Delft University fire burns all night

Wednesday 14 May 2008

The fire which ripped through Delft University’s architecture faculty continued to burn all night under fire brigade supervision, according to early newspaper reports.

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The fire, which broke out after a short circuit in a coffee machine on the sixth floor early on Tuesday morning, quickly spread upwards through the 13-storey building. Later the blaze moved down to the lower floors. One wing collapsed late on Tuesday afternoon.

‘We are watching the building fall apart in front of our eyes,’ a fire brigade spokesman told the Volkskrant.

Some 185 fire officers and 50 fire engines were at the scene of the blaze, which had been cordoned off to hundreds of onlookers.

The faculty, which had a library of some 40,000 books, drawings, models and furniture, was preparing a new exhibition of drawings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and others.

The collection, described by TU information specialist AD Bercht in the Volkskrant as ‘the most important architectural collection in the country’, has been destroyed, the paper said.

No-one was injured in the blaze.

© DutchNews.nl

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