Brian Fleuren Building Engineering · Avans
Render of two three-storey timber-clad accommodation blocks at dusk.

Portfolio · 2025 — 2026

Where a design meets the way it gets built

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Portrait photograph of Brian Fleuren.
Brian Fleuren · Wijchen, NL

Introduction

Building things came first. The engineering came after.

I am a third-year Building Engineering student at Avans University of Applied Sciences in 's-Hertogenbosch. I have been building and designing things for as long as I can remember; these days that means variant studies, building-physics calculations and BIM models in Revit.

What holds my attention is the point where a drawing meets reality — the span direction that decides which walls carry load, the duct run that has to be in the plan before it becomes a problem, the detail that decides whether a facade actually works.

The three projects below cover the range: four weeks on a live hospital site with a main contractor, an individual design taken down to detail level, and a large project run by a team.

Third yearSite experienceRevit & BIMDetailingWijchen, NL

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3

Projects

4

Weeks on site

350

Units planned

2028

Graduating

Project 01 Professional practice

Rijnstate hospital: Radiology & Nuclear Medicine

Four weeks on site in Arnhem with main contractor Bouwbedrijf Berghege, working alongside the site manager on an extension built hard against a hospital that never closed for a day.

The new hospital wing under construction: brick facade behind full scaffolding, with a mortar silo and site fencing in front.

Arnhem · Summer 2025

Twenty-four columns on a four by six grid

Project
Radiology & Nuclear Medicine extension
Location
Rijnstate hospital, Arnhem
Contractor
Bouwbedrijf Berghege
On site
10 June — 8 July 2025
My role
Intern to the site manager
Handover
January 2026

The building

A new wing on the north side of the hospital, holding outpatient rooms on the ground floor and the Radiology and Nuclear Medicine department above, including two hybrid operating theatres where imaging and surgery happen in the same room.

The frame is twenty-four concrete columns on a fixed four by six grid, with hollow-core floors and a masonry cavity wall. Simple, until you look at what has to happen inside it.

Why it was hard

Everything had to be built against a hospital that stayed fully open. The accident and emergency entrance sat directly opposite our scaffolding, so the site was shaped as much by what the hospital needed as by what the building needed.

The rooms themselves are unforgiving too: scanners impose limits on vibration and on what may come near them, and the theatre walls carry lead shielding that has to stay intact.

Construction

What the extension is made of

A hybrid of stacked and assembled construction: masonry and calcium silicate on site, prefabricated concrete over the openings.

Frame
24 concrete columns, 4 × 6 grid
Bays
7200 mm
Floors
200 mm hollow core + 60 mm topping
Cavity wall
100 brick · 80 cavity · 150 mineral wool · 150 calcium silicate
Thermal
Rc ≥ 4.7 m²K/W
Shielded walls
250 mm metal stud with 2 mm lead
North and east elevations of the hospital extension at 1:50, showing the brick facade, aluminium frames and the planted roof storey.
Elevations North and east elevations at 1:50 — brickwork, aluminium frames and the planted screen around the plant storey. Drawing by Croes Bouwtechnisch Ingenieursbureau for Berghege and Rijnstate.
Window sill detail at 1:5 from the project detail book, with the full cavity wall build-up annotated.
Detail H08 Window sill at 1:5 from the project detail book. The radiation shielding does not sit in the glazing — it sits in the metal-stud wall behind, as lead sheet between layers of plasterboard.

Constraints

Building against a hospital that stayed open

The site rules were written around the hospital, not around the build.

  • 01The ambulance route kept clear at all times, without exception
  • 02Nothing ferrous brought inside the scanners' magnetic field line
  • 03Vibration kept below the limit the imaging equipment could tolerate
  • 04Noisy work held back until the wards were awake, with fixed transport routes so construction traffic never crossed hospital traffic
View down from the scaffolding over the site, with the hospital's accident and emergency entrance and parked ambulances directly opposite.
The setting From the scaffold, looking across the fenced work area straight at the accident and emergency entrance. Everything on the left is a building site; everything on the right is a hospital running normally.
The cavity wall part-built along the alley between the new wing and the existing hospital, with insulation still exposed.
Facade The cavity wall going up in the alley between the new wing and the existing building — outer leaf part-built, insulation still open.

My contribution

What I owned

Most days were hands-on. Three things, though, were mine to design rather than to carry.

Work I designed

  • Took the raw transcript of a work meeting and turned it into usable minutes: seven themed sections, a decision list, and an action table giving every item an owner and a deadline. I did the same for the meeting that followed.
  • Built my own weekly measurement schedule for the operating-theatre walls. Those walls are electrically isolated by design, and services were being drilled through them constantly — the schedule made it visible, week by week, which walls were still sound and which had stopped being sound.
  • Carried out a workplace safety inspection against the site's own checklist and wrote it up.

Work I carried out

  • Setting out and plumbing masonry profiles so the brickwork would land on its gauge
  • Fixing vapour-tight membrane behind prefabricated panels, then drilling and resin-anchoring the brackets that carry them
  • Cutting service penetrations through the shielded walls and sleeving them
  • Building the timber support frame for an operating-theatre sliding door
Masonry profiles set out and plumbed along the facade, with prefabricated brick lintels resting on stainless brackets.
Profiles Set out level and at the right spacing — get this wrong and the bricks do not fit.
A stainless steel bracket bolted to the concrete floor edge, carrying a prefabricated concrete lintel, with black vapour-tight membrane dressed behind it.
Bracket Stainless bracket carrying a prefabricated lintel, with the vapour-tight membrane dressed in behind it.
A timber support frame built into a plasterboard wall opening for an operating-theatre sliding door.
Openings The timber frame we built to carry an operating-theatre sliding door.
Hand-drawn roof edge detail at 1:5 with an aluminium roof trim, prefabricated concrete band, insulation and a sedum finish.
My detail Roof edge at 1:5, drawn in CAD afterwards at school. Aluminium trim, a prefabricated concrete band borrowed from a solution I met on site, 160 mm mineral wool with a 30 mm continuous layer, and a sedum finish — facade and roof both at Rc ≥ 4.7 m²K/W.

Afterwards

Back at school I took the facade apart again and redesigned the roof edge myself, working through two variants before settling on one where the roof bears fully on the load-bearing wall. The prefabricated concrete band came straight from something I had watched go up in Arnhem.

Hand-drawn axonometric sketch of the cavity wall, annotated with the thickness of each layer.
Sketch Working the cavity wall out by hand: 100 brick, 80 cavity, 150 mineral wool, 150 calcium silicate.

Four weeks of carrying, drilling and setting out taught me something no drawing had: my interest sits before the site exists — in the preparation, the planning and the estimate.

Project 02 Individual

Cube House: from preliminary to final design

Module 1.3. A detached house with a cross-shaped floor plan, developed from preliminary design (VO) all the way to final design (DO). Floor plan, elevations, section, load-bearing structure, foundation and ventilation worked out entirely by me in Revit.

A1 overview drawing of the cube house containing four elevations, the ground-floor plan, section A-A, a 3D view and a roof plan.
Fig. 01 Overview drawing, A1 at 1:100. Ground-floor plan, four elevations, section A-A, 3D view and roof plan — built up entirely in Revit. Click to enlarge.
Module
1.3 — preliminary to final design
Type
Individual project
Brief
Detached house with studios and a workspace
Dimensions
15.7 m wide · ridge height +5.57 m
Software
Revit (BIM)
Delivered
April 2025

The brief

The house is made up of four volumes rotated around a diagonal axis. That produces a cross-shaped plan in which every wing takes on its own function: living, working, guest accommodation and four studios.

The difficulty sat in that rotated main form. Every kink in the facade demands its own answer in the load-bearing structure, the foundation and the detailing.

What I produced

  • Ground-floor plan at 1:100
  • Four elevations and section A-A
  • 3D model and visualisation in Revit
  • Principle details of facade and foundation
Ground-floor plan of the cube house with room numbers, areas and dimension lines.
Fig. 02 Ground floor, 1:100. Four volumes rotated around a diagonal axis: living room, kitchen/dining, guest room, workspace and four studios.
3D view of the cube house showing the rotated brick volumes.
Fig. 03 3D view from the Revit model. The rotation of the volumes is what makes the massing — and what complicates the structure.
Section A-A through the cube house with construction build-up annotations and level markers.
Fig. 04 Section A-A, 1:100, with the build-up of roof, facade and floor and the level markers up to +5.57 m.
Four elevations of the cube house at scale 1:100: front, right side, rear and left side.
Elevations All four elevations at 1:100. Every kink in the plan shows up here as a change of plane in the facade.

Structure

Load-bearing structure and foundation

Two variants for the span direction, tested against the rotated main form of the house.

Hand-drawn floor plan with arrows indicating a north-south span direction.
Variant 1 Span direction north–south. Short spans in the side wings, a longer span across the central section.
Hand-drawn floor plan with arrows indicating an east-west span direction.
Variant 2 Span direction east–west. Same plan, rotated span. This changes which walls become load-bearing.

Why two variants

Rotating the span direction immediately changes which walls carry load and where the foundation has to get heavier. I worked both variants out so that the choice could be made on evidence rather than assumed.

What I learned here

That a design decision taken at the front end — in this case rotating the volumes — works its way through to structure and cost at the back end. The diagonal axis looks good, but it produces extra kinks in the load-bearing structure and in the foundation.

Hand-drawn foundation plan showing strip footings under the load-bearing walls and an insulated floor between them.
Fig. 05 Floor with foundation. Strip foundations under the load-bearing walls, with an insulated PS floor between them.

Building physics

Ventilation concepts: system C and system D

Two ventilation principles worked out on the same floor plan, so that the consequences for comfort, space and energy could be compared side by side.

System C

Natural supply through vents in the facade, mechanical extract at the moisture-loaded rooms. In the drawing, two vents were deliberately struck out because they sat on the wrong facade.

  • Simple and inexpensive
  • Needs little space for ducts
  • No heat recovery

System D

Balanced ventilation: supply and extract both mechanical, with heat recovery. The duct runs are drawn out across the whole house from the plant room.

  • Heat recovery, so more energy efficient
  • Needs space for ducts and a plant room
  • Higher investment and more maintenance
Floor plan marked up in blue and red for ventilation system C, with two facade vents crossed out.
System C Variant 1. Blue: natural supply through facade vents. Red: mechanical extract from the toilet, bathroom and kitchen.
Floor plan marked up in blue and red showing the duct layout for balanced ventilation system D.
System D Blue: mechanical supply ducts to the habitable rooms. Red: extract from the wet rooms back to the plant room.

For this house, system D fits the energy requirements best — provided the duct routing is taken into account in the design itself. That last point turned out to be the core of the assignment.

Detailing

Principle details at 1:5

Drawn by hand, layer by layer, so that every part of the build-up has to be accounted for.

Hand-drawn roof edge detail at 1:5 with annotated layers from bitumen down to plasterboard.
Detail A Roof edge. Bitumen, waterproof membrane, XPS 040, vapour barrier, roof decking, timber joists and plasterboard.
Hand-drawn foundation detail at 1:5 showing the strip footing, insulated floor and cavity wall build-up.
Detail B Foundation. Strip footing, insulated floor and the transition into the cavity wall.
Hand-drawn window frame detail at 1:5 with dimensions and sealing annotations.
Detail C Window frame, detail 01. Brick, cavity, 30 mm insulation, 160 mm insulation between studs, plasterboard — with joint and seam sealing.

Project 03 Group · 6 students

Temporary asylum seekers' centre, Hoorn-West

A realisation plan for roughly 350 prefab housing units, commissioned by the COA (the Dutch central agency for the reception of asylum seekers). Elective module Project Management, with a team of six students from four different disciplines.

Render of two three-storey timber-clad accommodation blocks with bicycle shelters in front.
Fig. 06 Three-storey stacked units in timber cladding, with bicycle parking along the access route. Rendered from our Revit model.
Client
COA
Location
Genielaan 25A, Alphen aan den Rijn
Scale
350 to 360 housing units
Build time
12 months
Team
6 students, 4 disciplines
Delivered
October 2025

The brief

Deliver a temporary asylum seekers' centre within twelve months, built up from prefab modular units. The units are produced in the factory while the foundation is laid on site, so production runs parallel to the work on the building site.

Alongside the housing units, the plan covers sanitary facilities, communal living and dining areas, offices for the COA and the layout of the outdoor space.

What we steered on

  • 01A maximum deviation of 2% against the budget
  • 02Zero accidents involving lost time
  • 03Quality in line with the Bbl, NEN standards and the COA's programme of requirements
  • 04Limiting nuisance through the BLVC plan

My contribution

The 3D model and the building-engineering input

In a team drawn from construction management, spatial development and civil engineering, I was the building engineer. Working the units out in Revit therefore landed with me.

Dimensioned floor plan of one housing unit measuring 10.6 by 6.0 metres, with four beds, a shared living and dining area, kitchen and bathroom.
Fig. 07 Floor plan of a single housing unit, 10.6 × 6.0 m: four beds, a shared living and dining area, kitchen and sanitary facilities. This drawing was used as the cover of the realisation plan.
Section through three stacked storeys of housing units showing floors, foundation and furnishing.
Fig. 08 Section through three stacked storeys, with floor build-up and foundation.

What I worked on

  • The 3D model of the housing units in Revit, including plans and sections
  • The building-engineering development of the final design, together with two teammates
  • Thinking through working methods per construction phase: foundation, floors and placing the units

My role in the team

My fellow students came from other disciplines, so the building-engineering work fell to me naturally. A teammate who was originally going to build the Revit model swapped that task with me once it became clear it suited my background better.

That swap turned out to be the right call: our 3D model was noticeably more complete and more detailed than those of most other groups.

Render of the communal courtyard between the accommodation blocks, with a playground, benches and paths.
Fig. 09 The communal outdoor space between the blocks: playground, seating and paths, with external stairs and galleries serving the upper floors.
Render of a gallery-access block with an external staircase and a fenced play area in front.
Fig. 10 Gallery access along the facade. Stacking the units and serving them from an external gallery keeps the structure simple and demountable.
Site layout plan showing construction phases, driving routes, site huts, waste containers and emergency assembly points.
Fig. 11 Site layout from the BLVC plan: construction phases, driving routes, site huts, waste separation, first-aid points and emergency exits.

What I took from it

I had to work remotely for part of the project. That is exactly when I noticed how much a good communication plan is worth. It sounds like a formality, but in practice it is the difference between a team that sits waiting for each other and a team that keeps working. Agreeing clearly who picks up what — and writing it down — saved us a lot of time.

I also noticed that my own interest sits mainly with the design side. It was genuinely useful to look at a building project once from the position of project manager and supervisor, precisely because it shows what a design decision means further down the process.

Also on the drawing board

Other project experience

Smaller assignments and one thing I built entirely off my own back.

Project analysis

AVH Bouw — Kerkstraat

A building-engineering analysis of a live construction project, focused on the structure and how it was actually executed on site.

Sustainability assignment

Facade detail, my own house

Independent research into the options for making an existing facade construction more sustainable, worked out as a detail.

Own initiative

Revit automation

Built my own integration (an MCP connection) to automate repetitive modelling work in Revit — because the fastest way to understand a tool is to take it apart.

Get in touch Download CV (PDF) Download portfolio (PDF)

About me

Practical, technical, and curious about how it fits together.

Portrait photograph of Brian Fleuren.

I am a third-year Building Engineering student with a practical, technical streak. I have been building and designing things since I was young; that has grown into making variant studies, building-physics calculations and BIM models in Revit.

I combine an eye for detail and self-discipline with strong communication skills, picked up as a closing manager in hospitality, where I run staff and day-to-day operations on my own. What interests me most is the moment a design has to survive contact with reality: the span direction that changes which walls carry load, the duct run that has to be in the plan before it is a problem, the detail that decides whether a facade actually works.

I am currently looking for a practical work placement in the Nijmegen / Wijchen region where I can put that technical knowledge to work.

Software & tools

Open one to see what I actually use it for, and what it taught me.

  • My main tool, and the one I have put the most hours into. What I have learned is that a model is only as useful as the discipline behind it: consistent naming, parameters that genuinely carry information, and schedules that read straight out of the model instead of being retyped next to it.

    For the Cube House I built everything from a single model — plan, four elevations, section, 3D view and roof plan — and laid them out on one A1 sheet, so a change to the model updates every view at once. On the asylum seekers' centre I took the modelling over from a teammate, and our model came out more complete and more detailed than most of the other groups'. I have also built my own integration to automate repetitive modelling work, because the quickest way to understand a tool is to take it apart.

    Used in All three projects

  • Where Revit gives you the whole building, a 2D package is where one detail gets resolved. I drew my roof-edge detail at 1:5 as a production-ready sheet: every layer hatched, dimensions on the build-up, leaders naming each material, and a title block recording the scale, the date and who drew it.

    The lesson was that the skill is not the software, it is the conventions. Line weights, hatching and annotation exist so that someone can read the drawing correctly without you standing next to them explaining it.

    Used in Rijnstate / Berghege

  • The most useful thing I made on site was a spreadsheet. The operating-theatre walls had to stay electrically isolated while services were being drilled through them constantly, so I set up a weekly measurement schedule — one row per wall, one column per check — which made it immediately visible which walls were still sound and exactly when one stopped being sound.

    I have also worked with a cost structure split across labour, materials, subcontracting, plant and overheads, comparing budget against committed cost and forecast, and with a criteria table for weighing construction variants against each other. What I took from all of it: a good sheet answers a question, a bad one just stores numbers.

    Used in Rijnstate / Berghege · Cube House

  • I used it to put a drawing and the real site into the same frame: I took the A0 construction-site layout drawing for the hospital project and composited my own site photographs onto the positions they were taken from, so the plan and what it actually looked like can be read together.

    Working at that size taught me layer discipline, masking and resolution — and that a file which gets away from you becomes unusable no matter how good the image is.

    Used in Rijnstate / Berghege

  • I use Illustrator for the graphic side of presenting a project: diagrams, phasing drawings and figures that have to stay sharp at any size, and for tidying up exported linework before it goes into a report.

    Drawing in vectors rather than pixels forces you to think in shapes and layers from the start, which is the same habit that makes a CAD drawing readable.

  • For documents that run to many pages — setting up a grid, master pages and paragraph styles so a long report or portfolio stays consistent throughout, instead of being laid out page by page and drifting as it goes.

    It is the same principle as a BIM model or a drawing set: define the system once, then let every page inherit it.

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Expertise

What I can already do

  • BIM modelling & parametric work in Revit
  • Variant studies of building methods (system build, timber frame)
  • Floor types and foundation variants
  • Building-physics calculations (daylight, solar load)
  • Sustainability analysis of facade constructions
  • Materials science

Education

Where I learned it

08/2024 — 04/2028

BSc Building Engineering

Avans University of Applied Sciences, 's-Hertogenbosch

Building methods, materials science and BIM modelling. Currently in the third year.
Completed

HAVO — Economics & Society

Maaswaal College, Wijchen

Graduated with an average of 7.5.

Experience

Work & responsibility

Jan 2023 — present

Closing manager

Restaurant De Tyd

  • Independently responsible for closing the restaurant and running the floor staff during evening shifts
  • Keeping an eye on staffing costs and matching the rota to expected demand
  • Receiving and advising guests on drinks and menu choices, and resolving problems on the spot
Feb — May 2023

Intern

Nokavision Software B.V., 's-Hertogenbosch

  • Shadowed experienced colleagues and advised clients
  • Maintained contact with internal and external relations
Jan 2019 — Jan 2023

Sales assistant

Albert Heijn

  • Handled transactions and processed complaints
  • Kept the shop floor tidy and professional

Outside the studio

Coaching Jong Dames 3

MHC Wijchen — field hockey, second class

I plan the season and run the weekly training sessions for a squad of 14 to 16 players, and I coordinate sponsorship for the team's kit. It is the same skill as running a project team, just with more mud: decide what matters, make it clear who does what, and keep everyone moving.

Languages

  • Dutch — native
  • English — advanced
  • Spanish — elementary

Certificates

  • VCA-Vol — safety

Interests

  • Construction & engineering
  • Design
  • Cooking
  • Sport

Contact

Let's talk about a placement or a project.

Currently looking for

A practical work placement in the Nijmegen / Wijchen region where I can put my technical knowledge into practice — ideally somewhere that lets me work on design development, detailing and BIM.

Schedule a call
Send me an email Download CV (PDF) Download portfolio (PDF)

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