People's Palaces: Architecture, culture and democracy in two European post-war cultural centres

This thesis is an investigation of the relationship between cultural politics and architecture in the context of the welfare state in post-war Western Europe. The book focusses on two case studies, the London South Bank and the Stockholm Kulturhus, and examines the discourses informing their institutional concepts and architectural forms.

De toegevoegde waarde van architectuur voor de zorg in ziekenhuizen

Historic Concrete: From Concrete Repair to Concrete Conservation

Concrete like materials were already applied during the Roman Empire. After the decline of the Roman Empire, a wide scale application of concrete only reappeared in the 19th century. Here lies also the origin of modern (reinforced) concrete. Since then, both concrete application and composition have significantly changed. Today, concrete from...

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...

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...