Antwerp Unearthed: The capacity of the historic canal network beneath Antwerp in mediating future urgencies for environmental and social infrastructures.

The performance of a city is dependent on the performance of its infrastructure. As a result, the surface-level world is inseparable from the subsurface world. However, cities around the world are facing a shortage of available space both aboveground and belowground. The existing urban fabric has over time become unfit for the addition of new...

Mending Varna: Authentic Landscape as a Fountainhead and Essential Element of Urban Continuity and Identity

Thesis project is developed within the framework of the Flowscapes studio. It follows the strategy of a research by design. It explores solutions to the problems of urban fragmentation, lack of coherence and identity of urban environment from the perspective of landscape architecture. Authentic landscape is chosen as a hypothetical initial...

Suburbs and super-nature: How the Wasserkrater exposes an invisible landscape

What bearing can the expression of ‘place’ have on the ‘placeless geography’ of the suburban metropolis? Unravelling the design of the Wasserkrater garden, designed by Agence Ter between 1997 and 2000, points towards a possible reconnection between suburban metropolis and genius loci, the essence of the place.

Metropolitan gardens: Gardens in the interstices of the metropolitan tissue

The heterogeneity of the contemporary metropolitan landscape has led to a multiplicity of intermediate spaces, in between and within the different tissues of the metropolitan landscape. These interstices can provide favourable conditions to be transformed into gardens. What design instruments can be discovered for these gardens to address the...

Articulating the Site: The Reflection Garden as a Condensation of the Genius Loci

The term genius loci—“the prevailing character or atmosphere of a place,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it—has long been used to interpret landscape characteristics. Lately, however, it is being used, and abused, as a justification in just about any discourse. For spatial, aesthetic, and ecological discussions and social, cultural,...