Sustainable Refurbishment for an Adaptable Built Environment

The reconsideration of the existing building stock is motivated by society’s efforts towards sustainability and resilience. The building sector has a considerable role to play in doing so. The process of refurbishment is complex, since aspects such as design decisions, existing construction, energy efficiency, and user behaviour need to be...

A sneaky kettle: Emotionally durable design explored in practice

Emotionally durable design is a genre of sustainable design that aims at reducing consumption and waste by enhancing the durability of the relationship established between users and products. Several design strategies and theories have been published on this topic; nevertheless, it is still underexposed in practice. This paper presents a case...

Redesign: Upgrading the building stock to meet (new) user demands

Financial and real estate crises and “new ways of working” reduce the need for office space. As a consequence, office markets become replacement markets without a quantitative need for new office buildings: new buildings drive out bad buildings. In the Netherlands, currently 14% of the office space is vacant, of which 60% is redundant or...

The Sustainable Office. An exploration of the potential for factor 20 environmental improvement of office accommodation

Sustainable development is the goal of a balance between economy and the environment, whilst establishing a better spread prosperity across the world. In order to make this possible, the environmental load of our commodities needs to be reduced by a factor of 20. This factor 20 can also be translated to the office market. The PhD research...