In the middle of the picturesque quarter of Kosančićev Venac in Belgrade, a small empty crater is to be found. Once, the National Library of Belgrade stood here, but it got bombed during the second world war. Now it seems there is nothing more but some ruins of the original building. In multiple cases in Belgrade, the questions of how to deal with these scars in the urban fabric remains unsolved.

This graduation project investigates the site of the former National Libray of Serbia and how to deal with the historical continuity of its narrative. For the design of the intervention, the concept of layering will be used as a formative method. To strengthen the memorial function of the site, the intervention will serve as a place that allows for the experience of an abstraction of daily life. To achieve this, research into religious architecture is conducted.

Refugee camps are considered temporal places, outside of the normal juridical order, in which people are waiting to restart their lives in a new place or return to their original homes. The Palestinian refugee camps, which have existed for almost 70 years now, challenges these conceptions. The development of the Jabal al-Hussein camp, one of the Palestinian refugee camps in Amman, Jordan, from tent camp to neighbourhood, its governmentality by both the Jordan government and URNWA, and the new social structures combined show in this case study that the camp is a very paradoxical and ambiguous spatial form in terms of temporality, exclusion and stagnation. Or in other words, in its permanence, inclusion and identity. Therefore, we must reconsider the theories on refugee camps and shift our focus from the symbolic-political to the material-lived.