News

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.