Development And Realisation Of The Concept House Delft Prototype

The Delft Prototype is a single apartment from a not yet realized Concept House Urban Villa, which consists of 16 apartments on 4 floors. Both the urban villa and the prototype demonstrate the characteristics of high level industrial production with an extremely low ecological footprint, as well as being energy-positive in use, and both are suitable for multi-storey housing. The research, development, production and built prototype resulted in a unique innovation on the Dutch building market: a sustainable energy-positive apartment system for medium-rise energy-positive housing. This scientific report deals with the history, development and realization process of the prototype up to the completion of the building phase, after which the prototype was furnished and the garden landscaped, culminating with the opening of the prototype in October 2012. The development was initiated by Mick Eekhout’s Chair of Product Development at the TU Delft at the specific request of the building industry and was carried out in close collaboration with a consortium of partners from the SME building supply industry. Innovation continues to progress in these partner industries. The entire project was externally financed for the 8 years of its duration. Apart from initiative and natural project leadership, the innovative contribution of the Chair included the design, coordination and integration of the many components into the single coherent entity of the Concept House ‘Delft’ Prototype.

The Prototype Laboratory initiated and maintained by the Chair of Product Development at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, has set an example in architectural education for hands-on ‘learning-by-making’ for students. According to the authors of this book, in the current curriculums time spent on practical work is not rewarded and students are educated in an abstract concept of architecture, not getting a proper feeling for materialization. A semester of designing, engineering, producing and building a prototype with their own hands after their own design often gives students a boost in their education. The Delft Prototype laboratory was the base of around 1,000 students, now professionals. Some architect’s offices make prototypes regularly as their designs are quite experimental and require more insight for the designing architect, before the realization of his building. Prototypes of technical components are often developed parallel to the building process. The Prototype Laboratory at the Faculty of Architecture was supervised for almost 18 years by Peter van Swieten. He describes his experiences in this book, in collaboration with the initiator, professor Mick Eekhout. Marcel Bilow took over the Bucky Lab, as it is called, from 2012 onwards.

The success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed and engineered by Frank O. Gehry and inaugurated in 1997, opened the eyes of the world to the plastic possibilities of Free Form Design. That is, on the side of architects and their admiring clients. Some architects draw up complicated but surprising and attractive Free Form Designs and win design competitions. The next step is to involve the manufacturing industry and the contractors in realizing these dreams. According to the author(s), the desire and logic for an adapted Free Form Technology will become became apparent after more designs. At Mick Eekhout’s design & build company Octatube the first experiences with Free Form Designs either failed, were aborted, were a disaster or led to unfortunate events such as the bankruptcy of competing firms who took on the projects without major Free Form Design experience. But Free Form design has matured nowadays. Many lessons can be learned from these early experiments, which is the main reason to share these experiences with readers of this book.

This book is a collection of articles written in recent years and used in lectures for students at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft and at Nottingham University. The lectures and articles are based on a mixture of innovations in academia and industry. They elucidate the relationship between architecture and building technology, as well as high technology, transfer of technology, innovative design, development and research in the Chair of Product Development at TU Delft. With his experience in both industry and academia, Eekhout’s goal is to bridge the gap between the two worlds and to stimulate them both, to prepare students to be inventive, innovative and daring enough to materialize their own dreams in practice. The lecture articles are based on the adventures and experiences in Mick Eekhout’s design & build experimental laboratory cum factory, which works on projects all over the world, and for many interesting clients. Eekhout was able to develop an innovative technical vocabulary for lightweight structures and claddings in architecture and encourages students to attempt the same.

Industrialized housing has been a common phenomenon in the building industry since the industrial revolution; the casting of iron components enabled Victorian iron casters to prefabricate entire buildings and to export them to all British colonies. It got a second boost from Modernist architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann; and a third boost in the US when the soldiers came back from the Second World War in 1945 and wanted to buy a ready-made house. In the later decades of the 20th century composite prototypes were built. Timber frame houses are extremely popular in low density areas worldwide. For densely populated areas housing is now firmly attached to reinforced concrete. The contracting industries have developed efficient building methods for the concrete structures on which separate systems of claddings are fixed to form a house. However, in the coming decades, designers, builders and scientists also have to keep the environment in mind, working with a minimal amount of materials, and for minimizing embodied energy and energy use. In the coming age minimal embodied energy and low ecological footprints are renewed values that will be added to energy-positive housing and that will have an influence on the building technology of the future. This will lead to a reformation of the building vocabulary. Other materials will have to be chosen and developed to function in building elements and components.

This book presents the results of a multi-annual project with sustainable Living Labs in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. Living Labs – as initiated by the authors – have proved to be very promising research, design, co-creation and communication facilities for the development and implementation of sustainable innovations in the home. The book provides an inspiring introduction to both the methodology and business modelling for the Living Lab facilities. Understanding daily living at home is key to designing products and services that support households in their transition to more sustainable lifestyles. This book not only explores new ways of gaining insights into daily practices, but also discusses developing and testing design methods to create sustainable solutions for households. These new methods and tools are needed because those available are either ineffective or cause rebound-effects. Intended for researchers and designers with an interest in the transition to sustainable lifestyles, it also appeals to company leaders interested in new ways of developing sustainable innovations and offers suggestions for effectively applying Living Labs for sustainable urban development.

In the past few decades, cepezed has gained renown with transparent, sustainable and technologically progressive architecture that is remarkably usable and humane. Unaffected design, sober but stylish materialization, and careful finishing are just as characteristic of Cepezed's oeuvre as the integration of spatial and construction-technical aspects. The design and building processes at cepezed are also integrated: the use of prefab components and the application of industrial building methods guarantee an optimum alignment of design and realization, in which time, quality, and costs are meticulously planned and controlled. Prototypes documents a large number of key projects and deals extensively with the various aspects of product development, building process and architecture. The layout and form of the book make it very similar to a cepezed design: celar, logical and efficient. It offers very incisive insight into the office philosophy that cepezed has drawn straight through architectural history. In addition to the timeless aesthetic pleasure that can be experienced in the designs and the craftmanship displayed at detail level, the much-discussed role of the architect in the design process today is examined in the book. A must read for every architect who wrestles with the threatened depreciation of the discipline.

an overview of product design approaches and methods used at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft.