The VUB is building its future with the objective of providing the university's faculties and services with appropriate housing in accordance with contemporary standards. The development of mostly internationally oriented teaching requires new high-quality teaching spaces and laboratories.
The laboratories in Building G, which houses part of the teaching and research activities of the Faculty of Science, were built in the 1970s. The installations are now technically and economically depreciated. For these reasons, the VUB wishes to thoroughly renovate the building. In this way, the VUB hopes to once again have representative housing that meets the requirements and wishes of its users and the high-quality research they conduct. Moreover, this housing must be reliable, affordable, sustainable and future-proof. The project includes the renovation of the chemistry teaching and research laboratories of the Faculty of Sciences at the Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus in Etterbeek. The program consists of the phased renovation and realization of the 2 upper floors (building G, floors 9G-10G) with chemical research and teaching laboratories, rooms for specific equipment, support, writing space, offices, storage and a limited cluster of teaching rooms. About 70 fume hoods need to be renewed and relocated.
A double-height technical room will be added to the roof in order to have sufficient space for the necessary ventilation groups, heat pumps and chillers. This intervention is necessary on the one hand for phasing and preservation purposes, but on the other hand also in order to be able to already provide sufficient installation capacity and flow in the future for the other floors of the building, which will also be renovated in a later phase. The result is an additional roof structure provided as "a crown" on the building, and makes this building an "eye-catcher" on campus.
The site has a heat network, nevertheless for the heat production it was opted to provide this more sustainably with the help of some heat pumps. This is part of VUB's plan to make their site more sustainable in the future. When working out the techniques, account was taken of the fact that the vertical pipe structure was already provided as much as possible during the current works, with a view to the later renovation works of the other floors. A complete building assessment has also been made for the ventilation, and in this phase the necessary ventilation groups will be provided to suit the entire building. In this way, this building is made 'future proof', and VUB can smoothly carry out the following renovation phases on a technical level. The drawing up of a ventilation and energy balance allows all energy flows to be mapped, so that an exercise can be made to reduce consumption to a minimum.
The entire project was fully modeled in 3D, using REVIT software. This allowed us to closely coordinate the rather extensive installations (which such buildings demand) within the existing building structure. Since the existing building structure was preserved, it was a challenge to provide the necessary space for all ducts and pipes.
The works started in August 2021 and will be completed in 2023 so that the VUB can move into level 9 and 10, and the next works in the building can be started.
Want to know more about this project? Contact our expert Jan Robert at jan.robert@ingenium.be or by phone at 050 40 45 30.
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