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Sustainability is a high priority at TU Delft. Not only is it a common thread in many of the university’s education, research and valorisation activities - the university is also taking steps towards making the campus more sustainable. In this regard, the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment is the first faculty which offers an entirely vegetarian menu at Ketelhuis starting 3 May. When the other food & beverage facilities at the faculty reopen, their assortment will also be fully vegetarian.

Major home renovation projects often cause uncertainty and stress for the residents of social rental homes. Residents - sometimes due to a language barrier - often do not understand the impact of renovation works, find it difficult to make choices, and have little faith in the project. The use of interactive virtual reality (VR) changes this.

Strandeiland is the newest artificial island in the IJburg archipelago in the IJmeer, on the east side of Amsterdam. The island is currently being constructed. With 8,000 homes, Strandeiland is one of the largest future urban districts in Amsterdam. At Strandeiland the DemoS project aims to create an inclusive community of future Strandeilanders. Particularly exciting: new methods are explored to involve residents in the area development process.

The Zuiderwaterlinie (Southern Water Line) is one of the oldest and longest water defence lines in The Netherlands. The line connects Bergen op Zoom to Grave. The line has a long history with specific stories of war and peace from the past until now. In the past academic year, students made plans to develop this military heritage for the future. The purpose of the student plans is to show what possibilities the Zuiderwaterlinie offers for the future of Noord-Brabant.

This year INDESEM 2021 will take place 29th of May – 3rd of June. The program of the INDESEM seminar week consists of lectures, excursions and a workshop, all organized around a specific contemporary theme. Every edition of the seminar aims to raise awareness about this theme and its consequences for the architectural practice. This year we will explore the topic ‘Datascape’. How could data – about how people live, breathe and move through the projects we create - influence our future architectural designs?

Justice is a crucial dimension for sustainable cities and communities. Recent systemic shocks including climate change, the pandemic, a general erosion of democratic norms and more have prompted a rethinking and conceptualisation of the Just City in this light. A Manifesto for the Just City includes texts by a number of guest authors and 43 manifestos written by students from 25 universities around the world.

Iris Moons, alumnus van onze faculteit, wint de WTA NL-VL Monumentenstudieprijs. Zij is afgestudeerd met het onderwerp “Management van religieus erfgoed – een accommodatiestrategie voor Nederlandse kerken” en werd tijdens haar afstuderen begeleid door prof. Alexandra den Heijer en prof. Ana Pereira Roders.

Wind turbulence in an office district, noise nuisance from an industrial park, horizon-polluting windmills near a residential area, blinding light in classrooms. Often unexpected, such things can range from being a nuisance to highly annoying after a construction has been completed. We can now more easily simulate these effects on the living environment before construction, as detailed 3D data is now available for all 10 million buildings in the Netherlands.

Worldwide, levels of socio-economic segregation in cities are increasing and as a result the rich and the poor are increasingly living in different parts of urban regions. In a new book researchers Maarten van Ham and colleagues explain the relationship between increasing levels of inequality and segregation.

The Jaap Bakema Study Centre was established as a research collaboration between our faculty and Het Nieuwe Instituut in 2013 and has developed from an experiment into a solid multi-year alliance between a cultural organisation and a knowledge institution. The activities have been broadened and deepened with the international PhD programme Architecture and Democracy, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) project The Critical Visitor and with leading annual conferences such as last year’s Repositioning Architecture in the Digital.

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology will accept ‘Expressions of Interest’ to host Postdoctoral Fellows.

Given that building services can cost you as much as €1,000 per square metre, having a proper plan beforehand is hardly a luxury. But installation plans are rarely seen as a top priority during design projects. The fact that most of the heating, ventilation and airconditioning systems will ultimately be hidden above the ceiling or concealed in the walls simply compounds the problem. ‘Yet they remain of essential importance long after a building is commissioned. The installations are actually what will determine the building’s indoor climate and overall energy performance,’ says Atze Boerstra. Since last year, the tide appears to be turning for installations in buildings: ‘There is an awful lot happening in the building services world at the moment.’

The Netherlands has been world-renowned for decades as one of the leading countries when it comes to knowledge of flood risk management and spatial planning. “Our strategy of connecting both themes and adopting a cohesive view of them has received widespread praise. But in recent years, we appear to have lost that connection in the Netherlands; our tradition of managing spatial planning at the state level has been abandoned,” says Chris Zevenbergen who has been part-time professor of Delta Urbanism in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment since February.

Each year the Berlage awards a scholarship to an outstanding Dutch graduate from one of the universities or academies in the Netherlands. The scholarship is established to support Dutch students who demonstrate academic excellence and wish to join the Berlage's international, one-and-a-half-year English-language Post-Master of Science-degree program in architecture and urban design.

More than thirty per cent of the Dutch housing stock was built between 1965 and 1985. These homes are due for renovation in the next few years in order for them to meet current demands and requirements in terms of energy consumption, aesthetics, comfort and liveability. How can we ensure a sustainable future for this large, diverse and complex housing stock while respecting the current values of these homes and the living environment?

Roberto Rocco has been appointed Diversity and Inclusion Officer for Bouwkunde with the goal to advise the dean and help shape faculty policy and propose action on inclusion and diversity. “As an outsider, I have experienced issues of inclusion and diversity very personally in my life at TU Delft, not always positively. This has given me the tools, the curiosity and the ideas to see diversity and inclusion as highly positive assets and opportunities rather than “problems”, says Roberto.

Central and local governments have maintained the huge support package from the corona crisis until the end of 2020. As a result, relatively few housing consumers have actually been affected by the corona crisis in an economic sense. Combined with a prospect of vaccination, confidence in the owner-occupied housing market is fully restored in the third and fourth quarter of 2020. Residential consumers are daring to buy a (different) house in 2020, at substantial prices.

A special object is being built on the Westlandseweg in Delft: a temporary, circular watchtower, made almost entirely of wood without screws, glue or nails. The tower has been designed and is being built by BK students Edmund Thomas Green and Ludvig Sundberg, who won a design competition held by study association D.B.S.G. Stylos and project organisation Nieuw Delft at the end of 2019.

Now that we all work and study from our homes, it is impossible to catch the latest edition of Bnieuws at the faculty building. The editors however continue to work hard and, in addition to a monthly new Bnieuws, have made a lot of effort to make many previous editions available online.

Tess Tegelberg, master student, won the ECIO Frank Award with her thesis on how to design better study buildings at the TU. Her conclusion is that designing for students with functional disabilities creates places that are more pleasant for everyone.

How do the Dutch experience the corona measures in their workplace and working from home? Students from the master course Case Studies at the Department of Management of the Built Environment (MBE) put this question into research in cooperation with HEYDAY - facility management. As part of their course, they interviewed employees of a health insurance company, a chemical company, and a municipality.

A large consortium led by TU Delft is going to provide ‘brains’ to buildings. The Dutch Minis-try of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy has allocated 6.9 million euro to the Brains 4 Build-ings project. The objective of the project is to contribute to the development of smart meth-ods and algorithms that add operational intelligence to buildings, in order to make them as energy efficient and comfortable as possible. Professor and scientific coordinator Laure Itard: “Buildings’ energy systems have become so complex that their real time control cannot be achieved by traditional methods. We need much clever approaches using the potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

At the end of the 1980s, many modern masterpieces had already been demolished or had changed beyond recognition. This was mainly due to the fact, that many were not considered to be elements of heritage, that their original functions had substantially changed and that their technological innovations had not always endured long-term stresses.

What does the future of the port city of Rotterdam look like? How do you maintain the identity of a city in transition, with a growing number of inhabitants, spatial, economic and political interests? For whom does the gentrification of a neighbourhood take place? These are some of the questions studied by the researchers of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus PortCityFutures programme.

The programme "Eilande(rs)n aan het Roer" has been awarded a budget from NWO. In this programme researchers and social partners from the Caribbean and Dutch parts of the kingdom work together to bring together technical, traditional and contemporary knowledge practices.

The Executive Board has appointed Professor Andy van den Dobbelsteen as TU Delft Sustainability Coordinator with effect from 1 January 2021.

Climate change has major consequences for cultural heritage: pile foundations of historic buildings are deteriorating, and structures, landscapes and archaeological sites are in danger of flooding. The time for action is now, but the Netherlands is not ready for it, says researcher Dr Sandra Fatorić.

A solar heat network has proven to be technically and financially feasible for making existing neighbourhoods more sustainable and natural gas-free, as demonstrated by a consortium led by TU Delft

Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Eric van den Ham and Tess Blom (Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment) are the winners of the 2020 edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning, with their online course “Zero-Energy Design: an approach to make your building sustainable”. Their MOOC is designed to help participants figure out which energy measures can be applied to make their buildings (more) sustainable and zero-energy consuming.

The Circular Kitchen is a kitchen that is easy to renew and lasts a lifetime. This means less resource use, emissions and waste. The kitchen consists of easily adaptable modules made of high quality, environmentally friendly material. This makes it easy to create variants that are tailored to individual preferences. The first Circular Kitchens are currently being tested in houses.

This year, three BK alumni, Aditya Parulekar (Building Technology) Iris Moons (MBE) and Ananta Vania Iswardhani (Heritage & Architecture) won the first, second and third NRP Master Prize 2020.

Philomena Bluyssen and Marco Ortiz are developing a method in the SenseLab to compare leakage rates in different non-medical face masks. Up to now the NEN standard does not contain such a test.

Machiel van Dorst has been working in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment for over twenty years. In his role as head of the Urbanism department, and more recently vice-dean, he has invested a lot of time in the faculty. But teaching and research remained his passion, and have once more become the main focus of his career. “The interaction between environment, behaviour, urban and landscape design is the main focus of my teaching and research remit.”

GeoFluxus, a spin-off from the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment wins the 1st price at the EU DATATHON Green Deal Challenge. This competition invites teams from all over the world to create applications for European open datasets to solve one of the four main challenges the continent is facing.

The Netherlands Police is one of the biggest owners of public real estate in the Netherlands. From police station to forensic laboratory, from listed buildings in the centre of The Hague to large-scale facilities on the motorway in Driebergen: the task of housing the Police is as diverse as it is challenging. This September saw Monique Arkesteijn and Alexandra den Heijer (Chair of Public Real Estate, MBE department) enter into a four-year cooperation contract with the Police.

The scarcity on the housing market continues unabated. Relatively few residential consumers have really been affected in economic sense by the Corona crisis. This is mainly due to the enormous package of support measures provided by central and local authorities as part of the Corona crisis. Confidence in the owner-occupier housing market will recover in the third quarter of 2020.

In developing countries, aid organisations have a preference for building houses that meet Western standards. This is a mistake, claims doctoral candidate Michiel Smits in his dissertation, because residents struggle to maintain them. However, his call for ‘self-reliant', circular housing faces opposition from local residents, who prefer their houses to be made using bricks and cement.

Dr. Amy Thomas was awarded a Veni for her research Her Office. Amy's research includes a historical analysis of the role of gender in the design of corporate buildings and interiors. Historically offices have been designed for men, often by men, yet little research exists on how workplace design affects workplace inequality. This architectural history research will show how women’s wellbeing, health, status and career progression have been disproportionately disadvantaged through space management and design, furniture/product design, and the client-designer relationship.

During the Evening of the Assignment Film on 28 October, the film Energieslaven was awarded as the winner in the category Creativity/Innovation. The film shows in an insistent way how much energy is used in our household that has to be generated by rowers in the basement.

Every year, the best gradation projects of the faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment are selected and exhibited at the online VR exhibition. The jury selected the nine best projects to compete in the Dutch Archiprix, the leading annual competition for upcoming design talent. The nine projects were selected from a total of 47 preselected projects, showing the diversity of the different specialisations of architecture and the built environment.