Amsterdam’s National Memorial of Names: The Meaning and Importance of Scale, and Community Participation, in the Architecture of Commemoration

Embedding an architectural project in its context exceeds the mere use of materials and spatial devices. Rather, those are simply the tools used to convey a message, and to reflect certain values. Any piece of architecture with an urban, residential location, has the potential to impact the daily lives of citizens. This is especially the case...

Remembrance to Repression: Public Space, memorial landscape and collective memory in post-WWII Vienna

In his influential work ‘On collective Memory’, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs described an intrinsic relationship between the past and present, a reconfiguration of the perceived past through the lens of its current generation’s ideas and experiences. This represents an increasing challenge in the urban realm due to the growing amount of...

Transformative Reconstruction: The application of a new approach towards dilapidated or unfinished buildings in Beirut

The conflictual past of Beirut is being erased by the company of Solidere, which has a strong will to modernise, through a highly destructive reconstruction, in an effort to heal the city. With this project, a new approach is taken on, in which an old concrete structure, riddled with bullet holes, part of the great variety of dilapidated and...

Death in the city: Integrating funerary places in the urban fabric

While our cities are continuously getting denser and denser, and our methods of bodily disposal are getting more and more technical, the link between death and the landscape is radically changing. In this thesis I develop a concept for a commemoration garden that can take over part of the roles of cemeteries, while being more space efficient and...