The new Techbank on the university campus in Enschede delivers on a sustainable promise. The building was designed ten years ago to be fully demountable, as temporary accommodation for the Amsterdam District Court, with the intention of dismantling it after six years and rebuilding it elsewhere. In its second life, after a period in storage, it now functions as a knowledge lab. At the time, developer DPCP took a risk, but the importance of kick-starting the circular economy carried greater weight.
Because of the large-scale redevelopment of the Amsterdam District Court, the capital needed a temporary court building in 2016. The client, the Central Government Real Estate Agency (Rijksvastgoedbedrijf), asked not only for an appropriately representative building, but also for minimising waste and maximising residual value. Development consortium DPCP (Du Prie and cepezedprojects) saw this as an opportunity to prove it could be done: a business case for a representative building designed for reuse.
Accounting for residual value is a prerequisite for a circular economy. DPCP therefore incorporated it into its pricing, even though at the start of the project there was still no buyer for the separate components. Alongside idealism, the conviction that one would be found was reinforced by cepezed’s refined design - a Delft-based architecture practice that has been experimenting with high-quality prefabricated architecture for more than fifty years.