The project reflects on the challenges of urban vacancy and transformation in light of the scarcity of affordable and inclusive environments. It focuses on the adaptation of vacant buildings - particularly former industrial sites - through a community-oriented approach.
The research investigates the spatial and legal transformations that self-organized squatting communities in the Netherlands undergo to gain legal recognition. Based on interviews and analysis of six case studies - OT301, Tetterode, and Plantage Dok (Amsterdam); Het Domijn (Weesp); Poortgebouw (Rotterdam); and Boschgaard (Den Bosch) - the proposed building adaptation strategy aims to support a high level of autonomy, engagement, and self-building practices.
With a basic organizational structure and incremental development plan, the strategy is applied to the case of Landbouwbelang - a vibrant squatting community in Maastricht currently facing eviction due to new redevelopment plans.

The project focuses on the urban renewal of an abandoned postindustrial complex in Hoboken, southern Antwerp.
The meticulous process of observing a given site, understanding its identity and documenting findings through various media was inspired by referential artistic endeavors of the past and proves viable today in a time where spatial obsolescence including its potentials is at the forefront of architectural thinking.
Thus a new approach to sustainable use of existing spatial situations was worked out and applied in a final architectural design project assembling a new downtown in an area currently neglected.

This research investigates the personal experiences, memories, and desires of individuals who live or lived transient lives, shaped by the forces of globalization and relocation. With a focus on capturing the poetic and narrative aspects of place and movement, this study aims to deepen understanding of how individuals remember their previous architectural expiriences and identify the elements that help them form attachments to spaces in a constantly changing world. The study is linked to a later application in the design phase of a mixed-use building complex in Antwerp. Employing a method of portraying the memories of people who live or have lived in Antwerp through architectural drawings, this research will visualize and document personal stories, offering a new approach to the emotional and experiential dimensions of transience. By exploring these narratives, the study aims to broaden understanding of human relationships with place, memory, and identity in times of transience. Findings are expected to highlight recurring themes of forced relocation, adaptation, and the search for stability, offering valuable insights into the ways people navigate and emotionally anchor themselves within transient environments.

The neighbourhoods of Hoboken and Kiel, located in the south of Antwerp, form a complex urban patchwork; an assemblage of industrial remnants, modernist social housing projects, fragmented polderscapes, and winding residential streets lined with family-owned shops and row houses. This spatial collage is both eclectic and uneven, reflecting layers of historical investment, socio-economic shifts, and cultural overlays. Within this context lies the Blikfabriek, a former can factory turned cultural enclave, now inhabited by artists and alternative collectives. It is a heterotopic space, where exhibition halls transform into party venues, flea markets, and community festivals overnight, and where studios and shared fabrication spaces enable creative production and collaboration.

However, this apparent openness is not equally experienced by all. Through direct observation and informal dialogue, it became evident that the immediate neighbours of the Blikfabriek, largely families of Moroccan and Turkish descent, seldom accessed the factory’s social spaces. Their presence was limited to two peripheral zones: a homework class and a food cabin positioned along the site’s edge. Despite its claims of inclusivity, the Blikfabriek remained, for many, a closed circuit.

In collaboration with residents and social workers, and through immersive urban fieldwork including observational mapping, ethnographic interviews, and narrative workshops with youth aged 13 to 24, the research surfaced a nuanced cartography of social space in these neighbourhoods. This exclusion was felt most acutely by the youth—especially racialised youth—who were often positioned as threats within the public domain. Subject to hyper-surveillance and routine police interventions, their presence was read as risky, transient, or out-of-place. This raised a fundamental question: what spatial qualities make a place feel safe, comfortable, or claimable?

Can risk and belonging be traced, not only sociologically, but architecturally—through thresholds, boundaries, adjacencies, and affordances?

Emerging from this research was a shared desire among local youth: not just for a place to go, but for a space they could own, adapt, and make their own. Not a programmatic fix, but a spatial offering. The youth center unfolds slowly. The architectural response reframes the notion of safety—not through enclosure or control, but through layered spatial conditions that support informal use, retreat, and collective visibility. Spaces are layered, not labeled. Functions blur. Light filters through existing skylights, tracing patterns of occupation and change across walls touched by graffiti and memory.

Surveillance is inverted, youth are no longer the watched, but the watchers. The architecture offers them vantage points, agency, and ambiguity. Cultural and emotional resonance threads through material and color. A bathhouse, redolent of shared heritage, sits quietly to the side, its warmth radiating outward, literal and symbolic. Tapestries, screens, and patterns drawn from the language of home soften the industrial frame. Appropriation is not only allowed, it is encouraged: hooks for hammocks, walls for football nets, spaces that shift with the seasons, the users, and the moment. Risk is no longer about being exposed, but about being visible on one’s own terms.

In this reimagined youth center, architecture makes room, literally and symbolically, for becoming. A space that dares to trust the messiness of occupation, and the poetry of shared, negotiated futures.

The global construction industry’s reliance on finite, carbon-intensive materials has exacerbated ecological crises, including climate change, habitat destruction, and resource depletion. To aid the architecture and construction industry to move towards a post-carbon economy, this research investigates how surplus materials and agricultural by-products from quarrying and farming could be repurposed into building components for a new regional vernacular architecture. It hones in on methods and techniques for repurposing limestone surplus as a context, to ultimately advocate for transforming post-extractive stone and clay sites into material hubs for learning and making. These hubs aim to foster material sensibility, promote circular building practices, and support participatory self-build residential projects that empower communities towards self-resilience. The findings demonstrate what types of surplus there are, possible repurposing methods, and what sorts of regional architecture could be born out of such productive landscapes.

This study investigates the development of a modular facade system designed to align with
sustainable construction paradigms, focusing on a standardized façade structure, renewable
materials, and climate design for wellbeing. Using the Dutch climate and societal context as a
reference, the research outlines key performance criteria for three programmatic types:
dwellings, office space and commercial space. The interscale approach allowed for a
multifaceted elaboration, allocating the cassette as core concept.
The findings indicate that closed cassettes provide superior insulation and acoustic performance,
while open systems prioritize ventilation and daylight but require careful balancing to maintain
energy efficiency. Alternative solutions, such as 3D-printed demountable plugs and internal
drainage systems, enhance modularity, reuse potential and the implementation of bio-based
materials. Green facades and photovoltaic panels further augment ecological and energy
performance. The proposed system achieves significant modularity and adaptability but requires
further exploration of complex geometries, advanced biobased materials, and optimized
accessories. This work establishes a versatile template for sustainable facade design, suitable for
varied architectural contexts.

This year’s Urban Architecture studio focused on the Lageweg area in Hoboken, a district located to the south of Antwerp’s city centre. Central to this area is the Can Factory, a former industrial complex. Since 2019, the Can Factory has served as a creative hub, housing a diverse community of artists and supporting various cultural activities and initiatives. However, this function is only temporary as the site will be redeveloped in the near future. The focus of this year’s graduation studio was thus to envision an urban district that incorporates, rather than displaces, these emerging creative industries. To make the already present low town last as a downtown.

The research focus of Moving Bodies is to explore the choreography of daily life, examining how bodies move within their surroundings. It investigates the relationship between body and space through three distinct perspectives: at home, at work, and at leisure. These three aspects form the foundation of the research as well as the design project.

The design project consists out of a mix of functions that combines purpose-designed creative workspaces, residential spaces and a public swimming pool, as Antwerp has a shortage of swimming facilities. This combination directly addresses the scarcity of artist workspaces and swimming facilities in Antwerp while balancing the needs of the existing creative community with those of the wider neighbourhood.

Wind behavior is complex and not intuitive. Despite its significant impact on urban environments, the topic remains underexplored in architectural design practice. Meanwhile, as cities continue to densify and buildings rise to increasing heights, designing with wind comfort in mind becomes increasingly more important. This thesis explores how wind behavior can be effectively integrated into early-stage high-rise design to improve outdoor comfort and safety.

Using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, a series of design strategies were evaluated for their impact on local wind conditions in Rijnhaven, Rotterdam, a site facing both ambitious urban development and strict wind regulations. The study identifies how design interventions such as aerodynamic shaping, podiums, and open floors can significantly reduce wind discomfort at street level, particularly on the leeward side of buildings. The result is a workflow aimed at guiding architects in designing with wind more intuitively and effectively.

This research demonstrates that incorporating wind analysis early in the design process can not only improve environmental conditions but also support more coherent and informed architectural outcomes.

This study explores the design and development of large-scale floating structures, addressing current challenges in floating architecture while focusing on technical feasibility, energy self-sufficiency, and sustainable water management. A mixed-method approach combining qualitative analysis of existing projects with quantitative modeling and simulation was employed. The research proposes a modular hexagonal design with a 25 m diameter and 6 m height, demonstrating structural stability with a metacentric height of 0.8 m. Each module can produce 96,500.99 kWh of energy annually using solar panels and collect 325 m³ of rainwater per year. The design incorporates water management systems, including separate treatment for wastewater. This study contributes to the growing field of floating architecture by offering a flexible, scalable, and sustainable solution for large-scale infrastructure in marine environments.

Home Beyond Walls explores how architecture can foster belonging in rapidly changing urban environments. Focusing on Hoboken, Antwerp, the project combines ethnographic research, storytelling, and participatory design to reveal how personal narratives shape space. Through adaptive reuse of former factory buildings into cooperative housing and a community library, the design supports flexibility, care, and ecological continuity. Grounded in lived experience, the project offers a transferable approach to creating meaningful, inclusive urban spaces.

“Traces of transition” explores the architectural and social potential of an overlooked and banal industrial structure in Hoboken, Antwerp, once a rim-painting factory, now a decaying shell. Confronted with its imminent demolition, the research repositions the building not as obsolete, but as an organism, an active agent with a ongoing story. Through explorations into transformation, temporality, and user agency, the project challenges and critiques the dominant narrative of demolition and sterile replacement that characterises much of today’s urban development.
Drawing from the traces left behind, the story of the former rim painting factory was pieced together into a short 4 act film. The building is reimagined into a cultural and residential centre for the local youth, a demographic greatly marginalised in Hoboken. Inspired by the concept of “Low Road Buildings” as defined by Stewart Brand, as we all the local Blikfabriek cultural centre, the project celebrates adaptability, imperfection, and freedom of use. The building is viewed as evolving and unfinished, rather than a static monument waiting for its death.
Through narrative, scenography, videography, photography, mapping and physical modelling, the thesis constructs a living archive of the building’s past, present, and speculative futures, ultimately advocating for an architecture that learns, adapts, and resists erasure.

This thesis states the current urgent problem in the global context where the prevalence of depression among university students is increasing. Most of the university students who suffer from depression due to peer competition, high demands on themselves, inability to handle relationships well and other problems leading them to feel helpless, upset and anxious. In the Netherlands, even with a complete psychiatric care system, depressed patients still have to face a lot of problems in terms of treatment, such as long waiting lists and expensive treatment. Therefore, an increasing number of people are motivated to concentrate on depression prevention.

About depression prevention, there have been some research and measures at the social level and psychological level. At the architectural level, most of the mental-related research has focused on medical buildings, with limited research on daily living environments. It is relevant
to combine depression prevention measures and architectural design measures for university students to research and design their daily living environment to positively support depression prevention. The targeted group is healthy university students. For these university students living in student residences on campus, campus and residence are the places that they spend much time. In order to investigate how the design of campus and residential spaces can support depression prevention, the design guidelines are generated through four research methods: literature research, observation, interview and case studies. The design guidelines are categorised into three levels of importance and two scales. Based on the design guidelines, the design (including campus scale and residence scale) will be done.

Overall, through the research process, the design guidelines relate to the three aspects of physical, social and mental health. This research argues that promoting these three aspects of healthy lifestyles among university students can contribute to depression prevention for them.

The ageing population in the Netherlands presents challenges in elderly care, including rising health issues, a shortage of healthcare staff, and escalating costs. This study explores the association between healthy ageing and Blue Zones, regions in the world where long and healthy lives are common. Genetic factors contribute to 25% of lifespan variations, while non-genetic elements, such as unhealthy habits and social conditions, play significant roles. Environmental factors also impact the ageing process. The research aims to create a healthy urban living environment in the Netherlands, drawing inspiration from the lifestyle lessons in the Blue Zones. The main research question delves into how Dutch living environments can promote healthy ageing and assist the elderly in maintaining vitality. Sub-questions explore the key elements contributing to healthy ageing, the implementation of the Blue Zone concept in the living environment on the scale of the neighbourhood, street and building, and how the concept can be applied within Dutch urban living environments. Building on the principles of Blue Zones, the study focuses on three key spatial domains within the living environment: Physical Activity, Green/Blue Spaces, and Social Connection. The research goal is to provide practical design guidelines for architects and urban planners, aiming to reduce healthcare costs and chronic diseases in the ageing population. Implementing these guidelines in Dutch urban environments enhance the overall health of the elderly, maintaining their vitality and independence for as long as possible. To achieve the best health benefits, a societal shift towards proactive engagement and inhabitants’ responsibility for their living environment and health is needed to create a healthy living environment.

The theme of this year’s Urban Architecture graduation studio was ‘Last Green in Town’, which focuses on the twenty-four hectare piece of wasteland in the northeast of Brussels called the Friche Josaphat. The Friche used to be a marshalling yard but is now a field of wild nature and great biodiversity, where the railroad tracks that cut the site in half are still in operation by a local train line. The piece of land is very closed off to its surroundings by borders of trees, fences, and the railway, so accessing it is difficult. This has caused residents that live close to the Friche to know little about it, whereas the Friche is not at all empty and lifeless.

I propose the design of a small neighbourhood that consists of multi-generational living in combination with a hospice. The hospice is designed to be an intimate part of the neighbourhood, making it a part of life, rather than the end of it. With this new neighbourhood, the Friche will be valued again as a nature reserve that now becomes part of the city of Brussels again. But most importantly, the design responds to the housing problem that Brussels is facing. By designing for multi-generational living, I give space for different forms of households to live in the city, which contributes to not only quantity of new housing, but also social quality.

The Ways of Dwelling research that runs through the design like a red thread, is the analysis of the ways of dwelling of my grandparents. With this research, I mapped out the different patterns, rules, habits and uses of my grandparents in the different houses that they have lived in during their lives. They have experienced different family structures, that each resulted in a different way of using certain spaces in a home. I made a set of drawings where you can see these patterns in the floor plans of their homes using different colors to categorise everything. Some parts of the drawings fold open, which allows you to compare how and why certain spaces were used differently over time. The texts in the drawings describe ways of use, tied to different spaces, so the reader can find out in what way my grandparents lived.
With the findings from Ways of Dwelling, I set building rules for the design, which resulted in the design of the small neighbourhood that contains adaptable apartments, family houses, multi-generation houses, communal spaces and a hospice. The building rules determined a number of choices in the design, such as the entrance of the houses, the liveliness of spaces, the adaptability, and the design of the hospice. This way, the research became a practical design tool for the design.

In light of the endless capitalistic growth and energy & climate crisis, the project rejects the prevailing anthropocentric defitnition of a "comfortable" interior. The thesis begins with on-site fieldwork and personal interviews within elementary education. The research of "micro-climates" or micro-atmospheres in an elementary school is projected on the design location, benefiting from the micro-climates of the location. The result is a school building design in Friche Josaphat in Brussels. The design of the school focus on the careful placement between the city and the ecological site (Friche Josaphat), and experiments with a new interior climate for the education. The building envelope is imagined as a gradient of spaces instead of on clear separation of in-/outside. The layout and envelope design of the classrooms create thermal and atmospheric varieties as a productvie way to engage with micro-climate while reducing energy consumption.

Brussels, a city built on a wet marshland, has a rich history of landscape design and engineering. Earth was removed and resettled to create higher ground while parks and avenues were built to patch the gaps among different infrastructures. Thus the network of green spaces and parks in Brussels has become an important topic of its modern and contemporary urban development. Recently, there is a massive abandoned trainyard around the north-east suburbs of Brussels, waiting to be urbanised and transformed into a new neighbourhood. This situation was chosen to be the brief of the graduation studio of the urban architecture studio 2023 at TU Delft.