In the Netherlands, there is a large amount of buildings that are outdated according to today’s standards. Those existing buildings represent about 70% of the building stock in 2050. Updating these buildings in terms of functionality but mostly in terms of sustainability is therefore a highly relevant task at hand. To quote Prof. Mauro Overend in one of his lectures: “The most sustainable building is the one that has already been built”.
Among those buildings, what we could call brutalist buildings from the 1970’s and 1980’s represent a large part of our cityscapes. Those buildings are mainly built of concrete, are in general structurally sound, but although they are not to everyone’s taste, would cost a lot of energy to tear down. What’s more, due to poor insulation and dated climate systems, their energy efficiency is generally atrocious.
One good example of those brutalist buildings is the Academic Medical Centre (Academisch Medisch Centrum) in Amsterdam. Built at the beginning of the 1980’s, it is a concrete megastructure, Europe’s largest at the time of completion.
This graduation project is approaching the AMC building as a case study of how the brutalist buildings of the 1970’s and 1980’s could be renovated in a sustainable fashion.
The project has two components of sustaianability: the spatial design aims to introduce a social aspect to the layout of the research facility of the AMC ; the climate design introduces natural ventilation as a means to make the building more sustainable.
The education in the field of medicine has received new insights as to the advantages of exchange between researchers of different specializations. The current research facility is however not at all fit for such socializing. Where the official meeting rooms are already scarce, the informal meeting spots are practically inexistant. The spatial design of this project addresses that issue by creating informal meeting spaces, re-thinking the work floors’ layout and offering an inviting route to connect those spaces.
The climate system of the AMC, an all-air system with central air handling units, generates a high energy demand. By exploring the possibility of retrofitting natural ventilation couple with passive thermal treatment of the air, this design aims to show that very sustainable solutions are possible for apparently very un-sustainable buildings.