This research explores the hauntings of colonization in San Nicolas, Aruba, through a hauntological approach. Once thriving through the oil refinery and now rebranded as the “Sunrise City,” San Nicolas is caught in a temporal disjunction where past, present, and future are entangled. As the refinery will be dismantled—another colonial act of erasure—Aruba attempts to move forward through forgetting rather than confronting what persists.
Situated within an ethico-onto-epistemological framework, this research proposes response-ability as a way of engaging with these hauntings. Rather than erasing the past, it calls for acknowledging and working with the specters—reclaiming marginalized and forgotten (future) memories. In doing so, it aims to understand how hauntology can foster response-ability towards the ongoing injustices of colonization. How do fucus (specters) haunt the material and immaterial flows of disturbed sites? What affects do they produce? How can we reveal and revalue these fucus haunting disturbed sites to produce new modes of ethopoietic co-habitation? How can architecture ground itself into the assemblage of a San Nicolas yet-to-come?
The echoes of the fucus are followed through archival maps, images, and fieldwork photography, observations, and embodied attention. The researcher moves as both witness and participant, attuned to what the site reveals and what it conceals.
Central to this research are the fucus: active, affective forces that haunt both the material and immaterial conditions of the city. They are not metaphors, but expressions of unresolved colonial violence, repressed memories, and unrealized futures that continue to shape the present. These hauntings are explored through the refinery wall as a medium of encounter, approached through three lenses: matter, perception, and limits.
The refinery wall becomes a medium: a site to conjure and encounter the fucus. The wall is explored through three lenses. First, the wall as matter: what shifting materiality, its forces, its memory does. Second, the wall as perception: how it is seen, felt, experienced. Third, the wall as limits: what is erased and how they haunt. Each lens amplifies spectral, temporal, and ethical forces. They produce clues toward response-ability — toward architectures that acknowledge, regenerate, and transform. As witness and participant, the researcher becomes attentive to what the wall reveals, and to what it hides.
Through this encounter, the site informs design logics grounded in the material, social, and affective assemblage of San Nicolas, contributing to an architectural practice attuned to the yet-to-come.

This research investigates guilt as an underexplored category in architecture and urbanism. Beginning from a personal confrontation with environmental guilt within architectural education, the project asks how guilt is produced, regulated, displaced, or suspended through spatial design. Rather than treating guilt solely as an individual moral emotion, the study approaches it as a historical, psychological, political, and spatial construct. Drawing on Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt, histories of Western Christian guilt culture, psychoanalytic accounts of repression and fetishization, and theories of collective guilt, the research argues that guilt operates not only through discourse and institutions but also through the built environment.

The central claim is that architecture and urban planning can function as technologies of guilt regulation. Through scale, visibility, concealment, boundaries, hierarchy, atmosphere, and aesthetic coding, spaces can intensify guilt, direct it toward ritualized forms of atonement, contain it, or temporarily neutralize it. To examine this, the research combines theoretical analysis with case studies of architectural typologies and urban situations, including the church, the prison, the monument, the club, sex-work spaces, green architecture, and ascetic architecture. These cases are read not simply as programs but as affective arrangements that shape moral experience.

A second part of the research focuses on Amsterdam as a city with a persistent mythology of sin, tolerance, pleasure, and transgression. Through experiential observations and narrative accounts of places, events, and everyday encounters, the project investigates how guilt is lived, negotiated, and spatialized in the city. Amsterdam serves here as a testing ground in which issues such as sex work, nightlife, tourism, intoxication, queerness, and public disorder reveal how urban space mediates morally charged behaviour. These situated accounts are used not as autobiography for its own sake, but as a method for tracing how architecture and urban atmospheres participate in the management of guilt in lived experience

Post-conflict reconstruction in Yemen has largely focused on rapid housing provision and infrastructural repair, often relying on standardized concrete construction methods that overlook cultural identity, climatic performance, and long-term social sustainability. This project investigates how vernacular architectural principles can be reinterpreted and integrated into contemporary reconstruction processes to create resilient, culturally sensitive, and socially meaningful environments. Through the combined use of theoretical frameworks (such as critical regionalism, resilience, and place attachment theory) and case study analysis of reconstruction efforts in Beirut and Aleppo, the research establishes a foundation for a hybrid design approach that balances tradition with innovation.

The design component of the project translates these findings into a proposal for a girls’ primary school in Sana’a, Yemen. The school is positioned as a form of social infrastructure that extends beyond its educational function, acting as a catalyst for community recovery, economic participation, and collective identity rebuilding. The project responds to Yemen’s educational crisis by creating a safe, accessible, and adaptable learning environment that supports both formal education and informal social interaction.

Architecturally, the project explores the spatial and material dialogue between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Vernacular elements such as courtyards, layered thresholds, climate-responsive openings, and rammed earth construction are combined with modern structural systems, modular timber construction, and flexible programmatic layouts. This hybrid strategy allows the building to maintain cultural continuity while accommodating future growth, climatic resilience, and evolving educational needs.

Special emphasis is placed on “in-between” spaces (shaded circulation paths, courtyards, and outdoor learning areas) which are treated as primary learning environments rather than residual spaces. These transitional zones foster social interaction, collective ownership, and experiential learning, reinforcing the school’s role as a community anchor.

Ultimately, this project demonstrates how post-conflict reconstruction can move beyond purely technical or economic recovery toward a more holistic approach that integrates social, cultural, and environmental values. By positioning architecture as both a spatial and societal mediator, the project proposes a replicable model for educational infrastructure that supports long-term resilience and identity-driven urban regeneration in Sana’a and similar post-conflict contexts.

This work is a call for attunement and sensibilization. There cannot be attunement and an enhanced sensibility without an investment of time, energy, and attention. As a response against scientifization, binary distinctions and taxonomies of othering that dominate and reinforce colonial impositions, this research insists on an engagement with complexity, disorder and contamination, understanding space and time as active relational fields that are non-homogenous but dependant on a point of view and a problematic field, and thereby challenging binary dialectics that rely on simple yes or no answers, taxonomies and an essential objectiveness.
Design is a field of operations that concern themselves with the manipulation of limits and constraints. To understand the limit as the manner of relating is to understand it as a methodology. How to relate organism and environment is the gist of technology and design; then the question of the limit becomes, by definition, the question of the method. Rather than a typological approach, this research adopts a topological one, challenging stable typologies such as the prison, the dwelling, the hospital and the laboratory through their iterative modulations across time.
A methodology is not preexisting to the research nor this research output; instead, I allowed myself to switch methodologies, and I encouraged contamination, engaging in a process of complexity that I now understand as not only responding to my motivating concerns but also as an approach to design. I sought to embed myself in complexity as much as possible, taking the experiment as the technique and unpacking these device-machines of measurement to question them as the method for the understanding of our world.
The design project develops as a genealogical design exercise, asking myself what could have happened instead of what did, recognising virtual memory as affectual and multivergencies as compossible and worlding. Set within the Argentinian context, conditions of extreme scarcity are understood not as lack but as productive, collectivising and creative forces, welcoming contingent ideas and problem-creative solutions.
A contaminated methodology, in research and design, is thus not a metaphor but an actual letting go of the obsession with procedure and control to allow the difference to creep in, and, with it, allow new and fascinating encounters.

Baubotanik – a German term combining ‘build’ and ‘botany’ – is an emerging architectural approach that uses living trees as building material. It integrates architecture, landscape, and structural design to create living structures, raising new questions for contemporary architectural practice.

But what can you actually build with it? What forms can it take? And what are the potentials - and limitations - of designing with a material that grows, adapts, and evolves over time?

These questions form the starting point for The Growing Library. Set in the tropical urban context of Yogyakarta, the project proposes a public library that grows together with a tree, gradually evolving from an urban park into a living architectural structure. Conceived as a place for knowledge exchange, the library extends beyond a conventional building to include outdoor spaces, living systems, and ongoing ecological processes as core parts of its collection.

At the heart of the design is the Ficus benghalensis, whose aerial roots are trained and shaped to form spatial and structural elements. As they thicken over time, the roots intertwine with bamboo to form a hybrid structure, merging living growth and constructed elements into a single evolving architectural system.

The premise of this thesis is not to prescribe what architecture should do, but to explore how it might be thought and experienced. This inquiry focuses on an often overlooked minor art: the rural architecture of the Po Valley, materialized in the cascine – entities that, beyond their dwelling function, preserve the historical memory of a territory.

The concept of assemblage (agencement) developed by Deleuze and Guattari proves remarkably effective in analysing these heterogeneous structures. Far from being a theoretical imposition, this contemporary approach dialogues surprisingly with classical architectural treatises, which already described how different parts should relate to form a coherent body. These two strands of thought, although separated by centuries, converge in a vision of architecture as a system of relationships rather than a static object.

The multiplicities of events that animated the cascine find in Deleuzian thought a revelatory interpretive key, while their spatial organization recalls ancient architectural principles. In these deeply functional principles, a symbiotic relationship with the territory manifests itself, perfectly mirroring the notion of assemblage: not a simple aggregation of parts, but a continuous process of relationships between heterogeneous elements that maintain their identity while forming a coherent whole.

This perspective invites us to reconsider all architecture: are we not all bodies that maintain constant relationships? Every entity is composite, made of elements different in nature and quality that do not simply merge, but coexist in productive tension. What defines these bodies is not a presumed intrinsic unity but the relationships they establish with other bodies, places, and environments. Against the classical ideal of the one, contemporary philosophies propose a complex structure that does not presuppose an a priori unity, but recognizes and values the constitutive multiplicity of every phenomenon.

The thesis will methodically explore the various concepts that compose this vision of architecture as assemblage, tracing their meanings and interconnections. This is not merely a terminological exposition, but an investigation that, in illustrating these concepts, makes them operative – because understanding architecture means, ultimately, entering into a relationship with it.

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the role and relevance that architecture has (and can have) in facilitating the spatial production of festival spaces. It aims to demonstrate that festival spaces serve as ideal locations for experimenting with spatial relationships and architecture itself – through its expression and collective appropriation -which can have transformative effects on spaces of the everyday, guided by the disruptive nature of the festival.

The intention is to construct a designbrief for a permanent festival terrain in which the dialogue between people, place, society, and time can be constantly re-imagined through its fluid architecture—offering fertile ground for discussion on architecture’s role in the facilitation of festival spaces, how they inform the design, use, andorganisation of everyday spaces, and how they stimulate collective design processes.Ultimately, this project seeks
to enact architecture as a facilitator of dialogue, a medium for questioning and reshaping spatial relationships through the lens of festival spaces.

The Local Taste introduces a slow cooking project: a productive garden and cooking residency. It explores how locally grown food and the act of gardening hold the power to reconnect humans with their ecosystems. Set on a small German farm, the design brings together the disciplines of gardening and cooking, blurring the line between architecture and landscape. Rooted in the local soil, bricks fired on-site become the main design element—framing beds, retaining slopes, and forming a greenhouse, kitchen, and infrastructure for compost and water. These cycles, along with the human workflow, guide the redesign of the farm and the shaping of the garden. The brick becomes the link between old and new, house and landscape, cultivation and care. A curated experience that invites for reconnection through growing, processing, and tasting locally grown food.

Due to the practicality and inexpensive nature of synthetics, large quantities of wool are going to waste. One practical application to avoid such waste could be in architecture, as wool has been established as a durable material that offers protection against the elements. However, most uses of wool in Dutch architecture are especially limited to interior decoration or small use of hidden insulation. This research will analyze how wool could be used as an architectural material by looking at the aesthetic value of wool as a product in the different shearing layers of change in a building as proposed by Brand. By using the experiment-by-design method, it will attempt to measure aesthetic experience through surveys. The resulting prototypes will be used to show how wool can be useful in architecture according to its aesthetic value.

Grounded on the work of French psycho-analyst and activist Félix Guattari (1930-1992) and his attention to the practice of architecture, the seeds of curiosity of this research were planted in questioning the value ecosophical and ethico-aesthetic practices could have in relation to architecture and what it could mean to trade the position of the Dutch/European architect under today’s conditions. Through a neo-materialistic and posthumanistic framework, these curiosities have grown into chaosmic flowers by means of linking-together (mapping) trans-disciplinary under-standings on how to trans-form the mentality under-lying the etho-political grounds an architect acts-with and how to train an eco-logical response-ability towards heterogeneous worldings; different styles of living and dying: the under-ground(ing) riddles of relational architectural existence. This research resulted in a reseach-design tool and a project surrounding the collective milieu of Maashaven, Rotterdam (NLD) where the small design interventions attempt to empower new activities and positive ecological relations.

The thesis Post-Military Landscapes explores the adaptive reuse of a former military compound in Pardubice, Czechia. The site is examined through the lenses of its past, present, and potential future to uncover its values, assess its cultural significance, and articulate the rationale for its transformation. Drawing on insights from relevant case studies, I identified key principles that inform successful adaptive reuse. In the design proposal, I chose to repurpose the central part of the compound into an educational facility. This involved exploring the concepts of traditional and progressive schooling and investigating how reused buildings can contribute to meaningful and dynamic learning environments.

The research explores the impact of rapid infrastructural growth on Elephanta island and the informal economy that exists there. Located at the intersection of heritage, mass tourism, and sacred architecture.

Since Roman times, the Sicilian island of Favignana has been shaped by stone extraction, leaving behind a hidden architecture of quarries beneath its surface. This project asks how the spatial dualities of light and materiality below could be translated into an architecture above.
To capture these buried qualities, conventional design methods do not suffice. It requires a mixture of digital and physical experimentation. Through 3D scanning and printing, the embodied experience underground is translated into a spatial vocabulary that guides the design process through physical model-making.
Here, the construction site becomes a testing ground for post-anthropocenic architecture, shaped equally by human and non-human actors. Built with salt and stone, it anticipates erosion and reuse, questioning static architecture, where humans are only brief visitors before nature returns.

Europe needs to redefine the way architecture is being built, and also, more importantly, renovated. That is the case also for Poland, with a large stock of degraded housing.
This research explores the potential of bio-based materials and strategies in retrofitting Polish inter-war masonry tenement housing, focusing on circularity while addressing technical requirements, user needs and maintaining historical integrity. Through literature review, market research, cataloguing, and interviews with professionals, the study identifies key challenges in energy efficiency, moisture management, and user satisfaction, proposing bio-based materials such as wood, hemp, flax, wood fibre, straw and many others as effective solutions.
The design focuses on one of the buildings along Grochowska street in Warsaw, with an intention that it could be easily applied to other bildings of the same typology, numerous in the capital. A timber-based structure system is proposed in key interventions to the building, adding new usable space for the residents along with energy retrofitting. Custom timber joinery was developed for that purpose, dawing inspiration from japanese and polsh craftmenship.
The findings of the research emphasize the importance of navigating technical requirements with user preferences, which include affordability, comfort, and adaptability. By addressing these factors, bio-based solutions offer significant advantages in reducing environmental impact of the refurbishment action while enhancing living conditions. To bridge the gap between innovative practices and real-world application, the study also develops a guidebook and materials catalogue, providing accessible knowledge base about biobased renovation strategies to homeowners, designers, and policymakers.
This work contributes to renewable building practices by demonstrating how bio-based strategies can meet both ecological and practical demands, offering a path toward decarbonizing and futureproofing Poland’s aging housing stock.

This project explores the intersection of vocal expression, architecture, and AI to create personalized, expressive architectural designs that translate the unique vocal patterns of individuals into geometric and spatial forms. By combining spectrography, systemic analysis, and parametric design tools, this work redefines how voice can shape physical space. Inspired by the work of Iannis Xenakis, the project seeks to design an interactive architectural space that allows users to experience their own voices in a tangible, creative way, fostering a deeper connection between individuals and their environments. A fictional narrative, featuring tools like the Aesthetimeter, serves as an allegorical framework for exploring the translation of intangible vocal aesthetics into architectural form. This approach blends advanced technology with a narrative-driven exploration of how sound and space intersect. Additionally, the project emphasizes the preservation of human identity and authenticity in an increasingly automated world, prompting for a more expressive, human-centric design process. Ultimately, the project seeks to redefine the role of the human voice in architecture, carving out a space for creative self-expression in a world at the precipice of AI and automation.

This research explores how architecture can cultivate open spatial conditions that promote equal opportunities and foster new connections. Through a multidimensional approach, the study investigates the complex relationship between social and physical space, highlighting the influence of globalisation, neoliberalism, and urban development on spatial experiences. Drawing from theorists such as Lefebvre, Sennet and Harvey, and architects such as Pallasmaa, van Eyck and Hertzberger, the research introduces a human-centered framework—the Human Triad—comprising sensory design, architectural affordances, and space-time variations. This triad emphasizes the role of multi-sensory experiences, dynamic spatial interactions, and the adaptability of architecture over time. By designing spaces that encourage diverse interactions and perceptions, architects can contribute to more inclusive, flexible, and socially engaging environments. The study ultimately advocates for a shift away from rigid, standardized architecture toward a design philosophy that embraces openness, multiplicity, and human diversity in the built environment.

In a world full of consumerism, climate change, and capitalism, we face a crisis in how we relate to the world around us. Indigenous values offer a new way forward. This graduation project responds to the task laid out for practitioners to include Indigenous values in the practice. It does so by turning to the values of the Sámi people, the Indigenous people of the North and explores how this can inform architecture.
Because of my unfamiliarity with Sámi practices and beliefs at the start of this project, I looked for an alternative to the Eurocentric design frameworks, which often overlook alternative narratives or oversimplify representations. To include these different stories, there was a need to embrace the unfamiliar and employ this knowledge to design a world in which many worlds fit. This led me to the overarching question: How to make space for the Other? By engaging in interdisciplinary literature analysis and design-for-values frameworks, I gathered tools to make values tangible and translate them into architecture. Through this methodology, I intended to be very attuned to Sámi values and make inexplicit steps of the design process very explicit.
These ideas are grounded in the urban context of Tromsø, Norway—a city with limited visible Sámi representation outside of its touristic identity. Through four site-specific interventions, the Fish-Leather House, the Kitchen, the Weaving House, and the Summer Workshop and its Sheds, this project is a creative collection of practical places and relations, a set of activity spaces. They are not fixed but shaped by the times and contexts in which people engage with them, allowing for a space to find community, speak the language, transfer practical knowledge and reclaim Sámi spaces. Each space embodies core Sámi values: craftsmanship, community, care, and indigenuity.
This project is a continuous exploration of how to engage with the people you are designing for and a reflexive positioning on the role of the architect. The insights gained throughout this process not only informed my design outcomes but also encouraged a deeper understanding of how values shape practices. It emphasises that how we work is just as important as the outcome.

Urban environments offer excellent qualities for queer life: simultaneously allowing to acknowledge diversity and to find common ground. It is where a desire for difference can actively challenge the fear of the unknown. This city-based potential is decreasing due to urban optimisation practices, which can be understood as the (re)production of orientations that narrow the 'corridors of spatial possibilities'. In some case studies, the process of continuously creating an orientation could even be considered a form of 'smooth violence'. As a counter, this project offers an explorative inquiry of developing a design philosophy rooted in disorientation.

Through understanding disorientation not only as an emotional mode, but as a concept that spans phenomenology, philosophy and spatial theory, several situated interventions imagine alternative ways of use, design and projection within the context of the Parisian Historical Axis. They show how spatial disorientation (as a design approach) could serve to expose imposed systems, to question inequitable dynamics and to create openings for other ways of living together. Ultimately, it calls for a reconsideration of the position of architecture and the role of the practitioner in scripting and guiding openings in dialogues between orientation, disorientation and re-orientation. In doing so, we could find other urban directions that should be supported by our architectural practices through open-mindedness, care and allowance: to embrace the unexpected turn, to value other interpretations and to make space for difficulties beyond, and against, normativity.

The City of London, situated in the very heart of the capital, serves as the financial centre of the United Kingdom. Informally referred to as the City or the Square Mile, it maintains a distinct identity that sets it apart from its immediate surroundings. As outsiders, our understanding of the City of London remains shrouded in mystery and myth, entwined with an image that has been, whether deliberately or inadvertently, constructed by the place itself, its character, its people and its pursuits.

The project is situated within the context of the Square Mile, building upon the City of London Corporation’s plan to enhance its public realm and become more inclusive. The work established a perspective on what an accessible layer of architecture could entail in the City. It emphasised the importance of unconventional spaces within the Square Mile, alleyways, rooftops or other, and recognising their potential value. Within this project the alleys and roofs proved essential for integrating the new proposed interventions at a chosen site, addressing issues of both inaccessibility and privateness on the horizontal and vertical plane. Passageways were transformed into entrances, while rooftops provided the largest areas of open space suitable for development. The new structures form a gradient of public spaces that mark the beginning of a new public realm.

Although the work does not extend beyond the boundaries of the City of London, it is worth asking a fundamental question; what truly defines the essence of an urban environment? There is only one City of London, yet its distinctly neoliberal character is increasingly found in other urban places around the world. In these places, what was once public space is becoming private and inaccessible. Within a time when urban living and its spatial qualities have become more of a privilege than a right, it remains up to the architect, positioned between competing social, political and economic forces, to mediate their impact on the city.