The Culture of Living

The “The Culture of Living” explores the idea of an urban block as an organism, where living, working and meeting activities are entangled. This exploration seeks to create a lively neighborhood, where the residents and users are the protagonists while the urban block is the stage. At the same time, this project is a continuous research on how a...

Between Nature and Culture: a garden

There’s Paulo Mendez da Rocha quote that stuck with me since I read it on my first year of Bachelor: “`Las naturaleza es una mierda`” Swiss architect Luigi Snozzi made this quote his mantra, and used to repeat it all the time to his students at the first year. “`The role of the architect is to intervene on nature, modifying it for the needs of...

Real-Time Insight in Geotechnical Risks: Monitoring during the Observational Method

Designing challenges engineers to develop both economically attractive and safe designs. This might seem a paradox, but with the application of the observational method, wherein safety is checked by real-time monitoring, economic design and safety are united. The observational method is recently successfully applied in the Netherlands during the...

Observational Method, Case A2 Maastricht

The A2 tunnel in Maastricht has been built within a dry building pit with a maximum depth of 22 meters with sheet pile walls, suspended in a cement bentonite trench supported by struts at 2 to 4 levels. Dewatering is done by deepwells. The excavation reaches into Limestone layers so the maximum mobilized passive resistance of the sheet pile wall...

Nanolime deposition in Maastricht limestone: Back-migration or accumulation at the absorption surface?

The development of nanomaterials is growing exponentially in the last decade. New discoveries and their applications have taken place in different fields, such as electronics, chemistry, biology and physics. Some innovative nanoproducts have become available also for the conservation of cultural heritage (e.g. nano-Ca(OH)2, nano-SiO2, nano-TiO2,...

Experimental study on evaluation of self-healing capability of FRCCs comprising different components

Fiber reinforced cementitious composite (FRCC) has a great capability for selfhealing of cracks. Concrete cracks with a sufficiently small crack width (below 0.1 mm) can be closed and self-healed by crystallization of calcium carbonate in the presence of moisture, even in the case of ordinary concrete. Such precipitation is caused by reaction of...

Upflow limestone contactor for soft and desalinated water

Desalinated or demineralised water or even soft water is characteristically low in hardness, alkalinity and pH. Thus, these kinds of water need to be re-conditioned (re-mineralized) before distributing for usage as drinking water. The produced water is expected to satisfy the following requirements: safe quality for human health, no quality...

Identification of the members of the Maastricht Formation in Valkenburg, the Netherlands

In the city of Valkenburg a new underground parking garage is being built next to the Hema. For this project four boreholes were drilled in the Maastrichtian limestone. These cores were described and tested at the laboratory of the department of Geoscience and Engineering of Delft University of Technology to obtain the geotechnical properties of...

3D subsurface modelling and geotechnical risk analysis for the tunnel construction of the A2-project Maastricht

To reduce traffic problems and to improve the social climate in Maastricht a tunnel will be constructed for the A2 motorway. The tunnel will be construction with the cut-and-cover method. Before the constructions starts first a ground improvement campaign is performed. Afterwards sheet pile walls will be installed in cemented slurry trenches and...