Adopt + Adapt = Adept

[Piet Meijs]

Originally Posted by Koen Eykhout

....

The place where I sleep is a verblijfsgebied and needs daylight (what in the...), and a place like the kitchen where I actually do things does not?

Don't shoot the messenger.

[ardbuijsen]

The kitchen is also a 'verblijfsruimte'. Which doesn't mean that you have to make direct daylight (a window). But the connection between the kitchen and the surrounding 'verblijfsruimten' needs to be a minimum of 1800 mm. This may be reduced to 1200 mm because it is fairly normal to have a high model fridge at the end of the kitchen. Because of this normally a 600 mm deep wall is made to camouflage the fridge from the living room for example. So daylight is determined by a definition and not by physical means in this case. It does take reflection and radiation of light in account. Does this make any sense the way I try to explain this?

[Piet Meijs]

You are right. I needed to refresh my memory a bit but I found it again.

So in our solution what happens is that the kitchen is made part of the living-room "verblijfsgebied" and the windows in the living-room have to provide enough daylight for that entire area of living-room combined with the kitchen.

I did find the 1800mm requirement in my book but didn't see anything about the allowed 600mm reduction. Where did you find that?

[ardbuijsen]

That's not something you can find in the Bouwbesluit [iTunes-link]. But it is commonly accepted because these high model fridges take away daylight too.

[Margaret and Rijk Rietveld]

We have collected three different old office buildings from three different (existing) clients, on which we going to test this concept.

[Piet Meijs]

When we were looking online for reference projects for another project we came across this project:

http://jump.dexigner.com/directory/7895

The image immediately made me think of the intensive lowrise project we did:
http://www.rietveldarchitects.com/showthread.php?t=80

But after reading the site a bit more i found that the units are pre-fabricated and inserted in a concrete skeleton.

The main difference with our project is obviously that we re-use an existing concrete skeleton, rather then building a new one.

[ardbuijsen]

What I don't see really in all these concepts is how these are energetically sustainable. What I mean is, they add a lot of extra facade surface. I think it would energetically more interesting to do this without the extra external square meters of envelop. Or do I miss something?

[Koen Eykhout]

They don't have to stick out, do they?

I don't know.. We're talking about empty office buildings from the 70's/80's here.
There are exceptions of course, but for quite a few of them I'd say that some NATO missile strikes would count as urban renewal.
A bit tough to talk about it without looking at the specifics, but I could see how those elements sticking out could be used as a way to liven up the facade a bit.

[ardbuijsen]

Of course they don't have to stick out but so far in all images they do, hence my question.

[Piet Meijs]

Hey Koen en Ard,

To answer your questions:

The first reason that the "core" elements stick out is to add extra floor area to the building, which will generate more capital on the income side of the project. This extra income can be used to pay part of the transformation of the building.

The second reason is that we want to use this principle on an existing office skeleton. To keep the project affordable we think that it will be cheaper to have all the duct and pipe work on the outside of the building, rather then cutting through floors of the existing skeleton.

The third reason is what Rijk already once discussed on this forum. The issue of being green. Being green is not something that is the main objective of a project. It's just something you always do (aka change your underwear). The important thing for the architect is to create an interesting building while still achieving a good "green" result. Otherwise we would end up with heavy, "fat" looking buildings with tiny windows, etc....