Aula TU Delft, Netherlands

Some buildings sit on the edge of science and theatre.
The Aula at TU Delft feels exactly like that.

Completed in 1966 on Mekelweg, the Aula TU Delft is the brutalist heart of the university campus, designed by Van den Broek & Bakema as a vast auditorium and ceremonial hall for the Technical University. Its great concrete body cantilevers out over the grass, supported on angular legs, with a folded roofline of vertical fins that cut sharply into the Dutch sky. Often nicknamed “the frog” or “the UFO”, it has become one of the most recognisable post-war modernist buildings in the Netherlands and was listed as a national monument in 2009.

Inside, the Aula houses a 1,300-seat auditorium, trapezoid lecture halls, senate chambers and daily social spaces, from the main restaurant to informal meeting areas on the stairs. It is where students graduate, where honorary doctorates are awarded, and where the university gathers to mark its biggest moments, so the building lives in thousands of personal memories as much as in architecture books.

I was drawn to the Aula for its sheer strangeness and poise: that hovering concrete hull, the serrated roof, the way the whole thing seems to crouch and lift at once. Turning it into a model meant focusing on the overhangs and the symmetry along its length, simplifying the rear wings so the main auditorium volume and folded fins stay clear. I worked through several digital massing studies to get the stance right, then refined the casting so the undersides, legs and roof all catch light in a way that feels true to walking up across Mekelpark towards it.

A small concrete fragment of one of Europe’s great brutalist university halls.