· · · Institutional Repository

The graduation project is aimed at the restructuring of the metropolis of Mumbai by dealing with problems related to accessibility of the key business district and the realisation of local qualities and realities.

Graduation project for Hybrid Buildings

Urban Tomato is a systemathic analysis of urban agriculture in Havana, Cuba. The proposal of a lightweight infrastructure shaped by the built existing environment, aims at breaking the constrictions of the rigid orthogonal city planning by offering a new layer of walkable and productive public space. The socio-spatial characteristics of the city of Havana are materialized into the design of a system, potentially appliable to a large share of the city.

Urban and Architectural design for Zeeburgerpad, Amsterdam. Reconnecting this urban void with its surrounding urban network through physical, spatial and programmatic connections. The most strategic connection is architecturally elaborated in the form of an transferium with three residential towers.

‘Urban regeneration’ has been an important concept for many post industrial urban areas. There might be uncountable reasons why the places need to be regenerated with the urban complexity. Some places are simply too old and some of them are too small for the new urban demands. Sometimes the urban places are forced to be regenerated by war or terror attack. However, we can find the common motivation from all the regeneration cases, it can be summed up in ‘losing or challenging the original function’. The ultimate goal of every single urban regeneration process is ‘making better place’, and the process will be done by replacing, modifying or strengthening the original function. In this project, the urban regeneration process is started by the lost function as a city airport. The key element is ‘Emptiness’. Regeneration by emptiness is not special cases in this post modern era, for example, many industrial sites and factories moved away from urban area and the empty places have been filled with diverse new functions. However, this project has its very special aspect from its extreme size. ‘380ha space of inner-city’ was emptied in a day. Moreover, the nature of airport is giving a very different perspective to the project – it is all _at, hardly connected surrounding urban fabric, controlled by one single building, unusual topography by the runways, and etc. In short, the main concern of the project is about how the huge emptiness can be filled with new urban functions for the metropolis Berlin and the neighborhoods, at the same time, it will be considered which part of the space can be preserved for the future of Berlin.

The Center for Urban Agriculture is located in Rotterdam along the Maas River. Considering the problems of climate changing in Rotterdam, the project is defined by three main research themes: urban agriculture, water management and energy management. The idea is to propose a new kind of urban agriculture, the hydroponic cultivation, in order to develop in the Netherlands different possibilities to produce food in the city. In the Netherlands agriculture on soil is not possible anymore because of flooding and intrusion of salt in the ground water, so the proposal is a pilot project for small hydroponics cultivation in the cities. The function of the building is education in order to make people aware of what are the problems of climate changing and how to reduce the human impact on nature.

Architectural design that works at the same time as an urban design.

The thesis is developed around the concept of the “intermediate city”. In fact, during this precarious phase set by the economical crisis and worsened by the shrinking condition of the city, it is necessary for Rotterdam to work in an “intermediate dimension” in several terms: of scale, time, financing and also location, focussing more on those parts of the city that have been neglected for a long time, in favour of concentrated interventions in the downtown and in the suburban edges, thus addressing limited targets of population. Two complementary strategies, based on the same principles but with different processes and hypothesis, are proposed in order to depict an alternative model of urban regeneration as a basis for a more sustainable development.

The ongoing urban plans and designs in China may have provided an improper model of making cities. They do not consider the complex nature of city and take little into consideration of the welfare of people. Then, the question comes, what is a proper model of building cities? A city serves as a receptacle of life. There are various lifestyles co-existing in a city. They can be categorized into scales, e.g., global scale (L), local scale (S) and those in between (M). A good city should give places and provide diverse choices for all the lives happening together and interacting with each other. In this sense, the vitality will be achieved. On the other hand, a city is an emerging systems with its own internal growing force. Therefore, the diversity can not be simply imposed by designers’ own wish. It has to be reached by embracing the self-organization process of the city. Therefore, to achieve the real diversity (L, M, S), the study considers Complexity Theories of Cities as one of the theoretical bases. It tries to search for an innovative approach, through which the self-organization process of cities could be properly guided and facilitated.

The main problématique of the site -Ciudad Juarez and the graduation studio was to investigate into the various issues contributing to the emerging phenomenon of abandoned housing in Mexico. In addition to poor urban planning, there is a fundamentally flawed system in the manner in which social housing is conceived, designed, produced, inhabited and devalued in Mexico. These factors create a cycle of decay and dysfunction of which abandoned housing becomes one of the many spatial consequences. The goal of the thesis project was to come up with a strategic proposal and interventions which can provide counter or alternative proposals to the current situation of decay and allow for a socio-economic platform to develop from within the community. The project investigates into how urban agriculture or in this case peri-urban (peripheral urban) agriculture and other related programs serve as a ‘bottom-up’ strategy to tackle the ‘top-down’ issues in Juarez. A matrix with a toolbox for production and an inventory of open space explores the possibility of creating continuous productive landscapes and new urban infills from voids and forms the first step towards orgainizing the city towards the creation of productive landscapes. This not only provides food for the community but also allows for transforming the current urban landscape in Riberas Del Bravo by transforming the ‘terrain vague’ – the abandoned houses, fallow land, unused urban spaces into productive, green spaces through urban farms, community gardens, community kitchens and greenhouses. Architectural expression of the primarily utilitarian buildings which develop during the phase-wise development of the strategy take into consideration local, easily available materials and passive climate concepts. The project also investigates into the role of various stakeholders and urban actors involved in the various stages of the institutionalization of urban agriculture in Ciudad Juarez to develop a multi-stakeholder platform for implementation of urban agriculture.

Connecting, among university campuses & between campuses and the city of Shanghai.

A shift is taking place in planning culture from a rational planning approach, which is mainly about production, to a dynamic city approach which is more about the transformation and development of existing urban areas. Flexibility is a relevant subject in this. This graduation project has been aimed at developing an insight in flexibility in urbanism and using this in developing a transformation design for the Binckhorst in The Hague. This has been done with literature research, case studies and research by design. The definition of flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing and differentiated circumstances. Flexibility means finding a balance between freedom and fixation in many aspects in the design and development process. It means providing long term guidelines for quality and security and stimulating dynamics. The two reasons to use flexibility are as a reaction on uncertainty and on differentiation. The Binckhorst in The Hague is an (100 hectare) industrial area near the centre of The Hague which has an isolated position and incomplete urban structure. Because of its position in the city it has much potential to develop into an intense mixed use urban area. The design provides a framework which improves internal and external connections and uses the qualities of the Binckhorst to facilitate and stimulate the redevelopment of the area. This structure of streets, squares, parks and public transport enables a gradual transformation from the existing to a new situation. The design on a lower scale in the area is made to provide principles but leaves room for interpretation and design in a later phase of the project.

It is a multi-scalar approach to transform the non-develop urban void into an integrative place linking the fragments, through a permeable network of public space considering landscape, slow local street and semi public space.

The spontaneous agglomeration of the Vlaamse Ruit(Antwerp, Gent,Brussels and Leuven) in Belgium is compromising valueable open natural landscapes. A vast majority of buildings arise in suburban and rural areas without forms of urban planning. The Belgian government has the intention of centralizing and concentrating urbanization in rural settlements or larger villages. Open spaces within village borders should be considered as new valuable terrain for urban expansions. Beveren is considered to be a sizeable village near Antwerp with approx. 40.000 inhabitants living near and some distance away from the center. The dispersion of inhabitants prevents Beveren to be characterized as a city. This graduation project is situated near the central kerkplein (church square) and can be described as an anomaly in urban logics. The site displays itself as an big open space that in the past decades has been a refuge for important public functions that did not find a suitable home in the existing urban fabric. Four building blocks are the infill between public functions and adress them with clear urban elements such as squares or streets. The variation of angles in the building blocks are orientated by the existing routes and streets and connect with the existing organic urban fabric. Non-monumental streets with shifting focus- points have been main subjects of urban design. The building block closest to the central kerkplein forms the most direct connection between the village center and the new urban infill. The commercial activities at and around the kerkplein are continued in this building block in the form of a commercial plinth at the northside along the N70 infrastural artery. The heart of the block contains a supermarket that has been stacked with dwellings around a semi-public courtyard on top of the supermarket. The outside red brick facades connect with the existing urban fabric. The inside wooden facades materialize a natural softer intimate realm.

Bucharest is an urban palimpsest, its spatial characteristics bearing the trace of all ideological changes within its urban fabric. Its accelerated development in two stages (1850s- 1930s and 1950s-1989) generated a superposition of fragmented urban projects (signs of various stages of modernity) that were never finished. These stages in its evolution were generated by advances in technology and therefore the reformulation of the infrastructural framework, and changes in the perception of open-spaces as main arenas of publicness. After 1989, the inability of the City to produce a new infrastructural paradigm and its careless treatment of the open-space through market speculation produced chaotic development, extreme fragmentation, lack of public space, and last but most important, the lack of public trust in planners. With this problem setting in mind there are a few questions that become the backbone of this thesis: How could we use infrastructure and open-space to describe the future of Bucharest? Can they act as frameworks to produce a new paradigm for the city? Can Bucharest become a testing ground for conjectures that become relevant at a wider scale? These are the main questions to which this thesis research should be able to answer. By developing conjectures illustrating how Bucharest could be shaped around infrastructure and open-space, the ambition of this work is to produce guidelines and tools for an isotropic and permeable Bucharest.

The research focused on the identification of alternative public places in the contemporary city, especially regarding their possible connections with the urban mobility system and the urban domains constituted by mobile people that continuously cross the contemporary city with a multiplicity of flows coming from the most different scales. The choice of Milan is, in this sense, extremely interesting because of its own characteristics. Looking at the Italian context, Milan is indeed the city that, for urban dimension, world ranking in the global scale and the related phenomena on social and economical level, more than others [included Rome] can be the right example of a city affect by the problems that have been stated before, and the right city for some attempts of approaching and dealing differently with them.