Architectural Design and Engineering

‘Making Architecture' Lecture Series at the Department of the Built Environment of the Eindhoven University of Technology provide students, professionals and others interested in architecture the opportunity to get inspired by a variety of well-known architects. Moderator Juliette Bekkering.

Circularity and biobased buildings are currently a pressing and key topic in the design sector and the building industry. The global challenges we are facing due to climate change and the depletion of natural resources is forcing us to radically change the way we shape our built environment and to take a critical and new look at how we design and construct. The research developed under the lead of Prof. Juliette Bekkering in collaboration with Dr. Ing. Cristina Nan and Dr. Torsten Schröder addresses these themes and proposes a new agenda for the future.  We collected knowledge questions from both academia and the professional field and used these to identify the most pressing knowledge gaps. 

Our report consists of a selection of projects and a series of interviews and questionnaires, which challenged academics and designers to formulate their most pressing research questions. Our overview does not strive for completeness, but its ambition is to expose a range of exciting initiatives and to put together a challenging agenda that explores, shifts and thunders through boundaries. Our aim is to offer a simplified yet systematized direction for action in the complex realities surrounding circularity.

The topic of circularity is far too complex and multi-layered to be contained in chapters, by lists and tables. As we find ourselves in a transition phase from a linear to a circular economy, we strive for a unified and systematized direction that can point us towards a shared vision of circularity in the built environment and beyond.