project Cities of Making is now available. The report offers an insight into urban manufacturing in three European regions: Brussels, London, and Rotterdam-The Hague.

René van der Velde (Landscape Architecture) has been appointed as Research Fellow Urban Forestry, cementing a new collaboration between the BK City and the Dutch association for green-space professionals VHG.