Archive

The International Federation of Landscape Architecture has announced Adriaan Geuze as the winner of the premier worldwide Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award in landscape architecture. Adriaan Geuze’s outstanding contributions to the promotion of the profession in conceptual and practical respects represent the best values of the IFLA world community.

“Construction law can be seen as part of a galaxy: different parties, legal frameworks and interests all influence each other,” describes professor Evelien Bruggeman. “Balancing those forcefields is paramount to give technological developments a place in society.” On 16 September, the professor of Building Law at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment will give her inaugural speech, showing how digitisation in the built environment can find a place in the galaxy of construction law and the force field of technological and societal innovation.

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.

The importance of biodiversity for public health is widely acknowledged. However, few people are aware of how much housing design decisions influence the interaction between humans, non-humans and the diversity of microorganisms that populate our living environment. With the project Housing as Healthcare: Mapping the correlation between housing design, micro biodiversity and health in The Hague Nelson Mota won the NWO/NRO Comenius Teaching Fellowship.

City centres have become increasingly busier, and the pressure on the sometimes several centuries-old infrastructure is growing, for example due to freight traffic. Many municipalities in the Netherlands face major maintenance challenges, with costs running into billions of euros. Furthermore, the changes in the short term come on top of major transitions in the area of climate adaptation, circularity, energy and transport.

On Thursday 9 June, the TU Delft campus will be buzzing like never before. On that day, students will be presenting their ideas on how to accelerate the energy transition. Over the past six months, more than 15,000 TU Delft students have followed a course on energy transition. This has resulted in a large number of ideas and prototypes that can be seen on 9 June during the Energy Challenge Event, which is part of TU Delft's anniversary year.

In recent months, several grants have been awarded to research projects of our faculty. Frank van der Hoeven, Alexander Wandl and Arjan van Timmeren will be contributing to two of the five selected projects for the development of ‘lighthouse demonstrators' of the New European Bauhaus (NEB). In addition, a SURF grant has won for the first time by Serdar Asut. Karel Van den Berghe and Ellen van Bueren are part of the granted NWO KIC technology proposal SUBLIME.

The Solar Decathlon Europe will take place in Wuppertal, Germany, from 10 to 26 June 2022. Team SUM (Symbiotic Urban Movement) - a student team from TU Delft - is competing in the ten sections of the competition with their solution for making 847,000 outdated tenement flats in the Netherlands more sustainable.

Connecting sheet glass using heat bonding can theoretically result in perfectly transparent structures. But are they also manufacturable and are they strong enough? After countless fracture tests, PhD student Lisa Rammig concludes that welding and lamination can provide very high transparency and strength. But application in architecture is challenging.

The number of mortgage applications reached a new record in the first quarter of 2022 due to an enormous increase in the number of refinancings of existing mortgages. Consumers are thus anticipating the first increases in mortgage interest rates. However, this rise in interest rates in the first three months of 2022 has also had an impact on the maximum borrowing capacity of households.

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology is accepting ‘Expressions of Interest’ for hosting Fellows.

The Berlage is pleased to announce its upcoming theory master class entitled “Alive and Kicking: The Body Quick,” led by Francesca Hughes in collaboration with Miguel Rodriguez-Casellas.

The future of major cities has been in the spotlight for years now. After all, an ever-increasing share of the world population lives in metropolises. However, less attention is being paid to the question of how non-metropolitan areas might decline. As holder of the Bonnema chair at TU Delft and the University of Groningen, urban planner Zef Hemel's work focuses on the potential of regional towns and the surrounding landscapes.

In the most recent QS World University Rankings by Subject, Architecture has risen from the top 3 position to the top 2 position. This is a great achievement. In the top 3 we find MIT on 1 and UCL on 3.

Anthropologists, planners, architects and designers have a lot to learn from each other’s approaches and entanglements in professional and research practices.’ The connection between design and social sciences is a key issue for Hein.

Another 78 promising young scientists receive Veni funding of up to 280,000 euros from NWO. This concerns sixty researchers from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SGW) domain and eighteen from the Applied and Technical Sciences (TTW) domain, who can further develop their own research ideas over the next three years. The Venis for the ENW and ZonMW domains were announced in December 2021.

How will the future car transform the architecture associated with twentieth–century highways and interchanges, from gas stations and car washes to parking garages and motels? What new types of architecture will emerge alongside the future car in the second half of the twenty-first century? How will the private space of the car continue to merge with the public realm?

Research is increasingly based on data and how data can be used to achieve better designs, decisions or measurements. This sometimes requires enormous computing power to process all models and scenarios. Soon all researchers, students and education at TU Delft will be able to use the computational power of DelftBlue to solve complex problems. This high-performance computer has a speed of no less than 2 petaflops (one million times one billion calculations per second). The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment will also have access to use this supercomputer from the end of April.

Modern buildings that are threatened with demolition or disfigurement are regularly brought to the attention of DOCOMOMO International. In many cases the international DOCOMOMO community plays an important role in the preservation of these threatened buildings. To make the knowledge and information available for everyone, a lot of the material is made available online.

Clementine Cottineau (Urbanism) received an ERC grant for her research project SEGUE on economic segregation in cities. Ellen van Bueren (MBE) is the leader of a large consortium that received a NWA-ORC grant for RED&BLUE; a transdisciplinary study on climate-proof cities.

Port cities are where people, cargo, and ideas venture into the world, where economic development and liveability may clash or go hand in hand. This is the background against which the new LDE minor PortCityFutures offers third year bachelor students of all backgrounds an introduction in observing, design and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Articles regularly appear in the media about citizens protesting against the felling of large numbers of trees along road sites. The reason for felling is often to make the road more safe for traffic, because they stand too close to the road. But that is not the entire story: trees and roads have been inseparably linked for centuries.

Many of the outdated typical Dutch tenement flats are large consumers of energy and therefore often end up on the demolition list. However, these typical flats do not have to disappear from the city scene. Symbiotic Urban Movement (SUM) - a team of students from Delft University of Technology - has developed a plan to sustainably transform all 847,000 tenement flats in the Netherlands and create more housing.

Master's student Joep Bastiaans made an inventory of recently developed collaborative housing concepts for seniors and investigated to what extent these meet their needs and wishes. His Master's thesis 'Professional collaborative housing concepts for seniors' won the Jeroen van der Veer Thesis Award 2021.

Two recent MSc graduated from our faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment became third in the finale of the DAIDA Foundation Global Thesis award 2021. The annual event, acknowledges master graduates who come up with ideas to improve the lives of vulnerable groups living in rapidly growing cities in the context of the Global South. Ramona Scheffer and Zhuo-ming Shia were shortlisted with their graduation work amongst 10 other nominees and ended up sharing third place.

According to researcher Willemijn Wilms Floet the concept Hofje (charity courtyard) is likely to succeed in cities that face renewal and densification challenges: they bring security, tranquillity and a nice green communal environment. Hofjes contribute to the urban variety that makes dwelling and living in cities attractive. In her book and open access publication ‘Urban Oases, Dutch Hofjes as Hidden Architectural Gems’ she explains the sustainable design principles, the development, the social impact and why architects, urbanists and real estate developers in the 21st century could benefit. Every era deserves a hofje of its own.

Landscape architecture is more than the designing of parks and squares. It is an engineering tradition, argues Adriaan Geuze, landscape architect and founder of West 8. As the new Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at the Delft University of Technology, he sees opportunities for using landscape architecture in a crossover with the other domains in Delft. That is how we could work on complex and urgent long-term tasks, such as climate adaptation, housing construction, energy transition, and agriculture realignment.

Insufficient supply of new and existing owner-occupied homes is the main reason for the once again enormous rise in house prices in the fourth quarter of 2021. A declining number of house sales and increasing numbers of first-time buyers and middle-income households being sidelined were the first signals of a change in the housing market. The threat of a further rise in mortgage interest rates has now been added to this.

Jacques Van Marken was the founder of the Delft factories Calvé, Gist-Brocades and DSM. He was the first industrialist to build a green factory district for the employees, the Agnetapark. Van Marken was an extremely social entrepreneur who also arranged accident and health insurance for his staff, which was almost unheard of at the time. 30 students submitted models of their vision of an imaginary museum for someone who was of great importance to the city of Delft.

Teachers, students and construction practitioners experience a gap between the architect at the desk and the craftsman/woman on the construction site. The novice architect has a great gap between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge that is applied on the construction site, and therefore finds it difficult to maintain himself in contact with contractors and foremen.

Climate migration, or the movement of people due to environmental changes, is expected to grow as the climate changes. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre projects that 14 million people could be displaced annually by disasters, for example. Where will people leave, and where will they go – and why? How can we, as a society, manage this change in an equitable way?