Reading Sites, Building Stories

Doing architecture is an act of bricolage. New things take shape out of the existing. The architect makes do with the materials at hand. Accidents happen, incidents occur, circumstances meet. The site-specific nature of the architectural project opens up questions on how to work with materials at hand and as found, and how to capture, approach...

Growing up: An open air school in a former paper factory

The project is situated in the Sphinxkwartier in Maastricht, positioned in-between <br/>the inner city and the urban hinterlands. Underneath the fast pace of the city and factory, nature moves slowly, cascading down from the lock at the Maas river towards the fortification park, ever growing through the cracks.This project for an open air school...

The Paper School: Layer over Layer

Architecture is made for the user. It needs to fulfill their wishes.<br/>When a building is taken into use the architecture of the architect partly disappears. This is not because the architect did not do a good job. This is the cause of being use. The users will always change a space to their wishes. This can be small by hanging a painting or...

The remaked borders: SAPPI Island

Community theater and a housing project in the former paper factory in Maastricht

The 2022 Urban Architecture graduation studio explores urban leftovers of the city of Maastricht, and the studio's anthropological approach finds ways of cherishing and learning from the ambiguous identity of a place. The leftover spaces may not need large-scale planning but more a set of local urban interventions with the multidisciplinary...

The Readymade Approach: An Adaptation of Disruptive Artworks to Overseen Structures

Facing a decline in industrial production and potential vacancy in the north of Maastricht, the ‘Readymades’ by French artist Marcel Duchamp were investigated as an approach to reuse of industrial architecture. With the artworks being mundane, ordinary objects that were only slightly modified, their placements in unusual contexts like art...

The Fourth wall of the stage: Exploring the backstages of Maastricht

Theatrum mundi and the idea of ‘the city as a stage’ is the foundation of this research. It configures the our area of interest within the realms of stages, sets, scenes and backstages by defining their interrelations and metaphorical exchanges within the spaces in a city. The approach analysis and defines application backstages on architectural...

Social space: Seeking for communal places in Maastricht

This master thesis explores the notion of social space by searching for ways of how architectural elements can encourage social behavior in the public domain. Both spatial planning and architecture offer us places for encounters, freedom and creation. Architecture has therefore an important social task, it gives meaning to a place and can...

Left-Over Spaces: The role of left-over space in bringing sports & play into the city center of Maastricht