Activating the “glass box“: The post-war International style office building’s contribution to the future densification challenges of the city centre of Rotterdam

The project “Activating the glass box” aims to find out how the existing built heritage can be not an obstacle, but the key to the comprehensive dense city of the near future. It showcases the contextual design approach and opportunities for the unlisted 50’s-60’s international style office buildings - “glass boxes”- whose potential is not yet...

Bridge the collective memory: Urban living room design for historical city center of Dordrecht

The graduation project is about transforming the vacant V&D department store building in Dordrecht into an new urban living room. One sentence to conclude the background is: Revitalizing the obsolete. What happens to the traditional twentieth century commercial areas in major Dutch cities in an era that everyone is shopping online? The...

Rethinking a Parking Garage: The City Hotel

The City Hotel is a building/landscape that is fruit of a re-adaptation of the Q-Park Bijenkorf in Amsterdam. It aims to be a place for Amsterdammers, small local businesses and tourists that acts as a community center for all. The building can be appropriated by its users and hosts many different functions under one roof. It does not only give,...

A gap in the market: Towards circular heritage V&D buildings

This gradation project deals with the adaptive re-use of the vacant heritage V&D department store in Leiden. Both the story of the downfall of the V&D and the vacancy of these department stores illustrate a larger problem in the building industry. Because needs and desires in society...

Glass that strengthens floors, facilitates change, and tells stories

This text is an investigation of process. It outlines the design development of a historic concrete slab retrofit using glass. By working through iterations that build off each other, it chronicles the steady unfolding of the concept coming into being. Materiality, statics, construction, and aesthetics are the parameters that are mediated in a...

A Community Art Centre for Nijmegen

The Molenpoort shopping mall represents both a problem and a solution. Its concept is outdated, and its shops are for the majority vacant. Though being centrally located within the city, next to a heritage site and at a pedestrian gateway to the town centre, it is underused and hidden, and even though its mass is vast, it serves one purpose only...

Persistent Architecture

Since the dawn of the early twentieth century, there has been a strong emphasis in the architectural discourse on defining an idea of how a building is intended to be used. This has resulted in a tendency in contemporary architectural practice of capturing the use of a building in a strictly defined programme. This programme is an illusion...

Scenography of Heritage: An Urban think Tank

As a result of long time colonisation and trade, the city of Semarang in Indonesia has a large stock of built heritage that share a history with the Netherlands. The Dutch colonial buildings, left to decay have become a backdrop for tourists and feed into the 'insta culture' sweeping the current decade. At the same time the city suffers deeply...