Saturday, June 13, 2015

Oerol RWS TUD Stuiflab

Last semester we developed new concepts to build on the dutch coasts. The research project that was done in cooperation with Rijkswaterstaat and the Architectural Engineering studio Intecture had the focus on a coast friendly way of building holiday houses on the beach. While the graduate students from Intecture developed entire houses, the bucky lab students developed concepts for new building construction details that can be utilised to form sustainable and beach friendly accommodations or pavilions.

One group of students within the bucky lab decided to develop a wind tunnel to test the influence of buildings on the coast, which normally reduce the natural sand depletion and therefore harm the defense line of our country.

Inspired by the wind tunnel the dutch coast morphologist Jan Mulder and the team of the Ministry of RWS and the TU Delft decided to have a 1:1 test set up on the beach during the Oerol festival on the island of Terschelling.

After a long period of planning we finally finished our preparation and send our lightvan to the island and build a pavilion - the stuiflab - as an information center including the wind tunnel, bucky lab prototypes and the different designs of the graduate students.

With the background of the sea and a blue sky the preparations were done in two days and the pavilion is now ready to welcome its guests for the next week during the oerol festival. We already had a group of guests and everyone was impressed by the content which triggers the discussion about building on the beach.

We will place the projects being visible in the pavilion the next days, but for now a couple of impressions from the first days.