TU Delft: The Latest Architecture and News

Winy Maas is one of architecture’s most aggressive researchers. Through his office MVRDV and affiliations with universities in Europe and America, Maas produces a seemingly unstoppable stream of insights into the environments in which architects now operate. As an advisor to the educational program of the Strelka Institute in Moscow, the architect is currently contributing to the production of eleven radical visions of the future, based on extrapolating trends that shape contemporary life, in Russia and around the world. Maas recently sat with writer, curator, and Strelka faculty member Brendan McGetrick to discuss his unusual educational trajectory, learning from the conservationist Richard Leakey, facing death in Sudan, and the beauty of architects experimenting with algae.

+ 18

QS has released its annual World University Rankings for 2015, covering 36 individual subjects and sorting based on "academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact." The company, which claims to explore the top 800 universities in the world, began publishing academic rankings in 2011. Read on to see the list of top universities for architecture, and be sure to see the full, sortable list at QS's site.

With the touch of a button on your smartphone, your furniture begins to reconfigure while new walls glide into place. In a matter of seconds, your bedroom can become the kitchen, dining room, or simply an empty room thanks to the ingenuity of architecture students at Delft University of Technology's Hyperbody design team. The Pop up Interactive Apartment occupies a mere 50 square metres of multi-use space optimized for specific real-time use, allowing the occupant to choose a configuration based on current needs.

Enter the hyper-efficient world of Pop up Interactive Apartment after the break.

Buildings, regrettably, don't last forever. Until recently, the only way to increase a building's lifespan was ongoing maintenance, which can be expensive, time-consuming and in the case of infrastructure such as bridges or roads, inconvenient. Beyond that, periodic replacement of the entire structure was an option, however this is clearly not a sustainable solution, especially considering the amount of CO2-releasing concrete used in modern construction.

But in the 21st century, another alternative is emerging. This article on CityLab uncovers three self-healing materials that could significantly extend the lifespan of a construction, including Erik Schlangen's asphalt that re-sets itself with a dose of induction heating, concrete developed at TU Delft (and elsewhere) that patches up cracks with the help of its living bacterial aggregate, and a recent discovery by MIT scientists that some metals have self-healing properties.

Read the article in full here, or carry on after the break for our own coverage of Erik Schlangen and TU Delft's work in self-healing materials.