- Student
- 18/10/2024
VIRTU/e to present top-up concept at DDW
To provide enough housing for all future residents of Eindhoven, the city needs to densify. This can be achieved by building residential towers, but also by adding new homes on top of existing ones. Student team VIRTU/e is developing a concept for this, which the students will be presenting at Dutch Design Week next week.
Building a house on top of another house: according to VIRTU/e member Hannah Poot, this is a good idea because it allows more people to live on fewer square meters without losing the atmosphere and social interaction of a street. The student team has developed a concept to build new residential spaces on top of existing row houses. Row houses offer a lot of potential for gaining new living space: they are the most common type of housing in the Netherlands.
For the students, it’s not just about gaining space, but also about how you do that. Poot: “We want to do it in the healthiest and most sustainable way possible.” By “healthy”, the student primarily means a socially healthy environment where neighbors interact. The team already has a lot of experience with sustainable construction (see text box). At the team’s ED/IT exhibition during Dutch Design Week (DDW), visitors can use an interactive model to find out how sustainable certain building materials are and why. They also get the chance to design their own ideal street using an urban planning model.
Solar Decathlon Europe
VIRTU/e’s main goal in the past used to be to design a building for the sustainable housing competition Solar Decathlon Europe. Two years ago, the team won second place in the competition with their building Ripple. However, the next event scheduled for 2023 was canceled. With no more challenges ahead, the student team decided to set up a new project on their own. The idea to present the concept at the Dutch Design Week also came from the students themselves.
Through interaction with visitors, the students hope to gain insight into what residents consider important. For example, would people even be interested in living in a house built on top of another house? “Those are the kinds of questions we hope to find answers to at DDW. You build a house for someone else, so we hope to get feedback that will help us improve our concept.” Because at present, it is little more than a collection of prototypes; it is not even certain yet whether the various structures envisioned by the students can actually be built on top of row houses.
Fine-tuning
“We’re still running into a lot of issues,” says Poot. “For example, in order to add a new residential level, adjustments have to be made to the existing building as well. The question is whether that’s feasible and how much needs to be modified.” The students still need to work out many of those technical aspects. “We’ve completed the concept phase, and after presenting and fine-tuning our plans, we’ll move on to the technical side. That’s when we check whether everything is actually possible and can come together. If we manage to expand our network of partners, we can really start putting our ideas into practice.”
The team is already on the lookout for streets in Eindhoven where the concept could be applied and for housing associations that rent out suitable houses. “Our goal is for people to actually rent our houses in the future,” says Poot. “What we saw with previous teams is that they created a final product, only for it to be forgotten and left to gather dust after the presentation. I thought that was a shame. If we create something, we want it to be used.”
The concept will now have to pass its first test at DDW. If people are enthusiastic and the students manage to find the right partners, a “top-up home” from VIRTU/e may actually become a reality in Eindhoven. That wouldn’t be the first one, by the way. It may not have been very obvious because it was placed on the ground on campus for a long time, but Ripple, the team’s previous project, was also intended to be placed on top of another building. “It’s simply a good idea,” Poot concludes.
VIRTU/e’s exhibition is free to visit throughout the entire Dutch Design Week at The New Block, at Strijp-S.
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