De Circulaire School van de Toekomst

Switching to a circular school heritage in Flanders

Groep Van Roey designs and builds many schools. Until recently, this was done entirely through traditional design methods. With this project, we want to investigate how we can further optimise the transformability and circularity of our school buildings, based on scientific and technical studies.

We translated our objective into the following research questions: What is the design and construction strategy specifically for circular schools? Which set of building solutions can we put together for easier disassembly and reuse and which meet the specific requirements? Which solutions score best after life cycle analysis in terms of environment and costs? How can we take future transformations of schools into account in these studies?

What will the future bring?

As the Van Roey Group, we want to improve the quality of people's lives by creating liveable and sustainable environments where people like to live, work, learn and play sports.

We will therefore continue to work on making our designs for school buildings more sustainable. The learning lessons from this project will also be included by the various partners in further research projects, such as School Buildings in Motion where we are developing circular movable schools together with the municipal education system of Antwerp, Skilpod and Hasselt University, or CIRCAT where VITO together with Boydens and Re-vive is conducting research into circular technical installations.

Besides the various research projects, we also put the circular principles into practice.

For the education sector of the Flemish Community GO! we are building De Stadsmus, a primary school in Oudergem according to a number of circular principles, such as

- linking the classes in pairs so that co-teaching is possible (adapting the pedagogical vision)
- all internal walls are non-load-bearing, which ensures extra flexibility for the future
- the height was deliberately overdimensioned so that there is still room to provide extra technology (should the requirements change in the future)
- it is also a school that can be used for a wide range of purposes, with the classrooms and the playground being opened up to the neighbourhood after school hours.

De Stadsmus
- Principal: Education of the Flemish Community GO!
- Architect: Archiles Architects
- Landscape architect: Surroundings
- Stability agency: Studie 10
- Technical office: Boydens
- Acoustics agency: d2B

We are convinced that the combination of research projects and practical cases will serve as an accelerator to make circular schools the new standard.