A safe and vibrant neighborhood thrives when its community members interact, form connections, and feel a sense of belonging within their surroundings. While buildings are often designed with specific functions in mind, they should also actively engage with their urban context, creating diverse contact zones that invite interaction. These spaces can serve as catalysts for learning, leisure, rest, and activity, ultimately enhancing the safety, health, and cohesion of the city.

This thesis explores adaptive reuse strategies for an existing building in the Haraldsgade neighborhood of Copenhagen, reimagining Figaro as a dynamic, intergenerational space that integrates seamlessly with its urban and landscape surroundings. The proposed design introduces a large public park, peripheral cycling and pedestrian paths, and interconnected movement networks to attract and engage a diverse range of users. Through a fluid spatial transition from open public landscapes to semi-private programs, private student housing, and a public library at the top the project encourages vertical exploration and redefines how people interact with buildings.

By viewing vacant buildings not as obsolete remnants, but as opportunities to reconnect with the past and spark community engagement, this project offers valuable insights into how adaptive reuse can foster deeper social connections and a more inclusive urban fabric.

As cities grow denser and faster, so do the quiet pressures on our mental well-being. Haralds Haven is a hybrid public building that reimagines how architecture can contribute to emotional balance in daily urban life. Located in Haralds Quarter, Copenhagen, the project addresses rising levels of stress, loneliness, and overstimulation by offering a sequence of sensory-rich, inclusive, and restorative spaces.

The design weaves together six experiential themes - Green, Blue, Sensory, Active, Inclusive, and Playable - into a layered spatial network. From tranquil gardens and water elements to interactive zones and quiet corners, the building encourages movement, connection, and calm. It blends functions like community kitchens, creative studios, wellness spaces, and a central inner garden under a glass atrium, forming a place where people can pause, breathe, and simply be.

This is not a space for treatment, but one for support, a gentle framework that invites resilience through design. By translating psychological insights into spatial experiences, the project positions architecture as a quiet ally in the background of everyday life.
Because architecture cannot heal.
But it can help.

This thesis proposes an alternative to demolition as the default response to obsolete or neglected industrial buildings, focusing on the Haraldsgade area in Copenhagen. Residents, small businesses, and diverse communities have organically shaped the area and its buildings, much like nature shaping a landscape. This transformation has allowed clusters of buildings to age, grow extensions, change façades, and become canvases. However, a lack of maintenance and unsystematic alterations have made these buildings ineligible for heritage protection, leaving them vulnerable under current development plans, which now pose a threat to the area’s identity.

The project is rooted in the belief that instead of focusing on destruction, erasure, or redefinition, we might embrace reflection and cultivation, allowing for growth and creativity grounded in acceptance and reinterpretation. It explores how new functions can be integrated through adaptation and activation, embedding interventions in the existing context. Five principles were established to illustrate how neglected industrial heritage can become a framework for human and non-human life and development: Accept the Ruin, Maintain Continuity, Embrace a Fragment, Create a Binder, and Materialize Context.

As a result, a mixed-use public building was designed, combining knowledge and craft to strengthen bonds both among residents and with their environment. The library unites people around shared ideas, while the public workshop brings them together through making, encouraging reuse, fostering creativity, and allowing residents of the Haraldsgade area to add a personal touch to the building’s façade and bring reused furniture pieces into their homes.

By valuing the fragment, the patina, and the local resource loop, the project reframes neglected architecture as fertile ground for both continuity and change. This approach resists the globalizing forces of architectural uniformity, instead rooting development in the specificities of place, memory, and material. The result is a framework for urban transformation that acknowledges the inevitability of change while cultivating the cultural and ecological potential already present, allowing the block to grow, adapt, and tell its story far into the future.

KØKKEN+, addresses the urgent need for a “Common Ground” in Haraldsgade-kvarteret, Copenhagen, by proposing a public building that acts as a social condenser. The aim is to bridge generational, cultural, and social divides in a neighborhood challenged by limited green spaces, scarce community facilities, and social fragmentation. By leveraging the universal act of communal cooking and dining, the project positions the kitchen as a catalyst for intergenerational dialogue, social inclusion, and urban resilience.

The kitchen table is a timeless symbol of family and community which becomes, at the scale of the public realm, a crucible for dialogue and negotiation. Here, opposing viewpoints can converge, wisdom meets innovation, and shared meals foster understanding. By transforming cooking and dining into shared public experiences, the project aims to create a platform for intergenerational exchange, turning the act of preparing and enjoying food into a catalyst for social cohesion and cultural appreciation. In this way, the simple act of dining is reimagined as a cornerstone of community building in Haraldsgade-kvarteret.

Køkken+ exemplifies sustainable urban food systems through its innovative closed-loop approach that integrates food production, consumption, and waste management within a single building. The facility features integrated greenery that supplies fresh herbs and edible plants directly to its public kitchen, while on-site composting machines convert food waste into nutrient-rich compost that fertilizes the gardens, creating a circular system that reduces waste and CO2 emissions. Beyond environmental benefits, Køkken+ promotes healthy living by emphasizing plant-based, organic food choices that align with Copenhagen's public food service strategy. The building makes sustainable processes visible to users as educational and cultural tools that foster ecological awareness and encourage community adoption of sustainable behaviors.

The design reimagines infrastructure as more than a functional necessity, recognising its inherent value in shaping both environments and communities. Its urban approach becomes a catalyst for new opportunities, revitalising the neglected physical context and enhancing neighbourhood quality of life through vibrant circulation. By integrating social and infrastructural elements, the project aims to establish a strong connection with the urban fabric, generating value for both local residents and the wider city. Functioning as a mobility hub, the design fosters social interaction and gathering through its circulation zones, outdoor areas, and multifunctional interior spaces. Embedded within the urban grid, the strategically positioned project promotes spatial connectivity and equal opportunity among communities, taking advantage of its unique location between park and neighbourhood as part of a broader boulevard route.

Identifying a need for increased social interactions in the neighborhood of Ydre-Nørrebro in Copenhagen, this design project aims to densify social interactions through the architectural design of a Public Condenser. This typology - a public building with a focus on hybridity, multiplicity, sustainability, healthiness and resilience - in its program facilitates the need of residents to extend the range of their domestic environment, to feel at home in public space. The keyword here is 'domestication'. Being able to domesticate a public space, temporarily inhabiting it, allows users to consider a greater part of the city their home. By creating an atlas of functions that respond to the needs of the site area's residents, a diverse and inclusive building program is determined. This functional atlas is spatially structured in a way that encourages unexpected encounters, and juxtaposes intimate interior spaces with open-plan flexible spaces.
The building design through its inside-out approach reimagines the techno-optimistic high-tech architecture of the 1980s from a more sustainable and social perspective. A display of building functions and movement projects and promotes the building's publicity and creates an understanding in how it functions, socially and technically. Building services are presented as active 'organs' - in this project called 'plug-ins' - that support the interior spaces. The plug-ins facilitate rational movement on the outside of the building by a lateral gallery and elevators to move vertically in the building. Additionally, they facilitate in the climate system of the interior spaces. By acting as a heat buffer, a energy generator and an air extractor, the plugins take up an active role in the passive strategies of the interior climate system.

Haraldsgade-kvarteret in Copenhagen, shaped by its industrial past, transitioned from fields to a thriving industrial hub in the late 1800s. Industrial decline in the mid-1900s led to residential developments, replacing most industrial structures while some remain and contribute to the neighbourhood’s identity. Urban redevelopment often prioritizes new construction, erasing historical narratives and triggering gentrification. With Legacy Lab, the goal is to reuse both tangible and intangible elements of industrial heritage to create a hybrid public condenser that contributes to preserving neighbourhood identity in an area undergoing urban redevelopment.

The Haraldsgadekvarteret, located in Copenhagen, is a neighborhood that suffers from fragmentation due to the way its set up. This project aims to mitigate that, by creating a building consisting of different volumes that are based on physical characteristics of pieces of urban fabric in the neighborhood. This makes the building identifiable for the residents in the neighborhood. Unlike the neighborhood however, these different volumes are connected due to the functional nature of the spaces in between them. For these connections, both between the volumes and on a functional level within the volumes, the notion of indeterminacy is used as a tool to design these spaces, becoming a vehicle for many important aspects of the building, like hybridity, occupancy and sustainability.

Norrebro is officially classified as a disadvantaged area in Copenhagen, inhabitants within low-income groups suffer from issues related to health inequality. These low-income groups lack access to public health facilities and healthy food systems. The design of this public condenser focusses on solving the issues related to health inequality. The design of this public condenser will act as a catalyst for stimulating healthy lifestyles and improving physical well-being for low-income groups living in Norrebro.

Im this project a research is conducted on how different relgions can be combined in a single building in order to improve the livability of the neighborhood and provoking altruism. This research results in a proposal for a public condenser in the haraldsgade district in Copenhagen, Denmark.