Virgiel and DSC celebrate anniversaries this summer: how are the preparations going?

Party lovers will have a fabulous summer in Delft: not only will there be the OWee (a week earlier than usual), but also anniversary celebrations of the Virgiel and DSC (Delftsch Studenten Corps) student associations. DSC will celebrate its 35th anniversary, with the theme ‘Element: kern van verbinding’ (corde of connection), from 22 July to 4 August. At the same time, from 23 to 30 July, Virgiel will celebrate the final week of its 25th anniversary with the theme ‘Excitatie’ (excitation).

“We are not quite ready yet,” says Jurre Maaskant, Chair of Virgiel’s Anniversary Board, while walking across the empty patches of grass behind the sports fields of the Fortuna handball club. This is an understatement. Apart from a construction site, some shipping containers, and some stored props from the anniversary theatre (in Dutch), nothing gives away the big plans that the association has for the spot.

The site committee is on the construction site and started working full-time in mid-June to make sure that the building work will be ready on time. Is it going according to plan? “No, of course not.” But they have faith that it will all work out.

Maaskant knows exactly what the site will look like when it is finished. He walks across the field gesturing widely. “There will be a big stage in that corner with special places for people to stand or sit on the sides.” The shipping containers there will be the home of a radio station. “The members will broadcast on the radio throughout the week and anyone in Delft can listen to it.”

Everyone helps

They thought about everything, including the inner being. There will be a food court where members can cook themselves, says Maaskant. “We are hardly working with caterers at all. All the catering will be on the initiative of houses, clubs and groups of Virgiel’s friends. One house will have a cocktail bar, another a bistro, and another a sort of coffee corner.” There will be lots of choice, so something for everyone. “As there are so many of us, our own members will be able to provide almost everyone with food.”

He continues. “The idea of the anniversary is that everyone does what they can. Some people will cook, others will make a radio programme, and a lot of people will come here during the day in the summer to do their own attributes.”

A lot of people are helping at DSC too. Emma Toet is President of the Party Committee that is organising the anniversary celebration. Among the blocks of concrete, wooden boards and screeching circle saws in their anniversary building next to Delft Campus station, she apologises. “I’ll tell you up front: a lot still needs to be done.” Her members are working hard on building bars and restaurants in the building, each with its own theme. “We have a round bar with a circus theme and one with a ‘as strong as steel’ theme. The latter, of course, includes bicycles, important elements of ‘the true Delft resident’.”

‘Leaving everything to the very last minute is part of being a student’

Anyone wanting a chic meal will also be accommodated. There will be a lobster restaurant at the top of the building. “This is a long tradition in these guys’ house,” explains Toet. “They are doing their best to create a wonderful restaurant here. They have whitewashed the ceiling, hung up wooden beams, and there is a parquet floor waiting to be laid.” While much hard work is underway, she thinks that the heaviest point is yet to come. “It is now the last few weeks before TU Delft closes and most people are wrapped up in their studies. After that a couple of hundred people will be available. You are responsible for your project as a group and everyone wants to build the best bar they can. Leaving everything to the very last minute is part of being a student.”

Sustainability and reuse

The members get the materials for the decoration from all over the place. “They travel around the Netherlands to find unique materials,” says Toet.  “A boat is used as a toilet, the front of an old fire engine as a DJ booth. There is also an old bus outside. The owner wants it back afterwards, but it will serve as part of a bar.”

Sustainability is an important theme. “Everything under the ceiling was completely sealed shut. We took out all the planks and the insulation materials and are using them to reinforce the tops of the walls.”

The student association hopes that the entire anniversary celebration will even be climate neutral. This calls for working things out. For the merchandise from China, the Product & Design Committee opted for shipping rather than air transport, but had to take a much longer delivery time into account. “We are reusing materials, looking for sustainable suppliers, and encouraging people to come by bicycle or public transport,” says Toet. “We are also working with the Revolution Foundation that organises sustainable festivals. They are advising us on waste separation, CO₂ emissions and those kinds of things.” And the emissions that remain? “We are looking into various compensation projects. The sustainability committee is working on this.”

‘We check all the time for things we can recycle or give a new use to’

Virgiel too is working on a climate neutral anniversary celebration, says Maaskant. “The members have collected wooden pallets from all over the Netherlands to make benches and chairs. As TU Delft students, we naturally want to limit our emissions as much as we can and reuse as much as we can.” The waste will be separated anyway, and the student association is trying to minimise the waste too. “We will use hard plastic cups which people will hand in. Serviettes, cutlery and so on are biodegradable. For the construction we check Marktplaats (a secondhand market place) all the time for things that we can recycle or give a new use to. The guys working on this are so amazingly creative that they know how to make something useful from anything.”

They cannot yet say if they will succeed in making all the materials climate neutral. “This is absolutely our goal and we are also looking into how much we may need to compensate. There are good organisations for this, some of them even set up by old Virgiel members. They can tell us exactly what our emissions are so that we can compensate them properly.”

The committee has seen already that it is not always possible to achieve their sustainability goals. There was a gala in Berlin in December. They had wanted to go there in a big train, but that did not work out, says Maaskant. “The Dutch and German railways do not work well together so it was really hard to have the train leave the Netherlands so that it would arrive in Berlin at the right time.”

For members and for Delft

Not only does Virgiel have trips to the gala and for skiing behind it, but it has also had a anniversary week last May. There was horse racing, a kickbox gala and a festival on the Pier in Scheveningen for members, and activities for everyone in Delft. The students’ good cause activity, called the Delfts Blauwe Huis (Delft blue house), raised almost EUR 7,000, they gave a canal concert, and held a symposium about the energy transition.

“Three thousand people came to the kickbox gala,” says Maaskant. “It was the biggest event that Virgiel had ever organised. And hopefully we will even exceed this on the family day.”

‘The anniversary celebration is for everyone’

For DSC, most of the activities are still to come. They will party for two weeks solid in the summer. Toet emphasises that everyone is welcome. “The anniversary celebration is for everyone. We will start at the Markt at the weekend with a masquerade and music bands. And we will hold a ‘Ter land, ter zee en in de lucht’ (on land, at sea and in the air) on our water day. I would like everyone – young children, students and older people – to come and make a boat.” And everyone can buy a ticket for a classical concert and the anniversary play.

“We are very much looking forward to the start,” says Toet. “We hope that everyone joins in for the celebratory opening and comes to the talks. DSC’s 175^th anniversary is a very special occasion.” It will be two heavy weeks for her and her committee fellows. “But there are so many people involved in the organisation and everyone has contributed something, such as the people here now working so hard on the building. We are really doing everything together. That’s really wonderful.”

Good coordination

Two anniversary celebrations at the same time? Will that go well? Toet says “I am in regular contact with Jurre. We discuss a lot of things and try to learn from each other. We are in the same boat. We had no idea what we were taking on. They went to the same skiing location as we did, so we could give them some tips before they left. I have not yet seen their site and am very curious about it.”

Maaskant too is happy with the coordination. “Ideally we would have liked to have had the first week of summer and they the second two weeks, but there was no other choice given the resits. So we are coordinating the activities in the student houses carefully with each other. Emma and I speak every week about how things are going and that’s very helpful. We have no problems with each other, and we just want to help each other.”

Neighbourhood drinks to ease concerns

Five years ago DSC celebrated its anniversary in the same building. At the time the activities caused irritation (in Dutch) among neighbourhood residents even before the anniversary celebration started. This is repeating itself. One resident of the nearby Otterlaan sent a letter (in Dutch) to the city council at the beginning of March saying ‘How can we residents again be left out in the cold?’.

In a Municipal Council committee meeting in April, the party committee member Stephan Weenk promised improvement. He announced that he and the residents association would hold street corner meetings to talk to the neighbourhood.

To William van Treuren, Chair of the Heel Tanthof Delft Residents Association, this worked. “Up to now we have been kept up to date. The students are open for tips and I even see that they ask for more information. They ask what the problem is, how they can improve things and so on.” He sees that the neighbourhood residents at the meetings are ‘positively critical’. “They want the students to be able to party.”

Emma Toet, the DSC Anniversary Chair, is also positive about the contact and gives an example of a response which the Committee can use. “We heard that the building was old and dirty so we cleaned it up with a high pressure spray to clean it and had the greenery pruned.”

Yet, not all the residents are convinced, says Van Treuren. “Some people are and will remain angry. They must have had a bad experience. In the case of the resident who wrote the letter, a staff member of the Municipality visited him but he has not changed his mind.”

Virgiel is not experiencing these problems, says the anniversary celebration Chair Jurre Maaskant. “We informed all the neighbourhood residents, and included my email address and telephone number, but have not yet received any responses. Five years ago there were problems on one evening. The new hall was not built yet and we had a tent for the evening that had loudspeakers facing in all directions. The next day we turned the music system away from the residents and had no complaints all week.”

In the meantime, DSC has planned the last neighbourhood drinks just before the start of the party “to show them what the building looks like”, says Toet. Van Treuren is happy with this. “If people are still against the celebration, so be it, but at least everything has been done to ease the situation.”