A Building system for the future

Abstract

In face of climate change, a large challenge was posed to the construction section as the European Union introduced requirements to reduce CO2 emissions; these must be reduced by 40% before 2030, and all member states have to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. At the time of writing, the construction industry in the Netherlands is respon¬sible for a large part of CO2 emissions, and due to the lack of significant changes in the industry in recent decades, a meaningful reduction of emissions in the coming years seems unlikely. The difficulty of lowering emissions is further amplified by the major housing shortage, for which it is estimated that one million homes must be built before 2030 to meet the population’s demand in the Netherlands. Furthermore, the construction sector is far behind in terms of environmentally conscious innovation when compared to sectors such as technology and transportation. Architects, contractors, engineers, and civil servants therefore have to join arms to implement large-scale in-depth reforms and accept much-needed innovation.

The booklet, paper and posters present the results of an innovative building system that can contribute to the sustainability of the construction sector. This concept was developed based on six months of research in which nine timber building systems were tested for their degree of flexibility and demountability. A framework was then created, where a chosen system was further developed, step by step, into a building concept that can be applied on a large scale. An attempt was made to incorporate every aspect that a building must satisfy without compromising simplicity. The development of the system has a generic and an applied phase. In the generic phase, the basis of the system is laid, which in theory is the same for every building. In the applied phase, the system is further ela¬borated based on the design assignment, which in this case concerns a temporary student building that must be transformed into laboratory and office functions after 10 years. Although the two phases are separate, the gaps in the generic part become vi¬sible when the system is tested in an actual design, resulting in a generic and specific phases that have continuous exchange and influence on each other. In practice, such a standardised system that is to be applied on a large scale is further fine-tuned after it has been realised and experimented with many times.