News

The number of offered and sold new-build homes in the first quarter of 2022 appears to have fallen back to the level as it was shortly after the credit crisis (2008-2013). In addition, the number of new build homes for which a building permit was granted in the first five months of 2022 was about 15% lower than in the previous year. In the owner-occupied sector, this is even more than 20%.

For the calculation of noise levels produced by road and rail traffic and industry, a noise expert uses a 3D model of the environment. This 3D model contains information about the height of the terrain, buildings and sound-reflection/absorption properties of the soil. It can be a cumbersome process to create this 3D model. Since last year, noise experts in the Netherlands can use an automatically generated country-wide 3D dataset for noise simulation that was co-developed by the 3D Geoinformation research group, Department Urbanism.

The circular watchtower that could be found last year on the corner of the Westlandseweg and Nieuwe Gracht was demolished last month. The tower will be given a special new purpose: the wood will be used in the construction of a circular pavilion, in memory of Jacques van Marken, founder and director of the former Gist Brocades factory in Delft. The pavilion will be built this autumn in the Hortus Botanicus of Delft University of Technology.

LettUs Design Team of TU Delft proposed a winning modular urban farming concept that can be tailored to the needs of a neighbourhood with poor access to healthy food, good education and the resulting lack of economic opportunities. With their design, the team won the first prize of the Urban Greenhouse Design Challenge.

Several online exhibitions are available this summer. Take a look via the links.

The Green Deal, formulated by the European Union, comprises climate targets that are as ambitious as they are all-important. It aims to reduce net emissions of greenhouse gasses to zero by 2050, without depleting resources and leaving no person or region behind. Seven scientists from the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities wrote the whitepaper ‘Critical materials, green energy and geopolitics: a complex mix’, offering science-based knowledge and strategies for achieving these aims. The paper has now become available.

Symbiotic Urban Movement (SUM) is the name of the TU Delft student team that won third prize at the Solar Decathlon Europe 21/22 on Friday 24 June. Their solution: an innovative plan to transform all of the Netherlands’ 847,000 tenement flats.

BK alumna Tessa Koenig Gimeno has received the shared first prize at the Dutch Archiprix 2022 for her project 'Decolonising the City: Public Space as Cultural Resistance in Santiago de Chile'.

The book ‘Inzicht - Academische Vaardigheden voor Bouwkundigen’ (Insight - Academic Skills for Architects) gives an in-depth view of architecture and the built environment as an academic discipline, explicitly addresses the relationship between design and research, and focuses on the practical skills that architecture, urbanism and building sciences students develop during their Bachelor's programme in Delft.

After a pandemic year with no public space worldwide, it was time to look further and ask what has changed in public space. Three Honours Programme BSc students who participated in the research group 'The Design of Public Space' made a documentary series. This documentary gives a view into the changes in thinking about design, mobility, inequality, and our behaviour.