The built environment requires energy-flexible buildings to reduce energy peak loads and to maximize the use of (decentralized) renewable energy sources. The challenge is to arrive at smart control strategies that respond to the increasing variations in both the energy demand as well as the variable …

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations have drastically started to reformulate the functionalities of their offices. The trend hybrid working has caused office buildings to have considerable low occupancy rates, as employees rather perform certain tasks at home and do not feel like the …

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate which critical success factors (CSFs) influence interaction on campuses as identified by the facility directors (FDs) of Dutch university campuses and to discuss how these compare with the literature. Design/methodology/approach: All 13 Dutch university …

Background and aim – In practice, phone pods and office booths, hereafter referred to as pods, have proven their added value and popularity in open-plan offices. How would that work in another context, such as in higher education? This study explores use and user perceptions of these pods in an atrium …

The coronavirus crisis has forced us to rethink the demarcation between the public and private space in the city. Individual homes – stages for domestic life – have become office spaces and places for unusual social interactions. As people started working remotely en masse, they were also forced to expose …

Designers of the Anthropocene era have to work with and for nature in order to reintroduce its beauty and functionality into our everyday life. As humans, we are colonising every single spot on earth. According to the United Nations, 55% of the human population is currently living in cities and by 2050 …

Current urban design and urban planning aim to facilitate global, regional and local urbanization programs. This implies most of the planning documents give room to the types of land use that seem to require space ‘here and now’. The amount of new housing, office and other industrial and commercial space, …

To understand how transition across different thermal zones in a building impacts the thermal perception of occupants, the current work examines occupant feedback in two work environments — nursing staff in hospital wards and the workers in an office. Both studies used a mix of subjective surveys and …

Lighting accounts for a significant amount of electrical energy consumption in office buildings, up to 45% of the total consumed. This energy consumption can be reduced by as much as 60% through an occupant-dependent lighting control strategy. With particular focus on open-plan offices, where the application …

In Delft, a fundamental perspective shift between different generations is born. By providing shared office and studio spaces for professionals from different age groups in the former City Hall at the edge of the historic center of Delft, a city route through the design of Jo Coenen is revived. This …