Collapse Investigation of the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture Building: Preliminary Evaluation of Member Capacities

On May 13, 2008, the Faculty of Architecture Building, or ‘Bouwkunde’, at the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands suffered a fire that resulted in the collapse of the northwest wing of the 13 story building. No one was injured but the building was a complete loss.

Collapse of concrete buildings in fire is rare; this report aims to provide a preliminary evaluation of the structure and point to key areas that may be of interest to future analyses and investigations. To this end, a large database of information was collected, including original and renovation construction documents, original structural calculations, and over 3000 photographs of the structure during and after the fire. This data has been organized and reviewed to provide a clearer understanding of the building and fire.

Preliminary models of the fire are developed and applied to selected structural elements in the FOA to the temperature distributions within the members. Also provided is an overview of available methods for calculating the ultimate strength of reinforced concrete members at elevated temperatures and a computer application, UT Fire: Reinforced Concrete Analysis, which can be used to estimate member capacities through a given fire event, based on their internal temperature distributions.