News

The City-Zen Roadshow visited Nicosia, the capital city of Cyprus. The group of international environmental experts, led by Andy van den Dobbelsteen and Craig Martin (AE+T), studied the city together with residents and created a strategy to make the city a greener and healthier place.

Tacit knowledge is a specific type of knowledge that architects employ when designing. The Communities of Tacit Knowledge (TACK) will for the first time combine the expertise on tacit knowledge that has been developed at ten different research centres in Europe. The research project is an ITN-Marie Curie networking project, with BK Bouwkunde as one of the ten research centres involved.

Not one, but two TU Delft alumni received the Marina van Damme Grant 2019. Andrea Mangel Raventos and Hanneke Stenfert were both awarded € 9.000,- to achieve their goals.

The current Dutch housing market can be described as ‘stagnant’. There is a decreasing trend within the number of transactions and the number of sold new-build homes, as well a continuing but flattening rise of housing prices in the last quarters. That can be concluded from the Monitor Housing Market for the first quarter of 2019.

Following the Spanish civil war, Franco spearheaded sweeping rural modernisation and reconstruction. During this period, Franco had 300 ‘utopian villages’ built from scratch. Doctoral candidate Jean-François Lejeune places these villages in the wider context of a distinct South European modernism, and argues for a reassessment of this controversial heritage.

Good bridge design requires perfect interaction between all parties, but that is precisely where things often go wrong in modern practice, concludes PhD researcher Joris Smits. He argues for a role as ‘design integrator’ for the architect, to combat fragmentation of the design process.

During the Green Tie Gala 2019, professor Andy van den Dobbelsteen was awarded a top 3 position in the ABN AMRO Sustainable 50. This list reflects what has happened and who contributed the most to a more sustainable built environment over the past year.

As part of the upcoming book publication ‘The city of the future’, BK researchers Tom Daamen and Hedwig van der Linden reflected on the value of research by design for urban area development. This type of design thinking can create added value for clients on different levels of the design brief.

The new Breeze Hotel will open in a few weeks in Amsterdam. The hotel is the first building to apply ‘Earth, wind, and fire natural air conditioning’, and uses natural processes to ventilate the near 200 rooms of the hotel. The concept was developed by Ben Bronsema, and presented within his PhD research in 2013. The performance of the concept will be monitored for a longer period to further enhance the system.

A broad international debate is paramount for urban planning education. To this end, the Bridge DOCS research project aims to connect students from online courses with students in on-campus classrooms. Igor Tempels Moreno Pessoa and Roberto Rocco received a Comenius Teaching Fellowship grant of € 50.000,- to develop the necessary platform. They will start with connecting first year Urbanism students with students from the MOOC ‘Rethink the city’.