Tight Budgets and Sustainability: The Reconciliation of Water and Fire? Belgian Lessons Taken from the Past and Present into the Future.

Paul Lodewijckx, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is the largest university in Belgium—with 31,500 students and 7,000 employees, 4,500 of which are researchers—and one of the oldest in Europe. Out of necessity, the university has a tradition of realizing building projects with a very tight budget. This year, the design of a 20,000-square-meter (m²) biotechnology laboratory was completed with a budget of less than 1,500 euro/m² ($190/ft²) (excluding project & construction management). In 2004 O&N2, an educational, office, and research building, was completed at a price of 1,000 euro/m² ($135/ft²).

Sustainability, in this context, can seem a non-issue.

Nevertheless, in the last few years a lot of effort has been put into integrating sustainability topics into the design process, including:

• Heating, cooling, and comfort standards
• Heat recovery
• Flexibility and laboratory furniture
• Organizational flexibility/modularity

In every new project each topic is re-evaluated and re-interpreted. New topics are introduced into the design process.

While going in depth into these topics, this presentation wants to prove that sustainable design and minimal construction costs are possible, but it will show that this asks for intensified study and simulation during the design process, as well as scaling down sustainability topics (e.g., flexibility) to real user/owner/client needs. Building with limited budget means an integrated whole building approach and the same goes for sustainability.

In that sense this doesn't mean the reconciliation of fire and water, but rather it can be a catalyst for a thoroughly decision based design process.

Biography:

Paul Lodewijckx graduated in 1994 as an architectural engineer from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Belgium. After a two year practice at Abscis Ontwerpgroep, Ghent, he joined the Technical Services of K.U.Leuven as a project manager. He has been head of the laboratories division since 2003 and his current projects concern mainly biotech laboratories and vivariums but synthesis laboratories and nanotechnology laboratories are planned.

Mr. Lodewijckx was a speaker at the 206th seminar "Laboratories and Research Centers: Design, Construction, and Operation" of the National Training Centre, Belgium, and also co-organizer of the first Labs21-Europe "main land" seminar in April 2007.

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