New Urban Front investigates how waterfront densification can contribute to interiorizing the Maas river in Rotterdam. In the past decade, the post-industrialization of Rotterdam's docks has created a new urban front: the Maas. However, this waterfront lacks character and scale, while water and city lost their programmatic relation after industry migrated out of the city. A mixed-use high density transversal typology is proposed at the Linker Veerdam, the historic crossing of the Maas river, to heal this schism and place water back at the center of urban memory. A sectional base, large floating plinth, and towers connect water and city with a programmatic cut and add urban scale to the river. Urban program is loaded onto the river by introduction of a boat-in cinema, a Maaspodium opening towards the water, and multiple pools and piers. This creates a multi-layered and multi-scale relation between water and city. By doing so, New Urban Front contributes to interiorizing the Maas river and convert it into the central public space of Rotterdam.

HangARTs museum, situated in Rotterdam Zuid at the quay of Maashaven, is the new art museum of Rotterdam. Here, the visitors are audience without needing to enter the building. The public space that the museum provides has public art for passers-by to admire. Even if your original purpose of being was not visiting the museum, you get to experience art in the absent mind.

The thesis explores the issue of art not being present in the daily life of the neighbourhood. The proposal resulting from the research aims to attract even the people that are indifferent to the art world, providing small thresholds for the audience to pass to see what the art world can offer. Starting as just a place for leisure, the design then brings the audience to public art and eventually to the exhibitions provided. Ultimately, hangARTs museum is the museum that will lay the base for people to start enjoying art.

With global urbanization, cities all around the world are changing. Rotterdam is expected to grow significantly in the upcoming decades and therefore will experience densification. This densification takes shape in the form of Rotterdam’s high-rise strategy and will have a direct influence on the way residents live in the inner city center of Rotterdam. Therefore, the need for leisure amenities in dense area’s is of significant importance. With leisure-time being an important part of the day, investing in a wide range of amenities is crucial for a city center. In this project, the focus is on leisure sports, which is known as a space consuming function. This results in the following research question: How can space consuming leisure sports be implemented in a densified city center, in order to be a social condenser? The design assignment will be a leisure sports facility in the city center of Rotterdam. This building aims to engage the residents in sports and social activities and thus intensify their social interaction. By looking to other countries, this project can be a future migration of the Athletic Club; a combination of a social club and a sports club. This typology is the main reference for the final design; a tower filled with stacked sport facilities and social amenities.

Exhibitions and collections of art museums mostly consists of visual art. When we talk about “contemporary art” museums, people immediately think about paintings, photographs and sculptures: visual arts. Monet’s, Van Gogh’s and Picasso’s paintings, photographs of William Klein, sculptures by Richard Serra or Woody Allen’s movie. All these artworks are experienced by observing them with your eyes. Visiting those visual artworks in museums, possibilities to reflect on the social and political situations of today, are offered. However, for a great number of people the world of experiencing visual artworks is not accessible. They do not know how paintings can provoke imagination. Non-visually handicapped people can visit any “visual” art museums, and experience artworks with all their senses. A visually handicapped person, has less museum possibilities to go to and experience contemporary art. Art museums should be more accessible for visually handicapped people but also for people with other disabilities such as hearing impairment or people living in a wheelchair. Synesthetic art is a form of art where more than one sense contributes to the experience of an art work. There are art genres using other senses than only the visual sense. Sound, smell, taste, we can include them. Take music as an example, music has just as many opportunities to provoke imagination as a visual artwork.
A second problem we are facing today is gentrification. The process of upgrading neglected urban neighborhoods, in which the current, less wealthy residents and initial small entrepreneurs and pubs, have to move out of the way for the middle class and their catering industries and companies. Through the experience of synesthetic art, the new museum aims to stimulate and include current residents, offers appropriate daily-life activities, which are accessible for everyone, and where visually handicapped people are no longer excluded. A node of multiple scales (urban and social) will be created in my design. 
To respond to the lack of synesthetic art museums and the problem gentrification, the definitions and experiences of aesthetics and synaesthetics will be explained and discussed. It is fundamental to have knowledge about the relation between architecture and the human sense. The main question of this research plan therefor will be:
What architectural means are essential to provoke and reinforce our imagination while experiencing synesthetic art?
In order to answer the Research Question of this study, literature about synaesthesia, synesthetic art and gentrification are necessary. The “Van Abbe Museum” in Eindhoven has established to create a “multi-sensory museum”. This museum project is used as a case study to understand what people with impairments need and miss in current contemporary art museums. During a visit to the museum called “MuZIEum” in Nijmegen, the visual sense has been taken away, an experience of being visually handicapped leads to the awareness about the kind of art that can be experienced without seeing. 
The aim of my graduation project is to re-wire Tarwewijk, Rotterdam-Zuid, through an art museum. A museum that is able to contribute to an improvement of social conditions in a neighbourhood. And where current residents from the direct surroundings are stimulated and included. 



Over the past hundred years, advancements in technology have determined the way we work and interact. Research shows that a shift will occur within the coming decades. The contrast between working and everyday life will become blurry, and the workplace shifts from a formal setting towards an informal one. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), one can state that this shift is already happening. People all over the world are abruptly forced to work from home. NEW Office is a two-hundred-eighty meter tall tower that is located on the block between 47th and 48th Street and Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue. The building offers more than a hundred-and-twenty-thousand square meter of adaptable space that consists of living units, office space, and amenities based on daily-activities. With adaptability as the key concept to the design, changes to the program can happen independently to its structure, period, and context. With this, the hybrid mixed-use project has the opportunity to adjust to the changing demands in society, where the program gradually shifts from a collective work environment to an individual and community-based residential tower supporting a new type of work.

In the current geopolitical climate, where Arctic nations are at the brink of conflict in their pursuit for influence and resources, mining has acquired a political character, establishing a delicate equilibrium between resource claims and the protection of the territory. This equilibrium is manifested in the Svalbard Free Zone, where all nations are free to make use of its resources, yet the presence of Norwegian population, and mining as raison d’etre of inhabitation, has acted as the entity of governance and ambassador for the best interests of the region. Nonetheless, with the ongoing end of coal mining in Svalbard, and the demise of Norwegian presence in the archipelago, the ‘free zone’ will face a state of uncertainty, vulnerable to the interests and disputes amongst the Arctic nations. As the ‘free zone’s’ uncertainty threatens the stability of the entire region, mining waste becomes a glimpse of hope towards a new form of political representation. While the Arctic communities face the havocs of such waste, its potential reuse makes it a novel resource and a chance for cooperation to counterbalance both its environmental effects and the political crisis that is about to unfold. Hence, the Embassy of Waste is a political manifesto that introduces the recollection and recycling of mining waste in the decaying mining community of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in an attempt to become a novel tool towards the governance and self-sufficiency in the region.

The worldwide crisis in environmental resources, such as deteriorating water resource is intensifying. In Manhattan island, a metropolitan area, the risk is also extremely remarkable. According to the United Nations sustainable development goals, at the current time, more than 2 billion people across the world are living under the crisis of insufficient freshwater resources, due to poor economics or inadequate infrastructures. Likewise, In recent years, the increasing water pollution, mainly due to climate change, aging infrastructures and the regional expansion, have had a significant negative impact on Manhattanites’ habitat and health, which are embodied in the growth pollution level of natural waterways, such as East River and Hudson River. Based on the context, the main objective of this thesis is to research the system of local water systems and the resource crises. Several main questions raised during the study process: What are the causes of the regional resource crisis? What’s the ideological expression of the water infrastructures to Manhattanites? How to ease the climate- induced crisis, or even to end up the emergency by architectural interventions? Within these questions in mind, the main research question is formed: How can the architecture, concerning climatic crisis, cultural loss, evoke a more livable and healthier community for NE Midtown’s future development?

The project emerges from the acknowledgement of the growing phenomena of archive fever (Derrida, 1995). Driven by the need, obligation, desire or simply possibility to store a growing amount of both - physical objects and digital data, and encouraged with a constantly increasing capacity of digital media storage - we keep on gathering more. Often unconsciously or with little curation of the collected content, we keep on creating a limitless cloud archive, that has an overwhelming physical presence that takes over hectare after hectare of land. Huge, anonymous, dark and hot space, placed in a remote location – that is a typical data centre. Blending into the neighbouring storage halls is easily omitted and stays hidden from the public sight. Data storage came a long way from the representative architecture of banks, archives and city halls to a unit defined storage facility. Therefore, one may say that data centre is a continuation of the typology of storing and archiving. And a storage type that emerges is an opaque container defined by the size of a stored unit - server. These content defined buildings, technical as they are, allow for almost no human presence, but do potentially manage through their sheer size to organize and control the context they inhabit, the territory. One cannot underestimate their urban impact. Current trends in technology, among others, the Internet of Things and a growing amount of latency dependent applications will generate a need to introduce data into the cities. That gives a unique opportunity to redefine existing data centre typology. Even though data is already fully integrated and present in our lives, we rarely acknowledge it. What is more, due to a lack of understanding of data flows we are often excluded from the discussion on the degree of its presence in our lives or surveillance. The proposed project, is a gesture that brings data, technology, citizens and urban context together, emphasizing interconnections and interdependence of all aforementioned. This way introducing one of the most significant elements of our infrastructure physically into the culture, giving digital data a physical weight and interface. Creating friction between public and private, human and machine – that are completely dependent on each other and cannot function without the other.

In today’s cities, global urbanisation has created a fragmented, unresponsive and socially divisive landscape. Intensifying agglomerations to urban centres across the globe due to the displacement and mass migrations of large populations has increased the pressure of organising a dense urban habitat. In its dominion over nature modern life was so caught up in establishing the narratives of individual life that it was naive to the complexity of everyday activity. The celebration of the Individual and the rationalisation of nature and society attempted to find order amongst the chaos of a city. The intensity of diversification in cities due to agglomerations to global centres highlights the changing face society and culture in dense formations and its immediacy. But when the practices of a past epoch continue to pervade themselves into the contemporary narrative, when the ethical practice of past time refuses discontinue for the continuity of a new ethical practice and the development of collective memory then we find ourselves in a cycle of self-contradiction. The condition it creates formulates something hybrid, repetitive, standardised and universally proliferated. There is an inherent issue with creating a dense urban ecology, especially in verticality, that is both equitable to its inhabitants and sustainable to its environment. Between establishing forms of density and the articulation of diversity in our cities there exists an inability to inform the everyday perspective, the continued withering away of political character in our public space and a lack of avenues to establish resilient forms of citizenship. Creating a future perspective for our city becomes increasingly unclear and clouded amongst the ubiquity and generic nature of universal design and the destruction of our urban heritage. When the ability for the urban to produce space for the possibility of specificity is reduced, whether through urban segregation, stratification or fragmentation, then the reference plane for the city wither’s away. A loss of identity in density that cam as result of the modernisation for cities and city life.


The Future Primitive is a reframe for looking at the city, one that can enliven the stories of the common and everyday. It means to see the city as a continue process of collective memory and reflection. The research project was to use this concept of as a way to establishing the city as a common future. Through a series of theoretical discussions which aimed to enlighten an inherent paradox in the way we deal with the relationship between space and time in our cities through aesthetics and territory the research pretend how this is proliferated in the articulation of diversity and density in our cities ultimately constraining the possibilities for our common future and furthering the divide of Earth and World. This produced a set of theoretical notions and principals that established the basis for a design brief for prototyping the development of civic common space through the vertical densification of an existing urban landscape.

Within the main geographical contexts of the North Sea and the Scheldt estuary, the Doelpolder area stands out for the conflictual relationships between human settlements, environmental crisis, and man-made infrastructures, which are all paradigms of the so-called Anthropocene era. The site comprises the village of Doel, the natural reserve of Saeftinghe, the nuclear power plant of Doel and the largest dock of the Port of Antwerp in a 2 km long prone-to-flooding area, which is currently facing some anthropic phenomena such as pollution, infrastructural expansion of the harbor and dismantlement of the nuclear power plant. In its process of northbound expansion at the expense of the estuarine territory and the polder-land, the Port of Antwerp has turned Doel into a ghost town by means of expropriation and economic pressure, while the flora and fauna of Saeftinghe are endangered by the alteration of their brackish habitat caused by pollution and water level rise due to both infrastructural growth and climate change. This everlasting dichotomy between natural and anthropized processes poses here the dualistic problem of extinction/preservation and if/how can architecture depict a self-healing survival scenario for this specific site in the Post-Anthropocene, attempting at climate change mitigation and nature metabolism at the same time. The project first addresses the aforementioned issues within a regional strategic and energetic plan which foresees the “de-polderization” of the area, its transformation into a controlled tidal zone for soil and water recovery and the simultaneous expansion of the natural reserve. Moreover, the thesis wants to takes a position regarding the future re-use of (parts of) the nuclear power station starting from 2025 (the date Belgium is supposed to start the phase out of nuclear energy). On the architectural scale, the building here implemented is a “knowledge ark” with laboratories and academic-related spaces, a facility which can exploit not only the world-level Port infrastructure for an optimized logistic (coldchain) but also the proximity of the natural reserve and the former agricultural vocation of the area. This repository building consists of a seed vault and a frozen zoo for the conservation of species through cryopreservation technique, but most importantly is an architectural object designed to resist or accommodate time and territorial transformations, for guaranteeing a possible rebirth of both nature and culture. To do so, the architecture imagined for the Doel site is physically linked to the water-level-rise process. When/if the level of the Scheldt rises above 2 meters (worst case scenario), the whole area will be flooded and any human survival unlikely. In these circumstances, the water will trigger the self-destruction of the facility, spreading the seeds contained in the vault all over the area and thus favouring the rebirth of nature in unpredictable climatic conditions. In the end, the Seed Vault/Frozen Zoo constitutes, like Doel, the nemesis of the Port but, also like Doel, will eventually evolve into a ruin in case of loss in the fight against, pollution and climate change.

The Dutch sea water level raised with 24cm over the last 128 years. From a linear increase, we can see an increasing trend since the 1990s. According to recent scientific research, the sea level in the Netherlands will rise 1 to 2 meters by 2100 with a maximum global warming of 2 degrees Celsius. With a temperature rise of 4 degrees, the North Sea water level will rise 3 meters. At the end of the next century, the rise can increase up to 8 meters. This project focuses on the Wadden Sea, one of the last remaining large tidal areas where the forces of nature are free to do as they please. It is the last of the authentic nature in the Netherland and is essential to millions of birds and fish. The whole Wadden Sea area, which stretches between Den Helder in the Netherlands and Esbjerg in Denmark, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. Along the coast of the Northern Netherlands, salt marshes were created outside the dikes through the deposition of sand and silt with a spontaneously established vegetation on them. The plants, such as sea lavender, samphire and sea aster, are resistant to the regular flooding by salt tidal water. Salt marshes are one of the few Dutch landscapes of very great international significance. Salt marshes can play a role in protecting coastal regions from flooding. These intertidal zones are delimitated by wooden barriers created by man in settling fields, in order to reclaim land from the ocean. With the tide come sediments that are then held back by the wood enclosure as the water retreats. Salt tolerant species then stick to the mudflats making it more stable and bringing oxygen into the soil for regular plants to grow in these coastal ecosystems. The project therefore includes a territorial intervention: environmental engineering for coastal protection, a landscape Intervention: increase accessibility of the site, and a building intervention: offshore cabins inserted into the primary structure. The tidal area can be saved by the same forces of nature that make it unique: sedimentation can potentially be increased at the same pace as sea level rise, with help of low impact and low cost brushwood dams. With salt marshes breaking the waves, the impact of incoming seawater is muted, it promotes the wealth of species, and retains sediment. As a result, the marshes can grow with rising sea levels. The eroded brushwood dams from earlier times can be rehabilitated to reclaim land in front of the dike. The dams are extended into a floating boardwalk, which unlocks the engineered intervention as common ground. Offshore cabins are inserted into the primary structure on every intersection, overlooking the different landscapes. This increases attractiveness of the land in front-, on- and behind the dike and makes it better accessible from the Frisian hinterland, despite the sea level increase.

Make Food Great Again is a prototype for the future of Urban Agriculture. Thereby its a spatial strategy to address the urgencies connected to the biochemical pollution of agricultural enterprises on the example of the Netherlands. It aims to find a solution for the burden of ultra effective state of the art agriculture on the environment, while sustaining the foodsupply in a circular economical manner.
It’s the architectural answer to the question of how can our food become local and approachable again, while being an actually integrated part of infrastructure in contemporary urban society?

The project I propose is not the child of its time, it rejects the lexicon of current affairs (climate change, pollution, exploitation of resources) as well as that of social issues. It does not want to solve the problem of the site in which it operates, but it embraces a horizon of analysis and observation of man in his existential dimension, completely isolated from the dynamics determined by the homo faber. The project focuses on the relationship between the homo figurans 1 and the territory in which he lives, an archaic, but never anachronistic, relationship. The project I propose focuses on architectural language, on how to act in the place rather than what to do in the place. For this reason, I believe that it has a markedly political valence. As the political valence of a work of any type - literary or architectural - is not determined only by the issues it deals with, but above all by the choice it operates. There is not a more purely political operation than an operation on language.

Homo Figurans, term used by Eugenio Turri in The landscape as a theater 2001.
Homo Figurans: Man as a figure among the figures of the world.

We’re living in an era where spaces of logistics are further being detached from cities and urbanization to avoid choke points. But as these spaces migrate they leave traces of spaces permeating the city. What might be the impact of these logistical residual spaces whether large or very small on the expanding urban environment creating a clash, chaos and wastelands. The Port of Rotterdam is going under change concerning the petrochemical part. The reasons of decrease of oil in the last decade for the aim to shift to more sustainable energy production and for the increase of toxic spills on the ground and atmosphere. What would be the use of the abandoned toxic land of the petrochemical part of the Port, that once was storing oil, one of natures most needed source of for human survival, and refining it through burning.

We now live in a time when it is now quicker, easier and more efficient to speak to one another, yet it doesn’t always reflect on the fruitfulness in decision making and outcome of a conversation. Face to face conversation is one of the most effective means to converse and the North Sea is a space which needs to be part of the conversation. The research report found that North Sea is a one of the most dense urban seascapes in the world, with each nation taking a piece of the sea for the benefit of themselves rather than seeking to explore the notion of the North Sea as a common. One space; stronger, more resilient and profitable for those interacting with it, whether you are a fisherman or an energy company.

The architecture intervention has led to the notion of a space to gather those interacting in it, to put their nation status aside for the benefit of the North Sea. This space becomes a state of exception, where jurisdiction and sovereignty of one state no longer applies. The site is on Dogger Bank, a former land bridge it becomes a poetic reference to a past time when the United Kingdom was connected to the continental Europe. It is also one the shallowest points of the North Sea, making it physically possible to construct an island.

The design will seek for all nations to contribute to the island, building an aspect of the architecture, to create an emotional connection, so the space feel like theirs. The architecture is designed to be prefabricated and shipped across the North Sea, the island cannot follow typical building methods. The building construction is also dependant on the weather therefore the time to build the island can not follow a traditional schedule.

As a typology the building is a Parliament, but it is more than this. A hybrid building, it goes beyond the traditional parliament set up we know today. It seeks to look at conversation spaces; informal/formal as the main role to get attendees together and discuss matters on the North Sea. Every attendee would have to travel to the island and may find themselves delayed in leaving due to weather conditions. The attendees truly find themselves understanding the environment they are discussing and start to truly respect the environment they are discussing.

The design will question the idea of performance as part of the decision making process. Parliaments today can be very theatrical (United Kingdom). The stage in this concept is very import in the design, it questions its position, is it the main assembly room floor , the informal conversation spaces or is it the North Sea? A part of the performance is the audience, the design questions if it is those attending the parliament or is it audience those beyond, and everyone interacting in the space?

Finally, I ask those reading the book to ultimately question where you position yourself when making a decision, are you an ego (authoritarian, dualistic, self-destructive, imbalanced, power-seeking or eco (democratic, sustainable, balance, interdependent). And what would you do if you attended the parliament?

We are living in the Anthropocene; a period of time shaped by, and for, dominance of the human race. Barely a place or species sharing this earth remains unaffected by our activity. Humans treat other animals as commodities, objects available to be exploited. They are used for our gain and pleasure, at great cost to those individuals involved and indeed to entire species. The North Sea, surrounded by many of the world’s most powerful nations is suffering from catastrophic overfishing. Trillions of fish are killed each year, a scale of extraction so huge it is leaving ecosystems on the brink of collapse. A disconnect in our empathy for other species is further widened by the border between land and sea, the familiar and the unknown, between us and them. Scalloway is a small town in the Shetland Isles, 260 miles North East of Scotland. It sits in a wild, beautiful and romanticised landscape, surely the epitome of nature. Yet the islands are dominated by intense and ever growing salmon farms, highly destructive both to the fish who are farmed and the environment the industry dominates. As demand continues to grow, consumers typically have very little connection to the producers or the impacts felt by production. Scalloway is left in a state of constant adaptation, intensification and increasing dependency. Alternatives to animal-based foods exist and the arguments for their adoption, from nutrient profile to sustainability to animal welfare is compelling, so why haven’t we changed our approach to production? Food, despite playing an essential, daily part of each and every of our lives, appears to be the last aspect we are willing to adapt or change. It is embedded within our social, cultural and emotional connections: a change to our eating can bring so much more. Taking Scalloway as a precedent, a new approach to food production is envisaged, using spatial design as a tool to challenge, inspire and shift patterns in our daily lives. It harnesses the technical capability of architecture, providing the physical infrastructure for a new system of production, yet combines this with the aesthetic qualities it imbues to inspire, attract and reinforce the positivity of new possibilities. Finally, it breaks down barriers and thresholds to provide spatial connections, bringing together producer and consumer and creating habitats not only for humans but for all species to thrive. Understanding the process of change as a series of provocations, reminders and inspirations, cultural (ex)change invites the visitor on a journey. A series of moments mark the gradual transition from the comfort and familiarity of the land, to the sublime, unknown of the sea; defamiliarising, reorienting, sharing and expanding. Food production anchors habitat and livelihoods for other species in a mutually beneficial, productive relationship, bringing together human and non-human needs in places of co-existence. Consumption is reunited with production to create a place of experiential education, of discovery and exploration. A place that reconsiders, how we live and who we live alongside, bringing awareness and responsibility back into the public realm, back to the scale of the individual.

Today’s land grabs are a continuation of past imperialist desires, with a clear distinction that today’s capitalist domination is associated with the transnationalisation of the class structure and ignores the ethnicity and civility narratives of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This investigation will establish that the desire of the seemingly ubiquitous forces of globalisation and advanced capitalism, mobilised to reduce the importance of culture and identity is to better facilitate its own growth and expansion - which at its core is a process of pacification. With a departure from culture as a medium for the subjugation of people, finance has consequently turned to class for its apparent objectivity in the assessment of people as desirable and efficient for including within the system of capital. Such pervasive coercion has incepted a dependency on the compulsion of a market that rarely provides one with an opportunity to self-reflect. Consequently this project investigates the knowledge gap between politics, economics, and the built environment with accompanying forms of living.

The oil industry might be the most obvious system causing the North Sea to be a disputed territory in recent times. One of the main participants in this dispute is Norway: a country extremely wealthy, thanks to oil revenue. In oil’s supply chain, the Mongstad refinery plays a crucial role. Situated in a fjord in western Norway, it’s conveniently located in close proximity of both the North Sea and Norway’s urbanized regions. Reclaimed marshlands have served as Mongstads foundations, from where it directly and indirectly leaves its polluting traces. During its relative short lifespan so far, heavy impact on land and water have been caused. Even though the oil industry is of major importance for the wellbeing of Norway’s inhabitants, they lack in awareness of the processes and consequences involved with this business. Mongstad clearly represents this situation: in geographical sense bordered by either mountains and the sea, on top of this the territory is completely fenced off. Compared to other oil refineries worldwide, Mongstad is an interesting case. While having a capacity of 12 million tonnes of crude oil per year, groundbreaking research is conveyed on-site. In Technology Centre Mongstad and its adjacent test facilities, CO2 is being captured from flue gasses, and prepared for storage elsewhere. Mongstads functional future is extremely uncertain. The oil industry has to change, and Mongstad’s aim of being a ‘sustainable’ pioneer in the field allows for three possible future scenario’s: 1.Business as usual. The refinement and accompanying processes still take place, but as planned, co2 from the refinery will be caught off to be processed elsewhere on the site. 2.Transformation of the refinery. As in the case of Porto Marghera, the refinery will still function as an energy production facility, but in a ‘greener’ way. The current structures will be used, and, if needed, extended. 3.Loss of function, but exploiting potential of the site in geographical and infrastructural sense. The project is adaptable to these scenario’s. It’s an architectural infrastructure, able to grow and shrink according to time, function and place. The infrastructure stretches over a 2 kilometer line, which crosses from mountains to fjord, straight through Mongstad’s borders. While reconnecting nature over exploited land, an axis arises. Heavy labour and core production taking place at one side, while research and room for future development can be found on the other side. This axis is Mongstad’s new spine: opening up the territory, emphasizing on the natural environment, but most of all: supporting a more appropriate productive future. Nine concrete interventions serve as permanent gestures, telling the story of Mongstad through framing, directioning and their highly symbolic appearance.

The relationship between industry and market, in the Netherlands of the 17th century, was based on a sustainable model. It linked small scale producers with consumers through a system of canal boats, maritime technology and agricultural innovations.
This marketproduction connection was carried out by farmers known as ‘warmoeziers’. In 21th century Netherlands, canal transportation or ‘binnenvaart’ is acquiring more importance thanks to economical and sustainable benefits.
Complimentary to the global seaports, the canal boats can reach directly the customers in the cities. This revival of ‘binnenvaart’ can allow for a new type of city market to emerge, where automatization, innovations in food production and vibrant public life goes hand in hand with a lower CO2 footprint. The aim of this ‘warmoezier market’ is to merge the state of contemporary port-cities with the expertise of the past resulting in a market building.

The Atlantic Wall bunker ruins stand on the coast, abandoned and falling apart. There is a kind of beauty in this scene.

Contradiction between the rough concrete volumes defeated by asoft, ephemeral and seemingly delicate mass of water was the beginning of the research. Analysing the biggest territorial scale -the North Sea- the notion of “clashes” re-appeared. Historically, the North Sea was always an area of conflict. The constant fight between nature and the people trying to harness its power is it its very essence. In this context Atlantic wall seems to be the most contemporary example of the conflict on the area of the North Sea. Remains of Hitler’s plan stretch along the whole coast and in that sense are a direct translation of the territorial scale of the “war” into the architectural one- of a singular building- a bunker.

Yet, the conflict around the Atlantic war was in fact deemed to be a failure from the beginning. From the 15 000 bunkers planned only 6000 were realized by 1943. Then, suddenly, without any actual battle, the war ended. Observing the horizon was the only task of the soldiers until the war came to an end. The “absence” of the war is the essence of this narrative. Conditions of waiting, observing and experiencing the present moment surrounded by nature became a base for guidance and exploration.

Being part of theWadden Sea protected area, the location on the island of Terschelling emphasizes the contrast between the solid bunkers and dynamics of nature. Wadden Sea Islands are known for beautiful constantly changing dunes, inhabited by rich fauna and flora and influenced by regular tidal flows. One of many strong points on the island is the one located just next to the sea-shore, on top of the highest dune was chosen. It consisted of several buildings that were spread around that dune, serving primarily as an observation point.

Now, many years after the bunkers were placed there, some still remain. The passage of time and power of nature has however, changed them. They’ve became ruins. Some walls fell apart, some volumes tilted and moved, some were covered by the sand and overgrown by the grass. The “present ruinous state” of the remnants of the Atlantic Wall was understood here as the fundamental and relevant experience of the history itself and the starting point for the design. Instead of protecting against the forces, the project tries to use them as the main actors in the architectonic setting. The dominant, always present, unstoppable forces of nature are the base for design decisions. The way of
dealing with the knowledge was a strongly intuitive approach, mixing scientific knowledge with atmospheric perception of the nature. Inspiration for dealing with the composition, landscape and the ruins of the bunkers was taken from the archaeological excavation sites- the calculated geometric intervention against the vast masses of land in search of the “treasure” was to be used as the main concept in the design. The project relates to the landscape and experience of walking through the dunes. The wild nature is interpreted into rational concept. The different spaces and their architectonic qualities lead the visitor through subsequent spaces, constantly referring to the context.

The ritual experience begins by leaving the village or the parking area and entering through one of two gates. From a distance, only some of the bunker ruins and the skylights protruding through the sand are visible. Only when cutting through the ground and the building inside are the dimensions of the places revealed. The main buildings are almost all underground and are developed by taking from the architectural language of the bunkers.


The project tries to anticipate the flows of nature and takes the future time into consideration. Even though the building has a function to serve people at the beginning, it doesn’t have to be occupied all the time. It is a monument and its future role is to be there, in the constant condition of anticipation. Following the story of the bunkers that were left on sand to become ruins the concrete buildings are also going to stay and slowly deteriorate.

The cycle will close waiting for yet another chapter.