Living With Data

The research and design hypothesize how data centers can complement the urban environment rather than make a negative impact, both environmentally and spatially. Data centers consume and produce a variety of valuable flows, ranging from electricity, cooling/heating and water use. The aim of the research is to discover whether it is possible to...

Architectural Approaches to Housing Customization: Introducing the Inhabitant-Driven Customization Approach and the MyChanges Tool

Purpose: Customization is a paradox in architecture, providing necessary modernization for buildings but potentially damaging their architectural integrity. In this paper, the authors introduce the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach for avoiding this paradox; this approach lets inhabitants design the customization from options created...

Starters in the city: a lively and vibrant live-work environment in the future metropolitan area of Rotterdam

There is an urgent need for affordable housing solutions in the Netherlands before 2030. However, the focus should not only be on producing new dwellings, but rather on creating homes and neighbourhoods that meet the needs of the future population. In Dutch cities there is a change in the residential culture and there is a large lack of...

The Privatisation of a National Project: The settlements along the trans-Israel Highway since 1977

The settlements along the Trans-Israel Highway illustrate the privatisation of the national settlement enterprise. To understand this process, this dissertation focuses on the settlement production mechanism, which consists of the reciprocal interests of the government and various private groups to develop and domesticate the border area between...

The Live-Work Factory: Exploration of a live-work typology for the 21st century city of New York

This project is a part of the Complex Projects Graduation Studio, "New York Midtown", it explores the possibility of introducing a new workplace typology within an industrial waterfront of Clinton piers as a way to respond to the changing landscape of work of the 21st century New York and the revitalization of the waterfront in the previously...

Urban informality shaped by labor: Addressing the spatial logics of favelas

This doctoral thesis mainly consists of a series of journal publications written by the author between 2015 and 2019. The doctoral thesis presents the results of ten years of research on informal settlements, with particular reference to Brazilian favelas. The research aimed to understand the social dynamics of the production of space in these...

An Archaeology of the Ordinary: Rethinking the Architecture of Dwelling from CIAM to Siza

This dissertation examines architectural operations developed from the 1950s through the 1980s that challenged modernity’s “anxiety of contamination” and that have negotiated the boundaries between the realm of the individual and the social, the expert and the mass men, the local and the universal, modernity and the vernacular. The central...

From Emptiness to Japanese Space: Designing from a Japanese Perspective

The research on space in Japanese architecture resulted in a number of spatial characteristics. These were then used as starting points for the design of a housing block in Dutch context.

The polycentric anticlave network of institutional housing; an asylum seekers centre in Maastricht

Because of its fascination with safety and control, Dutch society at the end of the twentieth century became subject to fear for the unknown. Panic and terror overpowered society, and imprisoned it into a permanent state of institutional living. The proposed alternative for this development is to revalue and restate the achievement of todays...