R.R.J. van de Pas
Please Note
165 records found
1
Extractive Preservation
Interfaces of Profanation, Power and Ecology in the Restricted Zone
Informed by Giorgio Agamben’s concept of profanation, the project is structured as a trilogy of inquiry across territorial scales, the wider territory, the village and lake system, and the city. Across these interconnected conditions, it traces how ecological processes, governance frameworks, and everyday practices are deeply entangled, revealing environmental governance as an extractive mechanism that translates lived knowledge into remote systems of control.
At its core, the project seeks to make the local practice of fishing operative in subverting the hegemonic technopolitical mechanisms through which the Delta is understood, negotiated, and managed. In response, it proposes a series of infrastructural “acupunctures” that render local agency legible within the territorial system. Through a simultaneous process of formalisation and informalisation, fishing practices are re-inscribed into governance through the construction of a fishing dock and the adaptive reuse of a former fish canning factory, while environmental data is relocated into the commons of the Delta, opening monitoring processes to collective participation and situated knowledge production.
The project is liminal methaphorically existing at the threshold between needed action and an anticipated vision, but also physically situated between systems of power. Working simultaneously through territory, community and material, the interventions do not merely represent the citizen, the village or the institution. Instead, they position these actors on a shared and horizontal plane, displacing top-down forms of control in favour of governance emerging from below. The highly sophisticated and the deeply analogue, the abstract and the material, are brought into proximity not as opposites, but as coexisting forms of inhabitation and knowledge production. Through this profanation of established hierarchies, the project reclaims agency for those rendered outsiders within their own land.
...
Informed by Giorgio Agamben’s concept of profanation, the project is structured as a trilogy of inquiry across territorial scales, the wider territory, the village and lake system, and the city. Across these interconnected conditions, it traces how ecological processes, governance frameworks, and everyday practices are deeply entangled, revealing environmental governance as an extractive mechanism that translates lived knowledge into remote systems of control.
At its core, the project seeks to make the local practice of fishing operative in subverting the hegemonic technopolitical mechanisms through which the Delta is understood, negotiated, and managed. In response, it proposes a series of infrastructural “acupunctures” that render local agency legible within the territorial system. Through a simultaneous process of formalisation and informalisation, fishing practices are re-inscribed into governance through the construction of a fishing dock and the adaptive reuse of a former fish canning factory, while environmental data is relocated into the commons of the Delta, opening monitoring processes to collective participation and situated knowledge production.
The project is liminal methaphorically existing at the threshold between needed action and an anticipated vision, but also physically situated between systems of power. Working simultaneously through territory, community and material, the interventions do not merely represent the citizen, the village or the institution. Instead, they position these actors on a shared and horizontal plane, displacing top-down forms of control in favour of governance emerging from below. The highly sophisticated and the deeply analogue, the abstract and the material, are brought into proximity not as opposites, but as coexisting forms of inhabitation and knowledge production. Through this profanation of established hierarchies, the project reclaims agency for those rendered outsiders within their own land.
Piet's Centre
A hospital for immunocompromised patients
My motivation to focus on hospitals is personal. My younger brother, Piet, is nineteen years old and has Cystic Fibrosis. Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic condition that mainly affects the lungs and immune system, making patients particularly vulnerable to infections. Because of this, a hospital is not always experienced as a safe place. It is the place where care is provided, but also a place where exposure to infection can become dangerous.
This contradiction forms the starting point of my graduation project. The contemporary hospital is confronted with a renewed architectural challenge. Many hospital buildings were designed during the antibiotic era, when compactness, efficiency, shared waiting areas, and dense circulation systems became common. However, for patients who are vulnerable to infection, these environments can be problematic.
The main question of the project is: how can architectural design contribute to infection safety and overall well-being for immunocompromised patients within the hospital environment?
The project argues that infection prevention is not only a matter of medical protocols, ventilation systems, or personal protective equipment. It is also shaped by architecture. Routing, thresholds, room organization, outdoor space, material choices, visibility, distance, and atmosphere all influence how patients move, how care is organized, and how safe a hospital can feel.
The design responds by reorganizing the hospital around protection, clean air, and controlled interaction. Separate routes reduce unnecessary contact between patients. Positive pressure rooms create protected interiors. Outdoor circulation provides access to fresh air, while courtyard gardens bring daylight, greenery, and nature-inclusive healing into the care environment.
At the same time, the project avoids turning protection into isolation. Social spaces, outdoor meeting areas, daylight, greenery, and patient autonomy are included as essential parts of the design. The project searches for a balance between control and freedom, between medical safety and human comfort.
Architecture cannot remove medical risk completely, but it can define the spatial conditions in which care, movement, interaction, and protection take place. In this way, infection safety and well-being can support each other rather than compete.
...
My motivation to focus on hospitals is personal. My younger brother, Piet, is nineteen years old and has Cystic Fibrosis. Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic condition that mainly affects the lungs and immune system, making patients particularly vulnerable to infections. Because of this, a hospital is not always experienced as a safe place. It is the place where care is provided, but also a place where exposure to infection can become dangerous.
This contradiction forms the starting point of my graduation project. The contemporary hospital is confronted with a renewed architectural challenge. Many hospital buildings were designed during the antibiotic era, when compactness, efficiency, shared waiting areas, and dense circulation systems became common. However, for patients who are vulnerable to infection, these environments can be problematic.
The main question of the project is: how can architectural design contribute to infection safety and overall well-being for immunocompromised patients within the hospital environment?
The project argues that infection prevention is not only a matter of medical protocols, ventilation systems, or personal protective equipment. It is also shaped by architecture. Routing, thresholds, room organization, outdoor space, material choices, visibility, distance, and atmosphere all influence how patients move, how care is organized, and how safe a hospital can feel.
The design responds by reorganizing the hospital around protection, clean air, and controlled interaction. Separate routes reduce unnecessary contact between patients. Positive pressure rooms create protected interiors. Outdoor circulation provides access to fresh air, while courtyard gardens bring daylight, greenery, and nature-inclusive healing into the care environment.
At the same time, the project avoids turning protection into isolation. Social spaces, outdoor meeting areas, daylight, greenery, and patient autonomy are included as essential parts of the design. The project searches for a balance between control and freedom, between medical safety and human comfort.
Architecture cannot remove medical risk completely, but it can define the spatial conditions in which care, movement, interaction, and protection take place. In this way, infection safety and well-being can support each other rather than compete.
Time is the architect
Existing buildings as evolving landscapes
...
What we left behind
The architectural heritage of Jewish Baghdad
How can we reactivate this architectural knowledge? To test this, the corpus is read indirectly, through archival drawings, photographs, surviving objects, and interviews with the Baghdadi-Jewish diaspora, and analysed into twenty-two recurring spatial patterns. They work in three fields. Climate, as the relation between the body and its surroundings, set against Baghdad’s hot weather. The threshold, which regulates the distance between the resident and the street, treated as exposed and unclaimed, turning on the question of protection. And gathering, which organises the relation between a person and their community. These patterns are then put to work through interventions in the last building that gave the Jewish community a space of assembly, a kind of urban salon known as the Frank Iny School, with the aim of bringing it back into use.
The patterns are read as principles rather than fixed forms. Read this way, they allow classical means to be used again within a contemporary context, and they open up an inquiry into materials and techniques that lost their place over the years. The building, left in abandonment and neglect, becomes again a place to stay, to make, and to gather. The knowledge studied in these buildings returns to life not as historical reconstruction but as a living principle for present-day residents. The method is offered as a procedure for any architectural corpus that is dispersed, partly destroyed or closed to direct visit. ...
How can we reactivate this architectural knowledge? To test this, the corpus is read indirectly, through archival drawings, photographs, surviving objects, and interviews with the Baghdadi-Jewish diaspora, and analysed into twenty-two recurring spatial patterns. They work in three fields. Climate, as the relation between the body and its surroundings, set against Baghdad’s hot weather. The threshold, which regulates the distance between the resident and the street, treated as exposed and unclaimed, turning on the question of protection. And gathering, which organises the relation between a person and their community. These patterns are then put to work through interventions in the last building that gave the Jewish community a space of assembly, a kind of urban salon known as the Frank Iny School, with the aim of bringing it back into use.
The patterns are read as principles rather than fixed forms. Read this way, they allow classical means to be used again within a contemporary context, and they open up an inquiry into materials and techniques that lost their place over the years. The building, left in abandonment and neglect, becomes again a place to stay, to make, and to gather. The knowledge studied in these buildings returns to life not as historical reconstruction but as a living principle for present-day residents. The method is offered as a procedure for any architectural corpus that is dispersed, partly destroyed or closed to direct visit.
Material is matter given a role.
Value is assigned by the systems around it.
Architecture is one of the systems through which matter acquires that role.
When does matter become material?
What happens when architecture enters before that role has settled?
This thesis occupies that interval. Value remains contingent, relational and open to negotiation. No substance is inherently waste, resource, evidence or cultural material. These identities emerge through the technical, economic, ecological and social systems that receive it. Architecture participates in the production of value. Space is one of the means through which matter is recognised, organised and brought into public life. This project enters before meaning has been resolved, giving spatial form to the conditions through which value is assigned, contested and transformed.
This argument is situated in Six Bells, a former coal village in South Wales where the value of matter has undergone a profound territorial reversal. Coal organised the valley as an economic, spatial and civic system. When mining ceased, that system collapsed, yet its consequences remained in the ground, in the movement of water and in the ongoing work required to manage what extraction left behind.
Ochre is one of those remains. Separated from coal’s former economy, the residue can enter new practices, acquire new meanings and become part of public life. For a village largely understood through industrial decline, it offers another way for the community to encounter its material history through knowledge, making and exchange. Its economic value remains modest. Its cultural and civic significance lies in how people understand, use and represent what remains.
The same residue can be read as environmental burden, cultural material and ecological substrate. Its value shifts according to the system through which it is encountered. This is the Six Bells paradox.
Architecture mediates between environmental maintenance, material transformation and civic life. It gives public presence to a material afterlife that would otherwise remain concealed, and considers what becomes of that architecture when the process it accommodates eventually changes or ends.
...
Material is matter given a role.
Value is assigned by the systems around it.
Architecture is one of the systems through which matter acquires that role.
When does matter become material?
What happens when architecture enters before that role has settled?
This thesis occupies that interval. Value remains contingent, relational and open to negotiation. No substance is inherently waste, resource, evidence or cultural material. These identities emerge through the technical, economic, ecological and social systems that receive it. Architecture participates in the production of value. Space is one of the means through which matter is recognised, organised and brought into public life. This project enters before meaning has been resolved, giving spatial form to the conditions through which value is assigned, contested and transformed.
This argument is situated in Six Bells, a former coal village in South Wales where the value of matter has undergone a profound territorial reversal. Coal organised the valley as an economic, spatial and civic system. When mining ceased, that system collapsed, yet its consequences remained in the ground, in the movement of water and in the ongoing work required to manage what extraction left behind.
Ochre is one of those remains. Separated from coal’s former economy, the residue can enter new practices, acquire new meanings and become part of public life. For a village largely understood through industrial decline, it offers another way for the community to encounter its material history through knowledge, making and exchange. Its economic value remains modest. Its cultural and civic significance lies in how people understand, use and represent what remains.
The same residue can be read as environmental burden, cultural material and ecological substrate. Its value shifts according to the system through which it is encountered. This is the Six Bells paradox.
Architecture mediates between environmental maintenance, material transformation and civic life. It gives public presence to a material afterlife that would otherwise remain concealed, and considers what becomes of that architecture when the process it accommodates eventually changes or ends.
Well-being in an Analog Habitat
The role of architecture in supporting psychological well-being in isolated environments for astronaut training
Analog habitats, Earth-based facilities for isolation training, already prepare astronauts for the confined living and working conditions of future missions. However, in this project, they are also approached as experimental platforms for testing architectural strategies that would be difficult to pursue in space.
Privacy and stimulation are selected as two key challenges because spatial conditions strongly shape them. Design experiments explore how architecture can respond to these challenges.
The thesis shows that architecture can balance practical requirements and psychological effects in isolated and confined spaces, turning these tensions into a supportive spatial experience. Three design proposals explore different design responses to privacy and stimulation, from the overall organization of the habitat to the reinterpretation of basic architectural elements. Across the proposals, textiles emerge as particularly promising for future analog missions and space habitats because they are lightweight, adaptable, and currently underused in space missions.
The next step would be to develop the proposals into full-scale prototypes and evaluate them during inhabited analog missions, using existing isolation environments as a baseline. Such testing would examine whether the design strategies developed through the proposals produce meaningful effects on well-being when inhabited. The findings could contribute to future space habitats, and potentially expand architectural knowledge for Earth-based environments shaped by isolation or confinement. By using the analog habitat as an extreme case, the thesis also informs architectural education by suggesting that the psychological effects of spatial decisions should be considered throughout the design process. ...
Analog habitats, Earth-based facilities for isolation training, already prepare astronauts for the confined living and working conditions of future missions. However, in this project, they are also approached as experimental platforms for testing architectural strategies that would be difficult to pursue in space.
Privacy and stimulation are selected as two key challenges because spatial conditions strongly shape them. Design experiments explore how architecture can respond to these challenges.
The thesis shows that architecture can balance practical requirements and psychological effects in isolated and confined spaces, turning these tensions into a supportive spatial experience. Three design proposals explore different design responses to privacy and stimulation, from the overall organization of the habitat to the reinterpretation of basic architectural elements. Across the proposals, textiles emerge as particularly promising for future analog missions and space habitats because they are lightweight, adaptable, and currently underused in space missions.
The next step would be to develop the proposals into full-scale prototypes and evaluate them during inhabited analog missions, using existing isolation environments as a baseline. Such testing would examine whether the design strategies developed through the proposals produce meaningful effects on well-being when inhabited. The findings could contribute to future space habitats, and potentially expand architectural knowledge for Earth-based environments shaped by isolation or confinement. By using the analog habitat as an extreme case, the thesis also informs architectural education by suggesting that the psychological effects of spatial decisions should be considered throughout the design process.
For Deviation
Architecture, Control, and the Beurstraverse
...
Fucu di San Nicolas — Specters of San Nicolas
Hauntings of Colonization
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. ...
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.
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 ...
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
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.
...
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.
The Growing Library
Building with living trees
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.
...
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.
Sweet Memory
A metaphysical re-membraning of the limit
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.
...
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.
A Sensible Morphology
How can one speak about parts or wholes, without prioritizing one or the other but acknowledging their symbiotic relationship?
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 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.
Architecture as facilitating agent
Exploring architecture’s position in spatial relationships through festival spaces
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 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
Cultivating Reciprocity Through Regenerative Farming
Moreover, the research explores how literature can inform architectural design, emphasizing the importance of atmosphere and embodied experiences (Pallasmaa 2005; Zumthor 2006). It addresses key questions about translating narratives into functional design and extends the concept of narrative-driven architecture beyond temporary installations to permanent contexts.
Through theoretical research, case studies, literature analysis, and personal narrative surveys, the study identified the location of the project as well as the design principles and strategies that integrate narrative, atmosphere, and embodied experience into architecture.
The culmination lies in an architectural design with a focus on creating spaces and atmospheres that translate fictional literary experiences, emotions, and journeys into tangible form. Ultimately, the fictional narrative aspires to create spaces that are both emotionally resonant and functionally purposeful.
This results in a design of Casa Habitoria - a living habitat that is a unique meeting point of personal stories and communal experiences. ...
Moreover, the research explores how literature can inform architectural design, emphasizing the importance of atmosphere and embodied experiences (Pallasmaa 2005; Zumthor 2006). It addresses key questions about translating narratives into functional design and extends the concept of narrative-driven architecture beyond temporary installations to permanent contexts.
Through theoretical research, case studies, literature analysis, and personal narrative surveys, the study identified the location of the project as well as the design principles and strategies that integrate narrative, atmosphere, and embodied experience into architecture.
The culmination lies in an architectural design with a focus on creating spaces and atmospheres that translate fictional literary experiences, emotions, and journeys into tangible form. Ultimately, the fictional narrative aspires to create spaces that are both emotionally resonant and functionally purposeful.
This results in a design of Casa Habitoria - a living habitat that is a unique meeting point of personal stories and communal experiences.
Under-ground riddles
Loving chaosmic flowers
Wool in Architecture
The Aesthetic value