Living at Gele Scheikunde

Abstract

This research looks at Gele Scheikunde - a TU Delft chemistry department building constructed in 1945. The complex served for educational purposes until 2012 and then was sold by TU for redevelopment.
The ambition of the city of Delft is to increase the housing stock, furthermore, the number of TU campus users has grown significantly in recent years. This brings up a dilemma between densification and quality of life. For these reasons, abandoned or non-used buildings like TU faculty building Gele Scheikunde is envisioned for housing purpose. According to the official regulations and the Commission for Environmental Impact Assessment (MER), there is great potential in this university area to develop an innovative sustainable neighbourhood. Thus, the question that arises is: How to redevelop the former campus buildings?
The goal is to research on how to cope with abandoned campus buildings by including social and ecological values into the transformation and re-adaption design. The approach for the research was to involve stakeholders in the co-creation process. This co-creation process was facilitated through the Minecraft workshop. During the workshop, not only experts (e.g. architects, designers, planners) but also external parties (e.g. neighbours, users, ecologists), decided over the built environment. However, a co-creation approach is not limited to one method. There are various ways to involve stakeholders: interviews, surveys, questionnaires and workshops, with or without heritage games. For this research, a combination of the above was chosen: interviews, surveys and a gaming workshop with Minecraft.
This approach provided information on what is valued in the case study, why it is valued, what should be kept and what can be demolished. Besides all stakeholders shared their opinion on what would be the best “new program”.