From the 17th until the 19th of September, Anne Paduart and Stijn Brancart of the Circular Retrofit Lab-team organised a second 3-days student workshop. After a successful first edition with students from 5 different Belgian universities, in which the participants constructed a series of demountable spaces in the existing student modules of the campus, the students were now given a new challenge!

Making use of these demountable building systems, the students transformed the previous space into a pop-up space for lectures, events and exhibitions. Reusing, repurposing and reconfiguring the previously assembled systems, the workshop demonstrated their potential reuse, reversibility and multi-functionality.

Following the principles of transformable building design, this workshop illustrated the transformability and versatility of the construction systems to the test, checking for the feasibility of multiple reuse. This is one of the main research goals of the experimental Circular Retrofit Lab, the Belgian pilot project of the H2020 project Buildings As Material Banks, situated in 8 existing modules of the student village in the center of the VUB campus of Etterbeek.

The workshop challenged the creative skills of architectural engineering students to use reclaimed components to make a new design, giving them the physical space and tools to test the principles with a hands-on approach in an experimental and dynamic setting.

The living lab tests are sponsored by Geberit, Gyproc, JuuNoo, Systimber and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.