Arup go Dutch with the Echo Complex

UK consulting engineer Arup and Dutch architect UNStudio have designed a carbon-neutral building for Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The Echo complex will contain seven teaching rooms with flexible layouts, a 700-capacity lecture theatre that can be divided into three separate rooms, and 300 study spaces. It also houses cafes and restaurants and an underground cycle park. Designed in line with the Dutch universities’ requirements of extra teaching space, the latest intervention at TU Delft engenders larger teaching rooms. Supporting educational typologies with an energy-generating building, Echo is centered on the adaptability and wellbeing of the user.

The future campus needs to be programmed with a series of agile spaces that invite students and faculty to learn, collaborate and co-create. As student numbers continue to grow, educational buildings need to be extremely flexible: they not only need to operate for shared, interfaculty use, but also need to house a large variety of flexible spaces that cater for various ways of teaching and studying and varying class sizes.

Echo is currently under construction and due to be completed in December 2021.

Source: SteelGuru