Inspiring the next generation of engineers

At Octatube we organise a range of events over the year designed to inspire students and develop an awareness of Octatube’s world of realizing challenging architecture. That’s why we were happy to welcome about 32 students from BOUT, the Student Association for Building Technology last week to Octatube.

The afternoon was organized by Barbara van Gelder and Nick van der Knaap and before the group visited the factory they looked at some projects that Octatube has recently done like the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Sammy Ofer Centre in London.

Two case studies were explored deeper:

• The Van Gogh Museum
  First up was the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The entrance of the Van Gogh Museum is one of the largest glass structure in the Netherlands: both glass beams, glass mullions and double glass units are elements of the building’s main structure. The project demonstrates – together with projects such as the Municipal Museum in The Hague – that glass can be used as a primary structural material for breathtaking architectural facades. The largest glass fin is 12 meters long and 700 millimeters in height. The glass beams are supported by steel shoes, precisely welded to the main tubular steel structure. Due to the complex geometry, the many glass fin connections and extremely tight tolerances, the entire steel structure of 60x15x10 meters was pre-assembled in the factory (scale 1:1).
  
  
  
   
• The Market Hall
  The Market Hall is an architectonic residential project and market hall in Rotterdam. The building needed to be as open as possible to attract the public and at the same time it had to be closed off due to weather conditions. This resulted in a spectacular design covering the front and backside with a flexible suspended glass facade, allowing for maximum transparency and a minimal structure. These transparent cablenet facades have a width of 42 meters and a height of 34 meters, the largest of its kind in Europe. Octatube has been responsible for the engineering, production and installation of these large glass facades in collaboration with several partners.
   

By organizing this afternoon we hope to have given a bit of an insight into how we manage our projects. One of the students mentioned that it was clear that the work atmosphere at Octatube is noticeably good. Thank you for the great compliment! Of course we want to wish all the students all the best with their studies and thank you for visiting!