In the run-up to the construction of the new city hall of Amersfoort, Kraaijvanger is offering the students of Campus ROC midden Nederland a great opportunity: to jointly design and build a sustainable living room for the city. The Room for the City will be a circular pavilion where residents can meet each other and gain knowledge about sustainable building. A beautiful, future-proof opportunity for the municipality and an instructive experience for all parties involved. The kick-off of the cooperation was last April when the design team of the city hall started together with students through a design challenge week. The students worked in groups to investigate the case and pitched their ideas to a jury.

The collaboration with students is part of the way in which Kraaijvanger implements the Social Return of the new city hall. Sharing knowledge and reducing the distance to the labor market are central to this. With the design of the pavilion we want to give substance to this task in a creative and practical way. Besides sharing knowledge with students and teachers, we gave a project manager with a distance to the labor market the opportunity to supervise the entire design and construction.

Building a circular pavilion is also a great opportunity to work with the new generation on a sustainable future by putting theory into practice. We support the students with going through the entire building process; from concept development & choice of materials to the physical construction of the pavilion. The building of the pavilion will also take place on campus. This ensures more involvement of the students and gives them the opportunity to think about the use of healthy materials and new building methods throughout the process.

Circular design for the future

The room for the city is designed from the circularity idea and will be a signboard for the new House for the City Amersfoort. Together with the ROC midden Nederland we will look for reusable building materials and strive to build a fully circular and crade-to-cradle pavilion. This means that we build for the health of people and environment with 100% clean materials and products. All steps in the production process, the use and future reuse of the materials are without harmful residual streams. This allows us to reuse the materials of the pavilion in the future. See the pavilion as a temporary storage place of valuable raw materials.

Learning together by doing together

To share this knowledge, we organized a multidisciplinary innovation week at the ROC Midden Nederland, where students of architecture, human technology and smart buildings were introduced to topics such as design thinking, concept development, designing with residual materials, and demountable and circular construction through workshops. In teams of 6-8 people each team worked on one of the 3 cases for the Room for the City:

1. Awareness: How to create awareness of sustainability among users through interaction in the Room for the City.

2. Reuse of materials: How to realize a piece of furniture for the Room for the City with only reusable and recycled materials.

3. Demountable building: How to design the room for the city with only reusable and used materials.

At the end of the week, the ideas were pitched to the judges. With the input from the students, we will work on a design for the room for the city. This will be developed after the summer as a learning object and built with students on the campus of the ROC after which it will be moved to the new building location of the House for the City and will serve as an information point before it gets a new life at a place to be determined in Amersfoort.