BKCity Slim Refurbishment
Phased a 30,000 m² listed faculty to carbon neutrality for under €25 million.
- Client and partners
- Delft University of Technology, Atelier Ten
After a 2008 fire destroyed the TU Delft architecture faculty, the school moved into BK City, a labyrinthine 1920s brick monument of more than 30,000 m². The building was inspiring and expensive to run. Except was one of five international teams invited to design a sustainable vision for it. The resulting plan takes the building to energy and carbon neutrality within ten years for less than €25 million, and treats the fabric itself as a teaching instrument: every intervention is legible to the students who study inside it.
The Problem
A listed monument sets hard limits. The envelope cannot be freely altered, the plan is labyrinthine, and the energy bill was the running cost of a structure never designed to carry one. The conventional answer is a technical retrofit: insulate, reglaze, install plant, and hand the students a building that performs well and teaches nothing.
For a faculty of architecture that is a wasted asset. The brief was reframed around a second requirement running alongside the first: the refurbishment had to raise the building's performance and its didactic value at the same time, so that generations of architects learn sustainability from the structure they occupy.
Process
Four streams, run together
Analysis followed the four dimensions used on every Except project: energy and materials, ecosystems and species, culture and economy, health and happiness. Each intervention had to return benefits across more than one stream rather than optimise a single number.
Phase the easy gains into the systemic ones
The plan interleaves immediate measures with long-horizon interventions, each phase enabling the next. Wall, roof and window insulation carries 67% of the heat saving. Compacting the occupied volume cuts exposed surface by 32%. Glass-embedded photovoltaics, a Fresnel PV south atrium, ground storage and a connection to the campus biogas plant follow, with space reserved for energy technologies that do not exist yet.
Put an ecosystem inside the building
An enclosed atrium garden, the Green Lung, anchors a pervasive building ecosystem: polyculture and monoculture greenhouses, a plant-based climatisation system, bio-based water filtering to self-sufficiency, and green roofs on the existing atria. Collaboration frameworks with Wageningen and the Botanical Garden keep it running as a research instrument rather than a decorative one.
Outcomes
- Heat saving from insulation
- 67%
- Wall, roof and window insulation across the listed envelope.
- Reduction in exposed surface
- 32%
- Achieved by compacting the occupied volume.
- Additional usable space
- 10,000 m²
- Recovered within the existing monument.
- Total investment
- Under €25M
- Phased across ten years to energy and carbon neutrality.
Gallery
Credits
Except team: Tom Bosschaert (Director), Jacob Verhaart (Head of Science, Industrial Ecologist).
With: Eva Gladek (Industrial Ecologist), Stephanie Bartscht (Communications Design), Nels Nelson (Urban Ecologist), Rebecca Blum (Designer), Nico Langeveld (Designer), Meredith Davey (Engineering, Atelier Ten).
Except team: Tom Bosschaert (Director), Jacob Verhaart (Head of Science, Industrial Ecologist).
With: Eva Gladek (Industrial Ecologist), Stephanie Bartscht (Communications Design), Nels Nelson (Urban Ecologist), Rebecca Blum (Designer), Nico Langeveld (Designer), Meredith Davey (Engineering, Atelier Ten).
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