News

The treatment of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and Ebola is challenging, especially on location under extreme conditions. How can you use architectural design to make such clinics both technically possible and approachable? In collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières, students of the master track Building Technology set to work on that question.

Greenhouses use large amounts of natural gas for maintaining ideal crop growth conditions. BK Alumna Liesanne Wieleman and Jildou de Jong from the start-up Thermeleon, and researcher Martin Tenpierik received a Take-Off grant from NWO to conduct a study into the technical and financial feasibility of a new screening system, functioning as a passive heat battery. First results have shown a good potential for reducing the annual gas demand of the horticultural sector in the Netherlands.

Primary school classrooms can be noisy places, making it hard for some children to concentrate and feel at ease. PhD researcher Dadi Zhang spent recent years finding out to what extent sound is experienced as noise and how it affects the well-being and performance of pupils. She’s also thought out a potential solution and decided to design a device aimed at noise reduction.

New online platform Bouwflix will bring the building site to the lecture hall, clearly linking theory and practice. In this way, the new generation of architects and structural engineers starts with the right knowledge to hold their own on the building site. Petra van Diesfeldt (AE+T) has received a research grant of € 50.000,- as Comenius Teaching Fellow to further develop this initiative.

How can specific building components contribute to healthy circular material flows? PhD researcher Bob Geldermans took the case of non-bearing partitioning walls to explore how material properties, material flows, product design, and user benefits can contribute to circularity and flexibility in the built environment.

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology will accept ‘Expressions of Interest’ for hosting Marie Curie Individual Fellows. Excellent postdocs and recent PhD graduates who would like to apply 2020 programme are invited to join the excellent research environment at our faculty.

To maintain and keep a building in use, interventions are required at certain moments in time. It is usually up to an architect to consider what interventions are to be made. But what purposes do they actually serve? How do actions work out? How satisfactory is the result? The forty Master’s students taking the new MASTERMIND CRASH course, made a game of finding out.

Imagine this: you can control the acoustics of your environment, no matter the size and shape of the space around you, your access to electricity, and the type of sound you’d like to control. That is what the ADAM project prototype offers. With the use of mathematical models and 3D printing, amongst others, ADAM allows the creation of tailor made sound absorbers.

Urban rivers are important elements for urban ecosystems and for the migiation of the effects of climate change. Regenerating urban rivers proves a challenge, especially in dense downtown areas where there is insufficient space to develop natural riverbanks. Research project GreenQuays proposes a set of innovative vertical ecosystems to renature such quays.

With her graduation project ‘Space for the brain’, Lauren Broshuis is the first student to graduate online from the MSc Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences. Her project advocates the inclusion of varying environmental stimuli in the built environment to account for individual preferences, guaranteeing grounds for focus and creativity for every brain.