Archive

The city is an urban landscape system. The challenge is to not only address environmental challenges within that system, but to also make and keep the city liveable. To achieve this, urban design should be synergetic, concludes Nico Tillie in his PhD thesis.

A BOLD Cities consortium of Alexander Koutamanis (MBE), Carolien Rieffe (Leiden University), and Els Blijd (Interpsy Groningen) has received a € 500.000,- NWO grant to develop new tools for the analysis and briefing of school building designs.

Carola Hein (Architecture) together with Jonge Honden received a € 15.000,- NWO KIEM subsidy to connect the analysis of spatial impact of the energy transition to that of new business models.

Dick van Gameren and Nelson Mota are part of a consortium led by Aalto University, who have been awarded a 1 million-euro Erasmus+ grant to promote cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices in capacity building in Higher Education.

Spain-based platform Best Architecture Masters (BAM) has revealed its inaugural ranking of the best postgraduate architecture programs in the world. Based on the QS World University Ranking by Subject, the Berlage has been selected as the top 2 post-master programme for architecture and the built environment worldwide.

During the next two years, the LDE Centre for Sustainability and the Wageningen Research University will conduct research towards circular area development. Professor Ellen van Bueren (MBE) will lead the project, with De Binckhorst area in The Hague serving as a case study for the development of scientific understanding and practical tools.

Eric Luiten has been appointed Professor of Landscape Architecture. During his professorship, he will work towards connecting the landscape architectonic research and education with societal issues and partners from the professional field, to boost the Chair of Landscape Architecture and challenge its researchers and students.

Architects understand each other easily, but they often have trouble getting clients to understand their work. In her PhD thesis, Birgitte Hansen illustrates the thinking process and actions of architects in practice through a series of examples. She also makes tangible what role architects can play in decision-making processes.

Young people who want to buy a home in China, are dependent from their parents to a large extent, according to Wenjing Deng. According to her PhD thesis, government policies should invest more into the development of a healthy rental market for housing, to make young people less dependent of their parents.

The popular notion that city neighbourhoods easily develop into popular neighbourhoods for young professionals or unsafe ghetto’s is not true. Although some Dutch neighbourhoods have gone through the process of deterioration or gentrification, most city neighbourhoods remain stable in their ethnical and social economic composition, concludes Merle Zwiers in her PhD thesis.

Ana Pereira Roders is Professor of Heritage and Values. The Chair of Heritage and Values focuses on further understanding the values that define heritage, such as cultural, social, ecological, and economic; and how they impact the sustainability of cities. One of the main goals is to define, develop, and test new integrated assessment frameworks to better monitor and strengthen heritage conservation worldwide.

Over the past century, Delta cities have undergone significant spatial changes. We now know that in the long term, these don't always work out for the best. When the values we attach to water change, it is inevitable that they will impact on each other, concludes Yuting Tai in her doctoral research.

Making all housing corporation properties energy-neutral is an operation of mythic proportions. Does the solution lie in technical innovations, or does the construction sector's entire approach require change? Both, argues PhD candidate Eefje Stutvoet; otherwise, we will never meet our objectives.

Nigeria is struggling with a major shortage of housing, especially in the cities. Improving housing provision in Nigeria calls for concerted efforts from both the formal sector and the sizeable informal sector, concludes Job Taiwo Gbadegesin in his dissertation.

The supply of houses for sale continues to dry up. Insufficient supply of new homes and a completely turned-over buying process on the market of existing homes are the reasons. Consumers want to buy, but have less and less choice. The twenty second Monitor Koopwoningmarkt, presented by OTB, shows how most residential market areas are becoming increasingly pressurised.

Climate installations can be designed to create a healthy and comfortable indoor environment, while also maintaining a good energetic and economic balance. Professor of Indoor Environment Philomena Bluyssen has described how this can be achieved in the new concise guide ‘What you have to know about climate installations’.

The United Nations have compiled a list of more than 100 courses helping to teach about the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Four Mass Open Online Courses of BK Bouwkunde have been selected.

The five-year research project on autonomous floating vessels in metropolitan areas investigates the potential of self-driving technology to change urban infrastructure. The collaboration between the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology has already resulted in a first series of prototypes, which will be presented on location in October 2018.

The Netherlands will have to develop towards a circular economy before 2050. But what does this mean, is it even possible, and which challenges will we have to tackle in order to achieve a circular economy? That is the subject of the recent publication ‘Circularity – on the road to 2050?’.

BK Bouwkunde is represented at the Venice Biennale 2018 through a multitude of different types of projects. The exhibitions can be found in pavilions and in palazzos in the city centre: from a research exhibition to an installation, from student work to a dance performance, from a traveling exposition to young architectural talent.

His project ‘The Bank of England: a dialectical project’ is one of the four winning projects out of 334 nominated student graduation projects. The winning projects are currently on display in Palazzo Mora at the Venice Biennale 2018.

The National Renovation Platform (NRP) started the one-year academic programme to improve the sustainable re-use of the existing built environment. The academy was developed in collaboration with BK Bouwkunde and several other partners from both the academic and the professional field.

The smooth and shiny façades on contemporary high-rise buildings certainly look sleek, but they are a significant factor in city noise because of the way they reflect sound. Doctoral candidate Jochen Krimm is calling for façades with more structure and mandatory acoustic testing for every high building.

On 14 June, three winning teams were announced to advance to the next round in the Stylos Scala design competition. The winning teams will further develop their designs for a new staircase in the BK Expo, working on the feasibility of their designs. Additionally, three honourable mentions were announced by the judges.

On 20 and 21 June, the degree programme assessment of MSc Geomatics took place. In anticipation of the full report, the review commission said to be impressed with the quality of the master, praising both the graduation work, the master’s structure and the students’ enthusiasm. Additionally, they found Geomatics graduates’ careers to be well aligned with both the topic and the level of the master.

On 20 June 2018, BK Bouwkunde and the University of Strathclyde celebrated the launch of the policy research foundation EPRC Delft. EPRC Delft will reinforce the existing research and teaching cooperation between the universities and open up new opportunities for the institutions to carry out shared research after the UK leaves the European Union.

Jeroen Meijler pitched his thesis at CoreNet Global Benelux, winning the MSc Student Award. Meijler graduated cum laude in Management in the Built Environment in October 2017. He developed a new approach, a framework that helps make real estate decisions for a longer term.

Brownfield park project are important laboratories and catalysts for developments in landscape architecture. In these projects, contextual, process, and formal-aesthetic aspects form central and inter-related themes. That is why a major theoretical and methodological expansion of the notion of composition can be distilled from brownfield park projects, as René van der Velde concludes in his dissertation.

On 15 June, 2018, the exhibition Coder le monde [Coding the world] opened to the public at Centre Pompidou in Paris. The show takes stock of contemporary digital creation in different disciplines and includes a display of several PoroCity towers, created by the researchers and students of The Why Factory.

For several decades now, old urban communities in China have been demolished to make way for new-build residential dwellings. It is only since the last decade that the well-being of residents has been taken into consideration by the Chinese government. Xin Li concludes in her PhD thesis that there is still a world to win here.

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.