Humanitarian architecture is a field which is very open to different interpretations and for free uncontrolled experimentation. For architects willing to contribute to this field there is no defined framework that can support them in designing a suitable project. The core of this research is based on a case study in which three different cases in humanitarian architecture are investigated and analysed to create a framework with design principles for humanitarian architecture. These design principles can be used as a tool to evaluate projects or as a supportive framework by architects designing buildings with humanitarian purposes. The design principles are explicated as People, Planet, Profit, Place and Process. At the end of the research, Participation is added to this framework as the sixth principle to emphasise the importance of social design in humanitarian architecture. Those six principles are supposed to produce humanitarian architecture projects which can contribute to the creation of autonomy for communities in need. Project MIMPI includes a multidimensional design of a homelike orphanage in Jakarta in which the created framework is used and validated.

This graduation project aims towards a new understanding of intimate and domestic space through an experimental hands-on research method and a thorough analysis of the black box theatre stage to reveal layers, scales, dimensions, transitions and connections that define dynamic atmospheric space with the use of light, movement, perspective and reflections. Part of the research outcome is then translated into the Tiny HomeStage. A small scale theatrical house that creates Wonderment on the threshold of domesticity, and in which almost everything is adjustable to the moment’s need. The project is designed mainly with the method of thinking through making, which resulted in a 1:5 model of the entire design.

How can we design a low-energy house in the post-industrial context with the use of environment and technology and still keep heritage and expression of the past or machine architecture?

The Corona crisis highly affected socio-economic circumstances, and this was expected to have changed housing preferences. Understanding what needs to be built in quality in addition to quantity is key to a sustainable housing market. Hence, this thesis researched whether and how housing preferences of (aspiring) owner occupiers in the Dutch housing market have changed due to the Corona crisis. The change in housing preferences was researched through a survey inquiring expressed stated preferences for dwelling attributes. Quantitative and qualitative data of 1458 useful respondents combined showed that due to Corona, for 17.8% their housing preferences changed for one or more housing attributes, and thus their preferred dwelling had changed. Per attribute, an average of 3.4% of the respondents changed their preference. Most changes relate to working from home, which severed the link between the home and the workplace, enabling as well as causing people to move further away, and which necessitates space in and outside the dwelling. Accordingly, the crisis has had the biggest effect on the preferred number of rooms in a dwelling. The number of rooms is imperative, not the size. The apartment decreased in popularity, and the preference for dwelling types with a garden increased. The functionality which respondents seek of their outdoor space are enabling social possibilities, providing entertainment and supporting mental health. The living environment for which people are willing to move further away should provide greenery, nature nearby, space, tranquility and privacy. It appears that due to the crisis the willingness to pay has increased as housing has increased in importance. The Corona crisis has had more effect on the housing preferences of multi person households with children than on other households. The crisis has had an excessive effect on households living in highly urban places. Four out of five respondents expect their changed preferences to be permanent, in particular regarding the number of rooms, the dwelling size and the preferred outdoor space. The preferred price range is expected to change again as the micro and macro level financial circumstances change. It needs to be kept in mind that this regards expectancy of respondents and thus regard uncertainties. The results need to be interpreted with caution as the data suggests a discrepancy in the level of ideality or reality which respondents have conjugated in their expressed preferences. Lastly, the effect of Corona on housing preferences might be bigger than currently observed, since identifying Corona as the cause for changing preferences seemed to be difficult when the preferences concerned diffuse attributes. Additionally, the current extremely high macro level constraints constrain respondents to the point where their new preferences might not be able to manifest.

Nowadays, air ducts components for ventilation used in offices, hospitals and schools are made from non-renewable materials mainly sheet metal and plastics. Continuing to feed the high demand of metals is a challenge and could result of depletion of natural resources. This raises the importance to look into renewable resources with a lower environmental impact and contribute to the transition towards a circular economy. By rethinking the material usage for the duct components, solutions should be found in bio-based materials such as agricultural waste, cardboard, bio-composites or bio-plastics. This research aims to explore the potential and limitations of bio-based materials for the applicability of air duct components. Therefore the following research question is formulated: What are the potential and limitations of bio-based materials to replace sheet metal for the construction of air ducts by maintaining the same quality? Relevant literature reviews are conducted to give an understand of the construction and relevant requirements of sheet metal ducts. As well the circularity approaches and the categorization of bio-based materials and related manufacturing methods. A method is developed to classify the bio-based materials according their manufacturing efficiency per type of duct component: linear component, joint, bend and t-component. In addition, an assessment is described based on key criteria to select a suitable material per duct component in which the carbon footprint assessment and comparison is crucial. In conclusion, the potential for linear bio-based components made from Tetra Pak is more advanced than complex components including joints, bends and t-components. This relates to the production efficiency and the LCA of the analyzed materials. Bio-plastics and composites as potential materials for complex components resulted in a relative high carbon footprint which made recycled plastic as non-renewable material a more realistic alternative. The limitations lie by achieving a similar quality as sheet metal in terms of moisture resistance and chemical emission. Due to the porous character of most bio-based materials they are sensitive for humidity, increasing the risk of mold growth overtime making the use of bio-based materials and the design of the connections between components challenging. Furthermore, the lifespan of the bio-based materials is unknown which is crucial for an accurate LCA in terms of carbon footprint. Low lifespan indicates more replacements leading to potentially a higher carbon footprint overtime compared to sheet metal.

Currently, cities are in the midst of a transportation transition, namely, from human-driven to driverless vehicles. Because of the rapid development of technology, many systems are being automated or even becoming autonomous. Autonomous means that the system is able to perform each task automatically without any human intervention. Much research has been conducted to find answers to the way autonomous vehicles might impact cities. However, the results of this research are limited in practical application, because the integration of autonomous systems is still in an early stage and there have not been many integration projects in the world yet. In the Netherlands, more and more pilot projects are being established to explore the impact and applicability of driverless vehicles. As such, this exploratory study analyses how autonomous vehicles have been integrated during the autonomous vehicle transition in the Netherlands. Alongside qualitative research methods including desk research and semi-structured interviews, an analysis framework is designed and used as a means to measure the technical, social, environmental, and regulatory challenges represented in five case studies. The results show that the main challenges are, among others, road obstacles, intersections, weather implications, communication between the shuttle and other traffic flows, communication between the project team and the inhabitants of the area, and restrictions from the Dutch Vehicle Authority. Challenges such as weather implications, road obstacles, and intersections occur in each project. Looking at the current technological developments, there are autonomous vehicles that can pass intersections and obstacles already. The inability to deal with these challenges could be explained by the high costs of the technology.

In this thesis a two-stage model is proposed, combining the idea of a two-stage model from Anjos and Vieira [1] with a gradient descent approach, much like proposed in Sikaroudi and Shahanaghi [42], in order to solve the facility layout problem for problems consisting of 8 and 12 departments . This method was chosen after analyzing the criteria for a vegetable processing factory and combining this with a literature research to previous methods applied to solve these "facility layout problems". The gradient descent approach uses the partial derivatives of a multi-variable objective, the flow-cost, in order to get a vector which is the direction of greatest descent. Computing this vector for all departments and then moving them creates an iterative improving loop. In addition to the gradient descent approach a swapping procedure and a shooting procedure is introduced in order to reduce the effect of random starting position. From the result of the first-stage model, relative location constraints are extracted to be used in the second-stage model, a linear constraint programming solver capable of running optimizations by google or-tools [36], to greatly reduce the solution space. The proposed method was tested on two toy-problems from Tam and Li [44] and compared to results existing in literature. Additionally, the effect of including a first-stage model was tested as well. When looking directly at the results, the proposed method is consistent and shows good results. Especially the inclusion of the first-stage model helps finding better solutions. Compared to other results found in the literature, the method shows slightly less good results based purely on the objective value. However, the final layouts found in this thesis are more compact.

100 Years of Summer: A ski area brownfield as a testing ground to explore ways of how humans and nonhumans can thrive in a warming alpine landscape, together. This project started with a romantic fascination for the mountain landscape in my home country, and with wondering what would happen to all the infrastructure in ski areas once there isn’t enough snow anymore to run them profitably. I soon discovered, however, that there are some much more fundamental questions to tackle first - mainly concerning how we position ourselves as humans in this world: Are we as autonomous from other beings as we like to think? How does our experience of a (brownfield) landscape differ from that of a bird, goat, or flower? What is our role - both our responsibility and agency - in alpine ecosystems? What is the role, big or small, of each other thing? What does it take for the landscapes to be resilient and full of life despite the pressure applied by climate change? The final exhibition does not answer all these questions. It creates a spatial framework for experimenting with possible answers and tries to expand the (architectural) narrative: from a solely human experience of the landscape, architecture, and activities, to one that acknowledges the role and experience of nonhuman beings like animals, plants, soil, rain, materials,...

In Sculpting Sensations, I embark on an exploration of how architecture can transcend the purely visual to engage the full spectrum of human senses. This project delves into the psychological and emotional impact of sensory-rich environments, uncovering how the interplay of materials, light, sound, and texture can shape our experiences and evoke deep emotional responses. Through research and design, I demonstrate how sensory synergy can be used as a method to create spaces that resonate on a personal and emotional level. The journey begins with an investigation into sensory perception, exploring how we interact with and are influenced by our surroundings. This research phase lays the foundation for a series of design interventions that culminate in a unique museum concept, where each space is sculpted to evoke specific emotions and sensations. Sculpting Sensations is not just a reflection of an academic journey; it is a manifesto for a more empathetic and human-centered approach to architecture. By bridging technical innovation with sensory and emotional considerations, this work paves the way for creating built environments that are not only functional and aesthetically pleasing but also profoundly enriching to the human experience. Join me on this inspiring journey and discover how architecture can touch the heart, engage the senses, and sculpt the sensations that shape our lives.

In the face of changing climate and the increasing threats of flooding in low-lying Dutch polder landscapes, the demand for new development in adaptive residential architecture becomes crucial. This research explores the development of a lightweight amphibious building concept, designed to dynamically respond to changing water levels in the flood-prone wetlands of Groningen. The study delves into living with water typologies, construction techniques for amphibious buildings, and the utilization of paper and wood as a building material in lightweight constructions. The central hypothesis posits that a combination of a dynamic semi-floating foundation, coupled with paper as a sustainable and lightweight building material, offers new possibilities for future buildings in the floodplains of rivers. The research question addresses how buildings can effectively adapt to fluctuating water levels in Dutch polder landscapes through the incorporation of a lightweight biobased building construction and an adaptable dynamic floating foundation. The objective is to identify key elements by forming a series of design requirements for an amphibious building concept that tackles climate challenges by new construction techniques and biobased building materials. The thesis is carried out by a literature study of floating constructions and paper constructions, a precedents study and an experimenting phase through research by design. The findings indicate that an amphibious construction could be implemented in various ways, depending on the situation and location. When the river’s floodplain is submerged, the building will start to float. It should be considered that everything is connected flexibly, and access roads remain accessible. Paper constructions contribute to a stable, more sustainable, and cheaper building, enabling larger-scale buildings to be executed amphibiously. Paper constructions, with the right design, can meet the construction standards of traditional building materials and also score well in terms of recyclability and disassembly. However, paper as a building material poses additional risks in comparison with the traditional building materials. Also, the practical longevity of such structures remains a matter of debate. For an amphibious building that is specifically aimed at adapting to the future, it is important that the building materials can last a long time. Paper as a building material is a good alternative, but in the application of amphibious living it could be inadequate due to its lifespan. These research results are used in the design assignment of an amphibious housing complex in a water-rich neighborhood in the Reitdiep area in Groningen. This building implements aspects such as sustainability, technical features, adaptability to climate change and collective living community.

Charles Correa Over the course of his 50 year career, Charles Correa realized an impressive number of important and influential projects in and outside his native country India. However, alongside his cultural and other institutional work, housing, and especially housing for the poor, remained for him one of the key - if not the primary - responsibility of an architect. Correa’s oeuvre, especially in housing design, is remarkable for the consistency with which he addressed the various complex issues of generating habitat where forming intelligent responses to climate, culture and resources remained at the heart of all his work. Through both his built and un-built projects, deceptively simple ideas expressed with great clarity of thought help identify clear lineages between ideas and projects, whether they were for single-family homes or townships, built for the poor or for the rich. The exhibition It is the intention of the exhibition to pay tribute to Charles Correa’s legacy as one of the most prominent and inspiring authorities on housing design as well as highlight the main concerns and themes that guided his work. Through drawings, photographs and sketches from the Correa Archives, as well as models produced here at the faculty, the exhibition will chart the development of Correa’s ideas on housing, from his seminal Tube House linear model, based on the idea of a climate-responsive architecture, to the complex courtyard clusters of Belapur, focusing on the ideas of creating community and opportunities for growth and change in time. Through the exhibition, we hope to highlight these important paradigms and their development over time through a number of projects that remain key references for students and architects today.@en

Charles Correa Over the course of his 50 year career, Charles Correa realized an impressive number of important and influential projects in and outside his native country India. However, alongside his cultural and other institutional work, housing, and especially housing for the poor, remained for him one of the key - if not the primary - responsibility of an architect. Correa’s oeuvre, especially in housing design, is remarkable for the consistency with which he addressed the various complex issues of generating habitat where forming intelligent responses to climate, culture and resources remained at the heart of all his work. Through both his built and un-built projects, deceptively simple ideas expressed with great clarity of thought help identify clear lineages between ideas and projects, whether they were for single-family homes or townships, built for the poor or for the rich. The exhibition It is the intention of the exhibition to pay tribute to Charles Correa’s legacy as one of the most prominent and inspiring authorities on housing design as well as highlight the main concerns and themes that guided his work. Through drawings, photographs and sketches from the Correa Archives, as well as models produced here at the faculty, the exhibition will chart the development of Correa’s ideas on housing, from his seminal Tube House linear model, based on the idea of a climate-responsive architecture, to the complex courtyard clusters of Belapur, focusing on the ideas of creating community and opportunities for growth and change in time. Through the exhibition, we hope to highlight these important paradigms and their development over time through a number of projects that remain key references for students and architects today.@en

In July 2021, heavy floods hit the Dutch province Limburg after days of rainfall in south-west Germany, the Ardennes and southern Limburg. Rivers like the Geul, the Roer and the Maas couldn’t discharge the large amounts of water. Many parts of these regions flooded, and approximately 50.000 people have been evacuated from their homes (Task Force Fact Finding hoogwater 2021, 2021, pp. 8 - 10). How safe residents feel in the river landscape is affected by the floods. The sense of safety people get from the landscape depends on how they perceive that landscape and how they perceive their safety in it. How landscape and safety are perceived relates to the relationship residents have with their landscape. Due to centralized supervision, local communities are increasingly cut-off from their water system, and they are changing from active workers to passive users. Ultimately, their knowledge of the water systems is forgotten. Another aspect of perceiving a sense of safety is related to the Dutch water management strategies. Optimizing and directing water has dominated the Dutch attitude. Engineering strategies including dikes, storm surge barriers and regulated polders are dominant in the Dutch landscape (Metz & Van den Heuvel, 2012, p. 281). With these strategies, the Dutch have outsourced their water safety to engineers and water boards. As water safety is primarily the concern of professionals, people themselves are decreasingly aware of their dependence on these defence systems, and simply perceive dikes and other defence systems as objects in the landscape (Metz & Van den Heuvel, 2012, p. 79). As a result of this strategy, the relationship between humans and river has become a rigid one. Humans dominate water by force, pushing it away hard as possible. However, because of the changing climate water is now pushing back, which resulted in the floods of 2021. Changing how we relate to rivers, and water in general, can help to establish a new spatial relationship that is not based on dominance but rather on equality. In light of the recent floods in Limburg, this graduation project deals with the question of perceiving a sense of safety in river landscapes. The research project deals with the leading question “What is the role of architecture in perceiving a sense of safety in Dutch river landscapes?”. Central in this project is a cycling trip from Delft to Maastricht, including research methods like interviewing, immersive analysis, sketching and annotating. The design project deals with a public building that provides a safe evacuation centre in times of high water, while in the everyday functioning it expresses its position in the water landscape and in turn provides a lens on the water conditions in this landscape. Chapter 8 elaborates on the resulting design project, in which a permanent platform provides the base for a temporary evacuation centre. Together with other design objects (a hiking trail, a bridge, water basins) the project addresses river dynamics and flood dangers in Valkenburg aan de Geul, in Limburg.

Acoustics combined with digital fabrication has been investigated for multiple years. Most research in this area has focused on the combination of acoustics and additive manufacturing. This is mainly due to the ability of this technique to create any geometry, which allows for very high absorption. However, it has the downside that additive manufacturing is quite expensive and the production process is time-consuming. Therefore, this study has chosen to put the geometry first and the performance of the resonators second. To be able to produce a resonant panel based on Helmholtz resonators some additional knowledge was needed. Therefore, five experiments were performed to gain the knowledge needed to design the panel. The samples were printed using a fused filament printer and tested within an impedance tube located at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft. The experiments were concerned with: - The position of the neck compared to the cavity: According to the results of the experiments the position of the neck has a minimal to no effect on the performance of the resonator. - The crosstalk effect: According to the results of the experiments the effect of the crosstalk effect is minimal within the scope of this project. A small change in absorption was noticeable but so small as to be irrelevant. - The effect of the cavity separation between two resonators: According to the results of the experiments the cavity separation can be removed without a large effect on the absorption of the resonators. - The effect of the neck length on the width of the absorption curve: According to the results of the experiments a longer neck causes the width of the absorption curve to decrease. - The impedance of resonators with L-shaped cavities: According to the results of the experiments an L-shaped cavity can be approximated by replacing the L-shaped cavity by a cavity with an identical horizontal section right below the orifice but altering the height, so the cavity has the same volume as the original L-shaped cavity. After the experiments were done, a computational workflow was designed that is able to produce resonant panels based on the targeted frequency range and the possible size of the panel. The tool was theoretically verified using a case study. For the case study two panels were designed to improve the reverberation time for a room in the Faculty of Architecture. Using the Arau-Puchades method of calculating the reverberation time the panels showed to be effective at absorbing sound at low frequencies.

Design of elderly care buildings like nursing homes usually looks for balances between the livability for residents and the circulation efficiency for staffs and workers. Losing the balance between these two has the potential of either dissatisfying residents, uncomfortable living experiences, or causing low efficiency in operations, which might lead to extra working loads, longer service hours and higher service costs. This thesis first proposes an interactive computational methodology to embed daylight hour potential analysis and pathfinding of circulations into the early stage of the architectural design workflow, then the methodology is implemented to a test design case and the result is evaluated and compared to a manually designed result.

This exhibition presents analytical models of hofjes(the little charity courtyard), made by MSc2 students in the elective course Analytical Models at the faculty of Architecture in Delft.@en

This graduation report explains and illustrates the graduation project of Simone Hermans, entitled De Wadloper. The graduation project is part of the Technologies & Aesthetics graduation studio, a studio of the Form Studies chair. The graduation report consists of three parts: the research, the design and the technical foundation. The Wadloper is a project focused on landscape-based design, with a focus on the implementation of technology and aesthetics. In the research, the landscape of Groningen was analysed, after which a master plan was designed for the region. This master plan includes space for a new research and visitor centre, located in the restored Lauwerszee. This centre, De Wadloper, consists of two parts: the visitor centre positioned against the Zoutkamperdijk, and the pavilion, placed in the Wadden Sea. In particular, the design focuses on the pavilion; a unique and innovative structure. De Wadloper innovatively relates to the effects of tides and rising sea levels by allowing it, like its visitors, to walk across the mud flats.