On 1 October 1973, the first students moved into the colourful dorms on the VUB campus. The student village, as the complex was also known, was designed by architect Willy Van Der Meeren. He used prefab materials, quickly creating 352 rooms on the campus. When designing the homes, Van Der Meeren had the needs of the students in mind above all. So, random corridors, paths and stairs were added to the design – according to lore, with the intention of making it easy for students to navigate, but hard for the authorities to find their way in the labyrinth. The colours of the dorms – yellow, blue, grey and red – also ensured that students could navigate easily. A few years later, in 1978, green was added to the four colours.
A university is always changing and in 2016, it was decided that the campus needed a facelift. That year, the first units were razed to the ground to make room for the renovated swimming pool. Although initially the plan was for all the dorms to disappear, the decision has now been made to redevelop some of them. Some of them are used, for example, by the Circular Retrofit Lab, which investigates the possibilities of applying the principles of circular construction to an existing building, or by the WVDM Living Lab, which aims to develop innovative renovation strategies, taking into account parameters such as heritage value, environmental impact and cost.