The outcome of constantly striving for economic growth and making a profit has led to a city in which every building is seen as a product. Power, ownership, and mass tourism are taking over the city, exacerbating the housing shortage and making the housing prices rise to an unprecedented height. As a result, inhabitants are being pushed out of the city, while the discussion of housing as a human right is being ignored and wellbeing and equality are undermined. Alongside this housing crisis, tourism has developed into an economy with negative impacts on the city. Being a product for the almost 17 million visitors has been very overwhelming for the only 830.000 inhabitants of Amsterdam, which becomes visible through anti-hotel protests. This raises the question of the right to the city. The main objective of this project is to design a hotel that does not see tourism as a thread for the locals, but instead, as a resource. Considering different ways in which tourism can still take place in harmony with the wellbeing of Amsterdam’s inhabitants, I started to think of an architectural model in which tourists and residents live in the same building, benefitting from each other. The idea is a model where residents have a guest room in their home. The money that the guest room generates enables them to live in the city. The City Hotel will consist of multiple of these units, all housing a guest room. Together, they will form a collective house, sharing multiple facilities like gardens, a big kitchen, a dining room, working spaces and a laundry space. Thereby shifting the almost parasitic relationship between tourists and residents into a symbiotic one.

This graduation project is focusing on and looking for the function and role of the future national bank, as an outcome of its current physical and social situation. The site of the project is the National Bank of Belgium, located in Brussels. For its program, the bank has a public function and a reception hall, but mainly consist of office spaces and meeting rooms within a, with security line protected, area. The traditional program, like pressing and storing money, is already replaced to new buildings outside of the city center for better efficiency and land use. Next to that, the public and office program is losing its role due to digitalization. Organisational and programmatic changes are already made, but the architecture is still in its former state. Therefore, it is important to seek for new possibilities, and looking to the future role and image of the bank, whilst learning of the history of the Bank and its site.

The ambition of the National Bank of Belgium's project was to make a National institution accessible to the public. By opening the bank, both ideologically and physically, the dynamic of the bank is radically modified. The confrontation between the Bank and the public provides opportunities to gather, learn and improve. The change is subtle from the outside but radically modifies the way the bank functions. The creation of a series of spaces within the bank directed towards the different publics of the bank and brings the domestic sphere into the institution itself. The Bank of Opportunities is a space fostering a new kind of Bank and community.

The framework of this work is situated between the typological issue about the epistemological definition of art spaces, and their role as consequence within the city, and a personal interest in the kind of attention art demands in space for a specific engagement. It is in the place where art is displayed that the knowledge about it is produced. Within the art system, a distortion in the value of art has been staged by the increasing significance of the role of private collectors in investing in contemporary art and legitimating their collections trough the echoes of certain art spaces’ typologies. As consequence, private collectors become the accepted ‘manager of consciousness,’ and the former distance between collectors and museum is confused, and the museum academic capacity is being replaced. Here, the question of how a private collection is presented to the world became particularly urgent. In response to this context, the construction of two specific narratives embedded in two contemporary art spaces for two private art collections has been delineated not in a deconstruction of values, but contextualised in-culture within the realm of architecture and its position towards the system. Seeking a condition of nearness to the art world has been necessary in order to trace the encounters, or relationships which would construct the notion of place for contemporary art, and the values of the prelude to it. A certain alertness and respect towards the other and the world can be achieved in the art gallery that is otherwise often elusive, since what the art gallery as site does that ‘real life’ does not is that it forces the issues of attention – towards the space, the place and the other. Especially in this context, “considerations of where implies more than an ontology of position.” The fiction of the art space started from the definition of the collection as first assemble to relate art to places and spaces, since the structure and identity of it became fundamental. A section through two collections and their collectors tries to trace the ways and rules which define the different spatial implications of art, in order to relate different specificities to the word, to find them a place within the world. The role of architecture has been a negotiation between narratives, the one of the existing place which I found as connected to the specificity of the two collections I was dealing with, and the one of the artwork within the collection itself. And in measuring the one with the other, a staged uncertainty would lead to a certain awareness of the place one is in, and how does it relate with the collection itself, and with the world. I believe architecture has to offer a framework that should elicit reactions – it cannot be, as consequence, neutral. I do think that the role of architecture in relation with art it is not so different from the one of storytelling in “establishing the rights of intensity” of encounters. Since eventually, everything become visible through relationships.

The graduation studio ‘Spaces of Collection’ seeks to explore the relationship an institution has with the host city. The central question in research during the process is how to make the university’s physical return by a building with ‘spaces of collection’ for the accommodation and display of artifacts in various university collections. The design proposal could be seen as a treasure box of collections with its urban context.

A new administrative building is planned for the city of Brussels, one of 19 municipalities that together form the Brussel Hoofdstedelijk Gewest. The administrative centre will provide city offices for 1600 employees and a public space for the receipt and processing of applications from citizens. The winning competition project, known as Brucity, lacks any description of a truly public space and doesn’t engage with the citizens of Brussels on a political level. It is appearing as an anonymous office building, showing that the municipality has reduced themselves to their mere administrative task. This project is intended to be a critique on the competition project. The main objective is to design a building that allows for more direct contact and collaboration between the municipality and its citizens.

The advent of the internet and digital technology has transformed public spaces, impacting human interactions and diluting their original purpose. However, augmented reality (AR) technology, exemplified by Pokémon Go, presents a unique opportunity to revitalize urban public spaces in the digital era. AR technology offers virtual flexibility, empowering public spaces to become multifunctional environments and redistributing the value of urban areas. To accommodate this transformative potential, inclusive and enduring architectural structures are needed as resilient containers for AR development. This project focuses on designing robust, inclusive public buildings that seamlessly integrate into the urban fabric undergoing AR development. These structures adapt to the evolving needs and activities facilitated by AR, fostering social interaction and a sense of belonging within the community. The integration of AR technology necessitates a holistic approach to urban design, extending beyond individual buildings to the broader urban context. By leveraging the transformative power of AR, this project envisions digitally enhanced and physically resilient urban environments that accommodate diverse activities and cultivate community. It explores new paradigms for urban design where public buildings serve as adaptable containers for AR experiences, fostering social cohesion and redefining the relationship between people, architecture, and the environment. Through the integration of AR technology and thoughtful architectural design, this project showcases the potential for vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable urban public spaces in the digital age. By embracing flexibility, durability, and inclusivity, it establishes a foundation for AR-neutral buildings that respond to the evolving needs and aspirations of urban communities, creating a more engaging and harmonious urban environment.

For my graduation project, I aimed to explore the way in which the new economy of reusing existing building materials or complete structures can be used in a large building project such as the new town hall in Brussels and how it can serve as an exemplar to its surroundings. The project entails the appropriation of an existing corporate office building along the Boulevard de Anspach in Brussels. This building stems from 1969 and was part of the 'Brusselization'. This modernization resulted in many unattractive and rather outdated buildings. Since the office tower was built amid these innovations, this graduation project is a manifesto on how to deal with the inheritance of this modernization. Moreover, what should a municipality embody or represent to its citizens and passers-by? While elaborating on the theme of 'a political space' I focussed on exposing existing qualities/structures by claiming and appropriating a piece of urban space for its proximity.

The Future Bank involves the transformation and adaptive reuse of the National Bank of Belgium in Brussels. A vast closed off urban block, designed to safeguard the states treasures hasn’t moved with the ever changing ambiguous role of the bank. The project introduces a new public plinth for the city of Brussels to appropriate together with a conglomerate of different office environments for the banks employees. As architect, taking on the role of bricoleur, the existing building structure has been approached as a source of pre-constrained materials. The metaphorical tools of the axe and pocket knife are used to eke out new meanings within the existing building structure. The misfit building will be healed by stitching together on different scales. In that way creating an architectural continuity which allows future adaptation and even an informality that invites to do so. The minimal interventions aim to heal the existing, minimizing our impact on the limited resources that our planet has to offer. The result is a strategy which must be considered before diminishing a building that misfits its contemporary role.

The project is a rethinking of the political building. It presents itself as an public infrastructure open to the city and citizens, in terms of its form, facade and relationship to the surroundings. Collective public life and democracy of the space are more addressed in the project.

The project seeks to stabilise and reverse the degradation of the pier’s walls so it remains available to its users. The structure acts as a stabilizer for this piece of land, so as not to let it disappear. The light structure takes inspiration from a bird perched on a branch, a metaphor for young Amsterdammer’s searching for their place in the city. I relate this lightness with the temporality of a youth hostel, where young people come and go, renting cabins within the structure and using the campsite on the pier. The project encompasses a conversation between the new structure, which encases floors and spaces, and the existing structure of the pier. The essence of the project is showcased in an investigation of the structure, which is expressed as a piece of architecture in its own right.

The project "Celebration as Revolution - Transformation of Copenhagen's First Waterworks to Public Bath" investigates how the celebration of worker's movement in the 1970s has developed into Copenhagen's largest annual festival "Distortion". An industrial heritage site, the Waterworks plant, is proposed to be reappropriate for cultural and celebrative purposes in relation to water and pleasure.

The institution in this case is the Delft University of Technology, which will make its appearance through a building to be situated in Delft’s historical center, suggesting the university’s physical return to the city after a hiatus of some eighty years. The agent of this return will be a complex of 'spaces of collection' for the accommodation and display of artefacts in various university collections. An opportunity is seen to provide an elaborated place of social and intellectual contact between the university and the public, affected by objects and realized through students, citizens and visitors.

The City Hotel is a building/landscape that is fruit of a re-adaptation of the Q-Park Bijenkorf in Amsterdam. It aims to be a place for Amsterdammers, small local businesses and tourists that acts as a community center for all. The building can be appropriated by its users and hosts many different functions under one roof. It does not only give, but also asks. It asks the visitors to be flexible and adapt to its environment, this adaptation can bring its users together to create a synergy. This project is an example of how a car parks with extraordinary conditions can be re-adapted into a place suitable for people, and that demolition is not the only solution. The Q-park is a monumental building with a very unique architectural form. It is poetic in its ambiguity, a perking garage that deserves to be seen as a monument building also in memory of an age made around the role of the car in cities. Perking garages are silent giants that can be awaken, this project shows it. Nothing about this project is conventional nor its wants to be.

The project wishes to provide a case study in the way that the natural world can be integrated within the city life. The project site is located in Amsterdam at the island Uilenburg. Where it takes into account the doughnut economics model to create a social and ecological balance in the city. The existing buildings together with the newly designed buildings will continue what the city of Amsterdam started in 1915 when they planned to improve the living conditions of Uilenburg and make a healthier city. The design considers the historical aspect of the Uilenburg and its buildings. By creating a building which is directly into contact with different types of nature with a variety of gardens. A city hotel is designed for young people in transformation from dependence to independence. Creating a place where young people together with their neighbours, plants and trees can flourish.

China’s rapid urbanisation and industrialisation seriously impacted rural areas, which is reflected significantly in the Greater Bay Area. With globalisation and digitalisation, the emergence of Taobao villages has become a new model for rural development in China. However, socio-economic activities entering in Taobao villages with digital technology were unguided and lacked spatial planning. Consequently, the pursuit of economic growth has resulted in the sacrifice of agricultural resources, degradation of the ecological environment, and terrible spatial quality. With the regionalisation and integration of the Greater Bay Area, the need for sustainable rural revitalisation has become urgent. To envision future possibilities for rural development, this project introduces the concept of Smart Villages, aiming to enhance agricultural productivity and improve rural liveability. With the Dutch layer approach as the main methodology, the project understands the essential resources that support smart village development and evaluates the spatial conditions of rural areas at regional, district, and local scales. To conclude, the key design elements for Smart Villages development include agricultural agglomeration, accessible networks, and rural liveability. Based on these findings, the project proposes a potential Smart Villages development framework that serves as a guide for rural areas. A series of spatial design strategies are also presented and applied to two design cases, Xingtan in Foshan and Chikan in Jiangmen. They represent rural areas at different levels of development, showcasing scenarios of agro-industrial and eco-agricultural development respectively. It demonstrates how rural areas make use of local resources to spontaneously develop into Smart Villages, thereby reducing dependence on urban centres and contributing to the development of metropolitan regions. The project highlights the need for a flexible approach to rural revitalisation in the digital future. By embracing the concept of Smart Villages, it advocates for sustainable agricultural practices, improving infrastructures, and enhancing the quality of life for rural communities. The proposed framework and design strategies offer valuable insights for planners, policymakers, and stakeholders seeking to foster the sustainable development of Smart Villages in a spatial perspective.

You can find them in almost any major cultural city. Combinations of museum-clusters and public parks: museum-parks. What are the (urban) advantages of these cultural clusters in the middle of the city and what role does the museum-park play in the urban fabric? In this architectural study of museum-clusters, Sophie Kugel dissects four museum-parks on different topics, such as spatial composition, route and architectural representation. By creating drawings on different scales for each case study, all four museum-parks can be well compared in order to answer the research question: What is the interaction between the museum-park and the public space in the city and in what architectural way makes the museum-park use of the advantages of museumclustering?

The thesis is focused on Paris and the notion of power, prevailing in the city. It is more particularly looking at the experience of control felt within it and how it is possible to design in resistance to this particular aspect. The graduation was developed along different methodologies and themes of interest. The research, set at the beginning of the graduation, looked at how different monuments in Paris are using the visitor’s experience to condition its reactions and so behaviour. From it rose a reflection on the entering process and its conditioning aspect and the possibilities of resistance it could offer. Following the research came the study of Paris on a larger scale to look at places at the corner of political interventions, and therefore control. This was done to find a ground of potential resistance to the city structure. The place de la Bastille first appeared as a typical Parisian square, it is an important node for the city infrastructure and has at its centre a monument. However, its name and particular political and urban history revealed how it is in resistance. The study and analysis of the place’s history and structure delivers another understanding of the place, its important features and how it serves as an exception within Paris. Since Haussmann, Paris is characterized by uniformed public spaces. Its specificities relying on monuments and different figures of representations inherent to the French political history. His intervention on the place the la Bastille resulted in a disconnection between the common experience of the place and the symbolic of its name. The project itself re-uses the place’s history and physical aspect, its lost experience to reconnect the visitor to the feeling of the place; and not its representations; as a tool for resistance.

Based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the project deals with the unearthing of spatial and cultural layers of the historic city centre, focusing on the modern urban fabric which was built on the relics of the Judengasse, the centuries-old Jewish ghetto. The project’s mission involves the reinterpretation of ordinary, seemingly insignificant buildings and urban environments into spaces which carry a layered past, but possibly also a hopeful future for different social groups in the city of Frankfurt. This attempt expands the means through which architectural heritage can be understood and appropriated; by doing so, it invites the contemporary local Jewish community, along with other publics, to reclaim a lost chapter in the city’s history, and to continue writing its story while fully embracing the complexities and conflicts it might bring forth.

The new design for the Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art (VMHK) endeavoured to provide a contemporary interpretation of the nineteenth and twentieth century warehouse architecture, translated into a contemporary art museum. The 'Warehouse for Art' symbolizes its role as a repository for the museum’s knowledge and art, while at the same time identifying with the genius loci of the former port identity found along the Scheldt river and its surrounding brick buildings. This industrial character is neutral, but not as aseptic as a characterless white cube and does not lose itself in architectural caprices. Moreover, the design its flexibility makes the building adaptable for its upcoming function as a museum and the ones after, thus making it future-proof. Simultaneously, the design questions the conventional notion of a contemporary museum, aiming to transcend its exclusive institutional character and function as a public building instead. Within this pursuit of an 'anti-museum', the warehouse exemplifies a departure from the typical museum typology. Instead it represents a typology that contemporary art museums have discovered in industrial heritage and can fit into newly constructed buildings of the twenty-first century as well.