Place-time discontinuities: Mapping in architectural discourse

Beyond the typological discourse: The creation of the architectural language and the type as a project in the western modern city

This thesis considers the city and its architecture the extreme condition under which the endless discussion around the human being way of thinking takes place. More precisely, the research assumes the city as the place where the displacement of mindset principles, categories and catalogue of objects is materialized into Form, becoming...

Camp of Faith: On Political Theology and Urban Form

The dissertation explores the political foundations of the city. It positions itself around a definition of the idea of the political, which is determined by the specific constitution of opposed entities; a dichotomy between a sovereign body and movements. Subsequently, the research suggests a dialectical reading of the idea of Urban Form, which...

Common Space: Politics and the Production of Architectural Knowledge

Today we are familiar with definitions of architecture as an integrated, multidisciplinary “networked practice,” which takes its cognitive potential from a “diffused design intelligence.” These definitions were introduced to counter an individual, authorial approach to design which allegedly characterized modern architecture since its beginnings...

The Architecture of Co-operation: A Project for organizing collective creativity

The Architecture of Co-operation investigates the relationship between the collective subject and urban form through co-operation as means of production. The point is how individuals can organize co-operation today for the city as a project and what could be the role of architects into this process. Thus, the aim of the thesis is first to...

The Street as a Project: The Space of the City and the Construction of the Modern Subject

Typical Plan: The Architecture of Labor and the Space of Production

In a short essay dealing with the repetitive homogeneity of the Manhattan’s office layouts, Rem Koolhaas defined the term Typical Plan as one of the purest American architectural archetypes. A plan stripped of all its qualities and reduced to a calculated relation between discreet standardised elements: an empty surface able to host whatever...

Architecture in the Age of Apparatus-Centric Culture

The fourth typology; dominant type and the idea of the city

Architectural Contestation

This dissertation addresses the reductive reading of Georges Bataille's work done within the field of architectural criticism and theory which tends to set aside the fundamental ‘broken’ totality of Bataille's oeuvre and also to narrowly interpret it as a mere critique of architectural form, consequently presenting it either as the negation of...

Urban Literacy: A Scriptive Approach to the Experience, Use and Imagination of Place

This dissertation discusses how literature offers valuable ways to become aware of how people experience, use, and imagine places. It argues that Lefebvre’s concept of "lived space", experienced and lived through by characters, evoking memories and imaginations, is the space that we encounter in the evocative descriptions of places and spaces by...

De transformatie van het Hollandse bouwblok in relatie tot het publieke domein: Model, regel en ideaal, The transformation of the Dutch urban block: model, rule and ideal

The research focuses on the transformation of the urban block in relation to the public realm of the two great Dutch cities Amsterdam and Rotterdam throughout the last 400 years. In order to analyse the process of transformation, Dutch urban blocks are selected that can be considered paradigmatic for different historical periods . The time span...

Railways in the urban context: An architectural discourse

Railway and city have coexisted for more then 150 years. The realization of railroads in the 19th century can be seen as an important contribution to the development of the city. But during the making of railroads there was too little consideration for the overall picture of the city. The result is that today the railway is entangled with the...

System-embedded Intelligence in Architecture

Founded on the imperative to understand, evaluate and consciously decide about the use of digital media in architecture this research not only aims to analyze and critically assess computer-based systems in architecture, but also proposes evaluation and classification of digitally driven architecture through procedural- and object-oriented...