De Zwarte Hond shapes interaction environments for TU Delft’s Midden Campus

De Zwarte Hond has won the tender to draw up the area vision for Delft University of Technology’s Midden Campus area. The university’s aim is to smooth the way for a climate in which interaction and exchange – between students, researchers, employees, companies and city residents – is optimally facilitated. At the end of October, the focus was on the TU Delft and De Zwarte Hond teams getting to know each other, with a tour of the campus providing a great opportunity to see the strong points and the areas for improvement.

 Knowledge-intensive ecosystem
TU Delft is one of the world’s top (technical) universities, known for its pioneering research, excellent education and innovative collaboration with external partners. On its campus in Delft, more than 28,000 students and around 6,000 staff members work in science, design and technology every day, with the shared mission of helping to create a better society. In addition to the faculties, the campus also houses knowledge institutes, two universities of applied sciences, companies, student residences and other facilities. All these actors together form a rich knowledge-intensive ecosystem, in which high-quality education and research is conducted, and complex innovations are developed.

 Transformation Programming
Numerous developments are planned for the ‘middle’ (‘midden’) part of the university campus in Delft over the coming years. These require a vision with a spatial strategy that also gives further direction to current issues and ongoing developments. The Midden Campus Area Vision must illuminate the programming of the area and provide answers to challenges in spheres such as mobility, the design of outdoor space, green-blue structures and possible physical developments.

De Zwarte Hond regularly works on environments in which knowledge exchange, innovations and cross-pollination come into their own. Every day, we work on buildings and environments in which meeting and interaction are central, from the scale of educational buildings (such as in Leiden University’s Cluster Zuid or the Erasmus Pavilion in Rotterdam) to the creation of preconditions at city level (such as in the CID in The Hague). We look forward to putting this knowledge and experience into practice for TU Delft.