R.R. van den Ban
Please Note
58 records found
1
This is home, surely?
Retrofitting Singaporean Public Housing for Domestic and Climatic Collectivity
In the face of these intersecting crises, this project imagines progressive, alternative futures for existing Singaporean public housing stock. Through the case study site of Selegie House – the Singaporean public housing agency’s first urban renewal housing project, completed in 1963 – the project proposes numerous strategies for adaptation, including the insertion of new communal amenities, reconfiguration of household typologies, and integration of new hybrid mechanical-natural climatic systems. As a replicable model, these strategies encompass a paradigm shift in relation toward Singapore’s existing public housing stock, aiming to cultivate urgently required new attitudes towards existing structures, living forms, and definitions of comfort.
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In the face of these intersecting crises, this project imagines progressive, alternative futures for existing Singaporean public housing stock. Through the case study site of Selegie House – the Singaporean public housing agency’s first urban renewal housing project, completed in 1963 – the project proposes numerous strategies for adaptation, including the insertion of new communal amenities, reconfiguration of household typologies, and integration of new hybrid mechanical-natural climatic systems. As a replicable model, these strategies encompass a paradigm shift in relation toward Singapore’s existing public housing stock, aiming to cultivate urgently required new attitudes towards existing structures, living forms, and definitions of comfort.
Soil at the End of the Forest
Soil Construction after Wildfire for Unfolding of the Latent Commons
This thesis first emerges through a contradiction in rammed earth construction: soil becomes a stable, fire-resistant building material only after much of its organic matter and biological life has been removed. What first appeared as a technical condition opened into a question that is at once architectural and ecological — if there is such a thing as dead soil, what does it mean for soil to come alive again? Following this question through ash, charcoal, excavated soil, wildfire, pine mushroom forests, and post-disaster reconstruction, the research asks how architecture can make visible the nodes of multispecies world-making that arise within a wildfire-damaged forest landscape.
The work is situated in Yeongdeok, South Korea, in the aftermath of the 2025 wildfire, where the maintenance of pine forests for matsutake production and the expansion of fire-resistant broadleaf forests pull the same landscape in incompatible directions. This conflict is not treated as a simple opposition between residents’ livelihoods and ecological restoration. Rather, it is understood as a condition produced by policies and compensation systems that have tied rural income to a single tree species, while leaving forest-dependent lives exposed to fire, landslide, and post-disaster uncertainty. Instead of resolving this conflict into a fixed answer, the project treats it as the material it works with.
Through cartographic and patchwork readings of the site, on-site interviews and a workshop with residents, local architects, and county officials, and a 1:10 model built from actual soil and subjected to simulated weathering, the research develops a system of water tanks, retaining walls, an energy tower, collective housing, a greenhouse, and nutrient rammed earth blocks. Together, these elements rearrange post-wildfire material flows into spatial devices of occupation, decomposition, maintenance, and release. Soil weathering becomes a means of material redistribution, while the boundary between human and non-human actors is articulated through a non-consensual negotiation of occupation and withdrawal.
The central proposition is that architecture need not be understood only through permanence and protection. Here, controlled material transformation — weathering, erosion, partial collapse, nutrient release — is treated as an active medium of design, organised through a clear distinction between a stable structural core and a weathering sacrificial layer, so that decay is planned rather than merely suffered. Maintenance and withdrawal become architectural acts, and coexistence is understood not as harmony but as an ongoing negotiation among human and non-human actors. The thesis does not claim a completed ecological solution; it offers an architectural proposal and a monitoring framework, arguing that the ethical task of building in such a condition is to make visible not only the costs of coexistence, but also the larger political, economic, and ecological structures that placed these residents in so precarious a position.
...
This thesis first emerges through a contradiction in rammed earth construction: soil becomes a stable, fire-resistant building material only after much of its organic matter and biological life has been removed. What first appeared as a technical condition opened into a question that is at once architectural and ecological — if there is such a thing as dead soil, what does it mean for soil to come alive again? Following this question through ash, charcoal, excavated soil, wildfire, pine mushroom forests, and post-disaster reconstruction, the research asks how architecture can make visible the nodes of multispecies world-making that arise within a wildfire-damaged forest landscape.
The work is situated in Yeongdeok, South Korea, in the aftermath of the 2025 wildfire, where the maintenance of pine forests for matsutake production and the expansion of fire-resistant broadleaf forests pull the same landscape in incompatible directions. This conflict is not treated as a simple opposition between residents’ livelihoods and ecological restoration. Rather, it is understood as a condition produced by policies and compensation systems that have tied rural income to a single tree species, while leaving forest-dependent lives exposed to fire, landslide, and post-disaster uncertainty. Instead of resolving this conflict into a fixed answer, the project treats it as the material it works with.
Through cartographic and patchwork readings of the site, on-site interviews and a workshop with residents, local architects, and county officials, and a 1:10 model built from actual soil and subjected to simulated weathering, the research develops a system of water tanks, retaining walls, an energy tower, collective housing, a greenhouse, and nutrient rammed earth blocks. Together, these elements rearrange post-wildfire material flows into spatial devices of occupation, decomposition, maintenance, and release. Soil weathering becomes a means of material redistribution, while the boundary between human and non-human actors is articulated through a non-consensual negotiation of occupation and withdrawal.
The central proposition is that architecture need not be understood only through permanence and protection. Here, controlled material transformation — weathering, erosion, partial collapse, nutrient release — is treated as an active medium of design, organised through a clear distinction between a stable structural core and a weathering sacrificial layer, so that decay is planned rather than merely suffered. Maintenance and withdrawal become architectural acts, and coexistence is understood not as harmony but as an ongoing negotiation among human and non-human actors. The thesis does not claim a completed ecological solution; it offers an architectural proposal and a monitoring framework, arguing that the ethical task of building in such a condition is to make visible not only the costs of coexistence, but also the larger political, economic, and ecological structures that placed these residents in so precarious a position.
NEW NORMAL NOMADOLOGY
Productive Friction Platform in Ulaanbaatar’s Ger Districts towards a Posthuman Assemblage
This thesis examines the Ger district not as an urban failure but as a complex spatial assemblage shaped by its material-discursive entanglements. Employing a critical posthuman and post-structuralist lens, the research critiques inherited planning paradigms that attempt to erase vernacular urbanisms in favor of standardized, international neoliberal models. The thesis structures this inquiry as a processual descent across three distinct spatial registers. The first section, Soil, establishes the theoretical baseline and deconstructs the researcher’s own gaze, exposing the Western biases and colonial histories embedded in traditional spatial documentation. The second section, Horizon, utilizes a narrative and experiential register to map the traces of nomadic mobility and regional migration through the bodily displacement of a high-endurance expedition across the territory. The final section, Atmospheric Threshold, operates as the terminal zone of synthesis where these narrative and analytical vectors collide within the dense, toxic reality of the capital.
Within this framework, the text introduces a taxonomy of deterritorialization to diagnose the site as a zone of interference where absolute negative environmental collapse and relative positive vernacular survival occur simultaneously. Rather than proposing a fixed, commercial building application, the thesis deploys a conceptual case study as a theoretical proof of concept, demonstrating how fixed infrastructure can actively facilitate a state of fluid becoming rather than enforcing a static, sedentary being. Ultimately, the work advances the worlding assemblage model as a speculative yet grounded alternative to rigid spatial governance, proposing the right to occupy-own as a dual political instrument bridging state responsibility with local agency. In a geopolitically delicate context, spatial empowerment is redefined through ethical negotiation, friction, and hybridization, offering a critical rethinking of urban futures that broadens the horizon of current international standards.
Keywords: Nomadology, Posthumanism, Assemblage Theory, Deterritorialization, Ger districts, Mongolia, Sedentarization, Spatial empowerment, Post-socialist urbanism, Urban informality ...
This thesis examines the Ger district not as an urban failure but as a complex spatial assemblage shaped by its material-discursive entanglements. Employing a critical posthuman and post-structuralist lens, the research critiques inherited planning paradigms that attempt to erase vernacular urbanisms in favor of standardized, international neoliberal models. The thesis structures this inquiry as a processual descent across three distinct spatial registers. The first section, Soil, establishes the theoretical baseline and deconstructs the researcher’s own gaze, exposing the Western biases and colonial histories embedded in traditional spatial documentation. The second section, Horizon, utilizes a narrative and experiential register to map the traces of nomadic mobility and regional migration through the bodily displacement of a high-endurance expedition across the territory. The final section, Atmospheric Threshold, operates as the terminal zone of synthesis where these narrative and analytical vectors collide within the dense, toxic reality of the capital.
Within this framework, the text introduces a taxonomy of deterritorialization to diagnose the site as a zone of interference where absolute negative environmental collapse and relative positive vernacular survival occur simultaneously. Rather than proposing a fixed, commercial building application, the thesis deploys a conceptual case study as a theoretical proof of concept, demonstrating how fixed infrastructure can actively facilitate a state of fluid becoming rather than enforcing a static, sedentary being. Ultimately, the work advances the worlding assemblage model as a speculative yet grounded alternative to rigid spatial governance, proposing the right to occupy-own as a dual political instrument bridging state responsibility with local agency. In a geopolitically delicate context, spatial empowerment is redefined through ethical negotiation, friction, and hybridization, offering a critical rethinking of urban futures that broadens the horizon of current international standards.
Keywords: Nomadology, Posthumanism, Assemblage Theory, Deterritorialization, Ger districts, Mongolia, Sedentarization, Spatial empowerment, Post-socialist urbanism, Urban informality
Housing, having turned an investment product, is increasingly under pressure, and a capital markets-based logic will only in-crease this. Participating in a socially and material exhaustive new-building practice will only strengthen this trend.
Counter-based strategies to uncontrolled growth should be sys-temic as imposed to avant-garde one-offs, and can inter alia be directed through the state with its powerful tool of legislating and financial incentivization.
Berlin’s lawmakers are developing a “Treuhänder” paragraph to reinstate housing which has been illegally left off the market. This tool sits at the intersection between architecture, econom-ics and care via the state apparatus. Research on this lever seeks to understand the opportunities and threats of vacant in-frastructure.
“Gründerzeit”-architecture makes up about 15% of the housing assets in berlin and they are a often privately. Shining light on the decades old construction techniques, as well as the legal, fi-nancial and co-living possibilities, this thesis seeks an answer to the dangers of capital gains in this 120+ year old archetype for housing by offering a catalogue of repair for the highly standard-ised brick-timber hybrids. ...
Housing, having turned an investment product, is increasingly under pressure, and a capital markets-based logic will only in-crease this. Participating in a socially and material exhaustive new-building practice will only strengthen this trend.
Counter-based strategies to uncontrolled growth should be sys-temic as imposed to avant-garde one-offs, and can inter alia be directed through the state with its powerful tool of legislating and financial incentivization.
Berlin’s lawmakers are developing a “Treuhänder” paragraph to reinstate housing which has been illegally left off the market. This tool sits at the intersection between architecture, econom-ics and care via the state apparatus. Research on this lever seeks to understand the opportunities and threats of vacant in-frastructure.
“Gründerzeit”-architecture makes up about 15% of the housing assets in berlin and they are a often privately. Shining light on the decades old construction techniques, as well as the legal, fi-nancial and co-living possibilities, this thesis seeks an answer to the dangers of capital gains in this 120+ year old archetype for housing by offering a catalogue of repair for the highly standard-ised brick-timber hybrids.
In Passing
A Funerary Site of Qualitative Time
This tension has increased as secularization has shifted funerary sites from collective devotional landscapes into fragmented mosaics of individual lives, creating a spatial condition in which remembrance becomes dependent on individual responsibility and financial means, rather than existing as a temporal process shared by all human beings. A misalignment arises between the temporal nature of life and death and their spatial and material expression in funerary sites, undermining architecture’s capacity to transform matter into meaning and to accommodate the evolving and transient realities of both life and death.
Following Henri Bergson’s distinction between measurable time and lived duration, and drawing on Joke Hermsen’s plea for a renewed sensitivity to inner time, this project approaches this misalignment through Time, not as a quantity, but as a qualitative condition through which life and death are experienced.
The Schoorlse Duinen provide a landscape in which transience is already materially present. Shaped by wind, water, fire, and centuries of human intervention, the site reveals an ongoing negotiation between permanence and change. Within this dynamic environment, architecture is understood as a threshold where the two processes of farewell, each unfolding through a different experience of time, converge for a moment, grounding the fleetingness of cremation and the act of saying farewell. Rather than treating remembrance as a fixed act attached to permanent monuments, the project explores remembrance through the act of walking, embedded within landscape, movement, and material.
By positioning Time as a qualitative design medium, In Passing reconnects architecture to the relationship between human and humus, memory and landscape, life and death. Rather than seeking to resolve the tension between measurable and lived time, it creates a spatial and material framework in which remembrance can unfold through movement, return, and change. It asks what remains after loss and invites visitors to engage with the experiential qualities of time—weathering, movement, and transition. It situates remembrance within a landscape that, like memory itself, is never fixed and always in passing.
...
This tension has increased as secularization has shifted funerary sites from collective devotional landscapes into fragmented mosaics of individual lives, creating a spatial condition in which remembrance becomes dependent on individual responsibility and financial means, rather than existing as a temporal process shared by all human beings. A misalignment arises between the temporal nature of life and death and their spatial and material expression in funerary sites, undermining architecture’s capacity to transform matter into meaning and to accommodate the evolving and transient realities of both life and death.
Following Henri Bergson’s distinction between measurable time and lived duration, and drawing on Joke Hermsen’s plea for a renewed sensitivity to inner time, this project approaches this misalignment through Time, not as a quantity, but as a qualitative condition through which life and death are experienced.
The Schoorlse Duinen provide a landscape in which transience is already materially present. Shaped by wind, water, fire, and centuries of human intervention, the site reveals an ongoing negotiation between permanence and change. Within this dynamic environment, architecture is understood as a threshold where the two processes of farewell, each unfolding through a different experience of time, converge for a moment, grounding the fleetingness of cremation and the act of saying farewell. Rather than treating remembrance as a fixed act attached to permanent monuments, the project explores remembrance through the act of walking, embedded within landscape, movement, and material.
By positioning Time as a qualitative design medium, In Passing reconnects architecture to the relationship between human and humus, memory and landscape, life and death. Rather than seeking to resolve the tension between measurable and lived time, it creates a spatial and material framework in which remembrance can unfold through movement, return, and change. It asks what remains after loss and invites visitors to engage with the experiential qualities of time—weathering, movement, and transition. It situates remembrance within a landscape that, like memory itself, is never fixed and always in passing.
A Trees' Gesture
Regenerating farmland through food forest typologies and translating this to an architectural expression
Agro – industrial systems are one of the most rapidly expanding spatial developments (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Yet their social and environmental implications largely remain invisible as these systems function as black boxes. This problem becomes more salient when considering landscapes which have been prestressed by exclusionary colonial legacies regarding land, mobility and knowledge.
This project uses the dairy farming landscape of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa as lens through which to examine the relationship between agricultural production, knowledge, people and other forms of life. This landscape was shaped by colonial and apartheid era policies of exclusion - creating a dual agricultural territory, which is being further stressed by climate and technological change. The indigenous Nguni cattle and the optimised foreign Holstein cattle embody this dual landscape – each represents two different systems of agriculture present on the same soil. The tension between these two systems drives both the research and design of this project.
The project subverts the colonial era short line railway by conceptualizing the rail corridor as a spine and platform which connects the gap between mobility, knowledge and working landscapes as a piece of public infrastructure for regeneration as opposed to extraction. The architectural response of this project is the design of a generic rail platform typology with a context specific technical college attached to it - embedded in the productive landscape that many people were previously excluded from. Rather than being an insular institution, the college is conceived of as a series of interweaving platforms, which mediate different learning environments and link students, farmers and the public to each other and the wider territory. These platforms are centered around three interacting sets of relationships: knowledge and production; analogue and digital; non-human, human and post human actors
These sets of relationships also inform the physical construction logic of the building as each end of the Nguni - Holstein spectrum has an associated set of materials, construction and climate logic. The technical detail of the building structure itself embodies this heterogeneous landscape.
Ultimately, the project takes seriously Schumacher’s provocation and that agriculture lies in the tension between the “incompatibilities of opposites, each of which is needed” (Schumacher, 1973; 89). Thus, the technical college is as heterogeneous as the landscape it inhabits – within the tension, students do not inherent a top-down single system, but instead they inhabit, maintain and re-imagine the futures of working landscapes.
...
Agro – industrial systems are one of the most rapidly expanding spatial developments (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Yet their social and environmental implications largely remain invisible as these systems function as black boxes. This problem becomes more salient when considering landscapes which have been prestressed by exclusionary colonial legacies regarding land, mobility and knowledge.
This project uses the dairy farming landscape of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa as lens through which to examine the relationship between agricultural production, knowledge, people and other forms of life. This landscape was shaped by colonial and apartheid era policies of exclusion - creating a dual agricultural territory, which is being further stressed by climate and technological change. The indigenous Nguni cattle and the optimised foreign Holstein cattle embody this dual landscape – each represents two different systems of agriculture present on the same soil. The tension between these two systems drives both the research and design of this project.
The project subverts the colonial era short line railway by conceptualizing the rail corridor as a spine and platform which connects the gap between mobility, knowledge and working landscapes as a piece of public infrastructure for regeneration as opposed to extraction. The architectural response of this project is the design of a generic rail platform typology with a context specific technical college attached to it - embedded in the productive landscape that many people were previously excluded from. Rather than being an insular institution, the college is conceived of as a series of interweaving platforms, which mediate different learning environments and link students, farmers and the public to each other and the wider territory. These platforms are centered around three interacting sets of relationships: knowledge and production; analogue and digital; non-human, human and post human actors
These sets of relationships also inform the physical construction logic of the building as each end of the Nguni - Holstein spectrum has an associated set of materials, construction and climate logic. The technical detail of the building structure itself embodies this heterogeneous landscape.
Ultimately, the project takes seriously Schumacher’s provocation and that agriculture lies in the tension between the “incompatibilities of opposites, each of which is needed” (Schumacher, 1973; 89). Thus, the technical college is as heterogeneous as the landscape it inhabits – within the tension, students do not inherent a top-down single system, but instead they inhabit, maintain and re-imagine the futures of working landscapes.
"House of the Muses"
Proposing Feminist Alternatives to the Traditional (Art) Museum
To achieve this, I reclaim the muse, a figure traditionally considered passive inspiration for the male artist. I argue that one can be a source of inspiration and a creator simultaneously. In the House of the Muses, everyone and everything can inspire one another. This concept is reflected in the design of the Katoenhuis renovation, where an industrial cotton storage building in the harbor of Rotterdam is transformed into a generative machine of relations and collective transformation.
My design is informed by the four textile processes of spinning, weaving, stitching, and natural dyeing. These processes have been considered secondary due to their gendered nature, but I reclaim them as a universal language and medium. Through textiles, the House of the Muses takes shape and is inspired by and inspires human and non-human agencies of the urban environment.
https://lindadelrosso.com/house-of-the-muses-1
...
To achieve this, I reclaim the muse, a figure traditionally considered passive inspiration for the male artist. I argue that one can be a source of inspiration and a creator simultaneously. In the House of the Muses, everyone and everything can inspire one another. This concept is reflected in the design of the Katoenhuis renovation, where an industrial cotton storage building in the harbor of Rotterdam is transformed into a generative machine of relations and collective transformation.
My design is informed by the four textile processes of spinning, weaving, stitching, and natural dyeing. These processes have been considered secondary due to their gendered nature, but I reclaim them as a universal language and medium. Through textiles, the House of the Muses takes shape and is inspired by and inspires human and non-human agencies of the urban environment.
https://lindadelrosso.com/house-of-the-muses-1
The design component of the project translates these findings into a proposal for a girls’ primary school in Sana’a, Yemen. The school is positioned as a form of social infrastructure that extends beyond its educational function, acting as a catalyst for community recovery, economic participation, and collective identity rebuilding. The project responds to Yemen’s educational crisis by creating a safe, accessible, and adaptable learning environment that supports both formal education and informal social interaction.
Architecturally, the project explores the spatial and material dialogue between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Vernacular elements such as courtyards, layered thresholds, climate-responsive openings, and rammed earth construction are combined with modern structural systems, modular timber construction, and flexible programmatic layouts. This hybrid strategy allows the building to maintain cultural continuity while accommodating future growth, climatic resilience, and evolving educational needs.
Special emphasis is placed on “in-between” spaces (shaded circulation paths, courtyards, and outdoor learning areas) which are treated as primary learning environments rather than residual spaces. These transitional zones foster social interaction, collective ownership, and experiential learning, reinforcing the school’s role as a community anchor.
Ultimately, this project demonstrates how post-conflict reconstruction can move beyond purely technical or economic recovery toward a more holistic approach that integrates social, cultural, and environmental values. By positioning architecture as both a spatial and societal mediator, the project proposes a replicable model for educational infrastructure that supports long-term resilience and identity-driven urban regeneration in Sana’a and similar post-conflict contexts.
...
The design component of the project translates these findings into a proposal for a girls’ primary school in Sana’a, Yemen. The school is positioned as a form of social infrastructure that extends beyond its educational function, acting as a catalyst for community recovery, economic participation, and collective identity rebuilding. The project responds to Yemen’s educational crisis by creating a safe, accessible, and adaptable learning environment that supports both formal education and informal social interaction.
Architecturally, the project explores the spatial and material dialogue between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Vernacular elements such as courtyards, layered thresholds, climate-responsive openings, and rammed earth construction are combined with modern structural systems, modular timber construction, and flexible programmatic layouts. This hybrid strategy allows the building to maintain cultural continuity while accommodating future growth, climatic resilience, and evolving educational needs.
Special emphasis is placed on “in-between” spaces (shaded circulation paths, courtyards, and outdoor learning areas) which are treated as primary learning environments rather than residual spaces. These transitional zones foster social interaction, collective ownership, and experiential learning, reinforcing the school’s role as a community anchor.
Ultimately, this project demonstrates how post-conflict reconstruction can move beyond purely technical or economic recovery toward a more holistic approach that integrates social, cultural, and environmental values. By positioning architecture as both a spatial and societal mediator, the project proposes a replicable model for educational infrastructure that supports long-term resilience and identity-driven urban regeneration in Sana’a and similar post-conflict contexts.
Sweet Memory
A metaphysical re-membraning of the limit
Design is a field of operations that concern themselves with the manipulation of limits and constraints. To understand the limit as the manner of relating is to understand it as a methodology. How to relate organism and environment is the gist of technology and design; then the question of the limit becomes, by definition, the question of the method. Rather than a typological approach, this research adopts a topological one, challenging stable typologies such as the prison, the dwelling, the hospital and the laboratory through their iterative modulations across time.
A methodology is not preexisting to the research nor this research output; instead, I allowed myself to switch methodologies, and I encouraged contamination, engaging in a process of complexity that I now understand as not only responding to my motivating concerns but also as an approach to design. I sought to embed myself in complexity as much as possible, taking the experiment as the technique and unpacking these device-machines of measurement to question them as the method for the understanding of our world.
The design project develops as a genealogical design exercise, asking myself what could have happened instead of what did, recognising virtual memory as affectual and multivergencies as compossible and worlding. Set within the Argentinian context, conditions of extreme scarcity are understood not as lack but as productive, collectivising and creative forces, welcoming contingent ideas and problem-creative solutions.
A contaminated methodology, in research and design, is thus not a metaphor but an actual letting go of the obsession with procedure and control to allow the difference to creep in, and, with it, allow new and fascinating encounters.
...
Design is a field of operations that concern themselves with the manipulation of limits and constraints. To understand the limit as the manner of relating is to understand it as a methodology. How to relate organism and environment is the gist of technology and design; then the question of the limit becomes, by definition, the question of the method. Rather than a typological approach, this research adopts a topological one, challenging stable typologies such as the prison, the dwelling, the hospital and the laboratory through their iterative modulations across time.
A methodology is not preexisting to the research nor this research output; instead, I allowed myself to switch methodologies, and I encouraged contamination, engaging in a process of complexity that I now understand as not only responding to my motivating concerns but also as an approach to design. I sought to embed myself in complexity as much as possible, taking the experiment as the technique and unpacking these device-machines of measurement to question them as the method for the understanding of our world.
The design project develops as a genealogical design exercise, asking myself what could have happened instead of what did, recognising virtual memory as affectual and multivergencies as compossible and worlding. Set within the Argentinian context, conditions of extreme scarcity are understood not as lack but as productive, collectivising and creative forces, welcoming contingent ideas and problem-creative solutions.
A contaminated methodology, in research and design, is thus not a metaphor but an actual letting go of the obsession with procedure and control to allow the difference to creep in, and, with it, allow new and fascinating encounters.
The Growing Library
Building with living trees
But what can you actually build with it? What forms can it take? And what are the potentials - and limitations - of designing with a material that grows, adapts, and evolves over time?
These questions form the starting point for The Growing Library. Set in the tropical urban context of Yogyakarta, the project proposes a public library that grows together with a tree, gradually evolving from an urban park into a living architectural structure. Conceived as a place for knowledge exchange, the library extends beyond a conventional building to include outdoor spaces, living systems, and ongoing ecological processes as core parts of its collection.
At the heart of the design is the Ficus benghalensis, whose aerial roots are trained and shaped to form spatial and structural elements. As they thicken over time, the roots intertwine with bamboo to form a hybrid structure, merging living growth and constructed elements into a single evolving architectural system.
...
But what can you actually build with it? What forms can it take? And what are the potentials - and limitations - of designing with a material that grows, adapts, and evolves over time?
These questions form the starting point for The Growing Library. Set in the tropical urban context of Yogyakarta, the project proposes a public library that grows together with a tree, gradually evolving from an urban park into a living architectural structure. Conceived as a place for knowledge exchange, the library extends beyond a conventional building to include outdoor spaces, living systems, and ongoing ecological processes as core parts of its collection.
At the heart of the design is the Ficus benghalensis, whose aerial roots are trained and shaped to form spatial and structural elements. As they thicken over time, the roots intertwine with bamboo to form a hybrid structure, merging living growth and constructed elements into a single evolving architectural system.
Reconciliation Park
Toward Anti-War Architecture: An Exploratory Redesign of Bunkerpark Oostduinlaan
We live in a globalized world shaken by local conflicts. The digital space that has emerged through technological advancements enables the free flow of information across the globe. As a result, war has become more difficult than ever to conceive as a spatially finite phenomenon (Abujidi, 2014, p. 12). Regional conflicts stem from global political and economic dynamics, meaning that we all, citizens of democracies, bear responsibility and are, in some way, involved. However, rather than being incentivized to act, Western citizens have been transformed into mere spectators of these events. The media inundates us with photos, videos, reports, and stories from war-affected regions, providing ample information. Yet, it remains unclear how - or even if- we are truly affected. Meanwhile, due to hyper-exposure to information, the observer loses interest in the issue (Fuller and Weizman, 2021, p.120). We have the potential, but not the motivation to intervene. Through my graduation project, I want to challenge our preconceptions regarding political crises and our roles as citizens in them. I aim to create a space that allows people to empathize with victims of warfare and serves as a backdrop for discussions and debates among individuals with different beliefs and backgrounds. I believe that through education, empathy, and willingness, people have the potential to civicize their everyday lives and, together, discover how to bring about change. ...
We live in a globalized world shaken by local conflicts. The digital space that has emerged through technological advancements enables the free flow of information across the globe. As a result, war has become more difficult than ever to conceive as a spatially finite phenomenon (Abujidi, 2014, p. 12). Regional conflicts stem from global political and economic dynamics, meaning that we all, citizens of democracies, bear responsibility and are, in some way, involved. However, rather than being incentivized to act, Western citizens have been transformed into mere spectators of these events. The media inundates us with photos, videos, reports, and stories from war-affected regions, providing ample information. Yet, it remains unclear how - or even if- we are truly affected. Meanwhile, due to hyper-exposure to information, the observer loses interest in the issue (Fuller and Weizman, 2021, p.120). We have the potential, but not the motivation to intervene. Through my graduation project, I want to challenge our preconceptions regarding political crises and our roles as citizens in them. I aim to create a space that allows people to empathize with victims of warfare and serves as a backdrop for discussions and debates among individuals with different beliefs and backgrounds. I believe that through education, empathy, and willingness, people have the potential to civicize their everyday lives and, together, discover how to bring about change.
Spaces of Impact
Architecture as a Medium for Social Activation
The research phase explores how architectural space can be designed to convey narratives that move beyond symbolism and instead engage visitors through experience. Drawing from three theoretical fields, narrative psychology, experience design, and narrative architecture, the study identifies 5 key qualities that support emotional engagement, memory formation, and behavioural reflection. An analysis of 24 architectural and non-architectural case studies results in the identification of a practical toolbox with insights into design tools intended to guide message-driven architectural design.
In the second half of the graduation project, this theoretical framework is tested through a research-by-design approach. The design ‘Dripping Data’ outcome is a travelling pavilion that communicates the societal issue of Dark Data: the invisible environmental impact of digital data storage. The pavilion addresses the paradox of increasing efficiency leading to increased consumption and highlights the hidden energy and water demands of data centres. Structured according to the three-act structure, introduction, confrontation, and resolution, the pavilion guides visitors through a carefully choreographed spatial journey. Each space applies specific design tools from the research framework, such as controlled sequencing, interaction, and moments of reflection, to translate abstract information into embodied experience.
The pavilion is designed as a floating, demountable structure situated on a push barge, allowing it to spread the message by travelling between cities while remaining physically connected to water, a key narrative element in the project. Sustainability, adaptability, and material responsibility are integral to the design, aligning with the project’s message. Water functions both as a sensory medium and as a narrative actor, gradually shifting from background presence to the central character.
By integrating theory, analysis, and design, this graduation project demonstrates how architecture can move beyond passive representation and become an active medium for communication and reflection. The project proposes a transferable design framework that can be applied to other societal topics, positioning architecture as a powerful tool for raising awareness, encouraging dialogue, and inspiring individual responsibility. ...
The research phase explores how architectural space can be designed to convey narratives that move beyond symbolism and instead engage visitors through experience. Drawing from three theoretical fields, narrative psychology, experience design, and narrative architecture, the study identifies 5 key qualities that support emotional engagement, memory formation, and behavioural reflection. An analysis of 24 architectural and non-architectural case studies results in the identification of a practical toolbox with insights into design tools intended to guide message-driven architectural design.
In the second half of the graduation project, this theoretical framework is tested through a research-by-design approach. The design ‘Dripping Data’ outcome is a travelling pavilion that communicates the societal issue of Dark Data: the invisible environmental impact of digital data storage. The pavilion addresses the paradox of increasing efficiency leading to increased consumption and highlights the hidden energy and water demands of data centres. Structured according to the three-act structure, introduction, confrontation, and resolution, the pavilion guides visitors through a carefully choreographed spatial journey. Each space applies specific design tools from the research framework, such as controlled sequencing, interaction, and moments of reflection, to translate abstract information into embodied experience.
The pavilion is designed as a floating, demountable structure situated on a push barge, allowing it to spread the message by travelling between cities while remaining physically connected to water, a key narrative element in the project. Sustainability, adaptability, and material responsibility are integral to the design, aligning with the project’s message. Water functions both as a sensory medium and as a narrative actor, gradually shifting from background presence to the central character.
By integrating theory, analysis, and design, this graduation project demonstrates how architecture can move beyond passive representation and become an active medium for communication and reflection. The project proposes a transferable design framework that can be applied to other societal topics, positioning architecture as a powerful tool for raising awareness, encouraging dialogue, and inspiring individual responsibility.
Amsterdam Decentraal
Re-imagining Architecture through an Ecofeminist lens
The project is rooted in an understanding of spatial design as a world-making practice, one that not only shapes material reality but also produces meaning through its storytelling capacities. It questions and critiques contemporary architectural practice, which is deeply rooted in colonial and capitalist systems, and counters this with a practice centred on connection rather than divide.
Through a method of Radical Spatial Imagination, complex theoretical and philosophical notions are translated into spatial manifestations. This process resulted in 18 insights which embody the ecofeminist lens that was developed throughout the research. It is through this lens, represented by these insights, that the design project unfolds.
The projects continues in a speculative reimagination of Amsterdam Central station. Here the station is reimagined not just as a multispecies landscape or a project on ecological continuity but as a place that fundamentally questions and reshapes our relationship with our environment.
Amsterdam Central station is transformed from a sterile, smooth and efficient transportation hub into a messy place of interconnected entanglements. Harsh, dry, dead and TL-lighted spaces are replaced with leaky wet and sun-kissed area’s full of life. By breaking boundaries and facilitating more than human agency it disrupts tempo and forces human actors to let go of control. ...
The project is rooted in an understanding of spatial design as a world-making practice, one that not only shapes material reality but also produces meaning through its storytelling capacities. It questions and critiques contemporary architectural practice, which is deeply rooted in colonial and capitalist systems, and counters this with a practice centred on connection rather than divide.
Through a method of Radical Spatial Imagination, complex theoretical and philosophical notions are translated into spatial manifestations. This process resulted in 18 insights which embody the ecofeminist lens that was developed throughout the research. It is through this lens, represented by these insights, that the design project unfolds.
The projects continues in a speculative reimagination of Amsterdam Central station. Here the station is reimagined not just as a multispecies landscape or a project on ecological continuity but as a place that fundamentally questions and reshapes our relationship with our environment.
Amsterdam Central station is transformed from a sterile, smooth and efficient transportation hub into a messy place of interconnected entanglements. Harsh, dry, dead and TL-lighted spaces are replaced with leaky wet and sun-kissed area’s full of life. By breaking boundaries and facilitating more than human agency it disrupts tempo and forces human actors to let go of control.
Architecture as facilitating agent
Exploring architecture’s position in spatial relationships through festival spaces
The intention is to construct a designbrief for a permanent festival terrain in which the dialogue between people, place, society, and time can be constantly re-imagined through its fluid architecture—offering fertile ground for discussion on architecture’s role in the facilitation of festival spaces, how they inform the design, use, andorganisation of everyday spaces, and how they stimulate collective design processes.Ultimately, this project seeks
to enact architecture as a facilitator of dialogue, a medium for questioning and reshaping spatial relationships through the lens of festival spaces. ...
The intention is to construct a designbrief for a permanent festival terrain in which the dialogue between people, place, society, and time can be constantly re-imagined through its fluid architecture—offering fertile ground for discussion on architecture’s role in the facilitation of festival spaces, how they inform the design, use, andorganisation of everyday spaces, and how they stimulate collective design processes.Ultimately, this project seeks
to enact architecture as a facilitator of dialogue, a medium for questioning and reshaping spatial relationships through the lens of festival spaces.
Transfigurations. Shifting Landscape Imaginaries
Reduction, Digestion, and Absorption. The Alpine Brownfield of the Ex-Cementificio Marchino as a Landscape of Aftermath
The design engages with the complexities of brownfield reuse in the mountainous landscape, reinterpreting the former cement factory not as a static object, but as a dynamic form in transformation. The factory, once instrumental in supplying materials for hydroelectric infrastructures, has been reimagined as a "landscape" from which to extract meaning and material rather than mere resources. The project is realised through a phased strategy of dismantling, re-scaling and recomposition. This process serves to reduce the alien monumentality of the industrial artefact, thereby initiating a process of contextual digestion. This process involves the demolition of parts of the structure and the reappropriation of their debris. Consequently, the factory becomes the quarry. The final phase of the transformation process involves the introduction of new architectural elements, constructed using the processed remnants of the original building. These interventions are designed to support a new programme, which involves the establishment of a basecamp for landscape observation, environmental monitoring, and community engagement. The site functions as both civic infrastructure and territorial lens, and is embedded within a broader network of observation points across the Caodre region.
The reconfigured ruin, articulated along a path that connects it to a newly designed inhabited wall, now acts as a spatial and symbolic filter between the former machine and its surrounding landscape. Through this mediation process, the site's context is progressively restored, healing the scars left by past extraction regimes and reorienting it towards novel perspectives and connections with the site itself. ...
The design engages with the complexities of brownfield reuse in the mountainous landscape, reinterpreting the former cement factory not as a static object, but as a dynamic form in transformation. The factory, once instrumental in supplying materials for hydroelectric infrastructures, has been reimagined as a "landscape" from which to extract meaning and material rather than mere resources. The project is realised through a phased strategy of dismantling, re-scaling and recomposition. This process serves to reduce the alien monumentality of the industrial artefact, thereby initiating a process of contextual digestion. This process involves the demolition of parts of the structure and the reappropriation of their debris. Consequently, the factory becomes the quarry. The final phase of the transformation process involves the introduction of new architectural elements, constructed using the processed remnants of the original building. These interventions are designed to support a new programme, which involves the establishment of a basecamp for landscape observation, environmental monitoring, and community engagement. The site functions as both civic infrastructure and territorial lens, and is embedded within a broader network of observation points across the Caodre region.
The reconfigured ruin, articulated along a path that connects it to a newly designed inhabited wall, now acts as a spatial and symbolic filter between the former machine and its surrounding landscape. Through this mediation process, the site's context is progressively restored, healing the scars left by past extraction regimes and reorienting it towards novel perspectives and connections with the site itself.
Living Archives
Effective inefficiencies that turn space into story
Our home became the inspiration for a new type of architectural research. Not about finding specific solutions or creating perfect plans, but about following fragments, being guided by stories, and learning all the hidden ways through which space accumulates meaning.
But what allows a place so (technically) unsuitable, a vacant, decrepit hospital with all its shortcomings, to function so successfully for this community?
In a building never intended for living, leaking roofs, awkward staircases, and narrow hallways turned out to be “effectively inefficient”: imperfections that unintendedly triggered social interactions. What at first glance loos like architectural obstacles instead brought people closer together, turning friction into connection. These so-called shortcomings became subtle design forces, guiding movements, encounters, and everyday rituals. It suggests that what architects are trained to “correct” or “resolve” can be the very thing that gives space its social intelligence.
Therefore this project doesn’t aim to re-design but to re-read. Here, seemingly inefficient architectural details are not interpreted as “flawed” technical junctions but as successful social ones. Through a non-linear, foldable storybook/map the building’s human and architectural “voices” unfold through scale and interconnect in all directions without a set beginning or end. This way, each fragment stands on its own, but (through folding out) always in relation to the bigger whole. Not as a fixed format or static object but, like the building itself, as a layered and living network of human stories.
Understanding space through social life expands the boundaries of what architectural education considers valuable and opens new ways of seeing, practicing, and representing architecture.
...
Our home became the inspiration for a new type of architectural research. Not about finding specific solutions or creating perfect plans, but about following fragments, being guided by stories, and learning all the hidden ways through which space accumulates meaning.
But what allows a place so (technically) unsuitable, a vacant, decrepit hospital with all its shortcomings, to function so successfully for this community?
In a building never intended for living, leaking roofs, awkward staircases, and narrow hallways turned out to be “effectively inefficient”: imperfections that unintendedly triggered social interactions. What at first glance loos like architectural obstacles instead brought people closer together, turning friction into connection. These so-called shortcomings became subtle design forces, guiding movements, encounters, and everyday rituals. It suggests that what architects are trained to “correct” or “resolve” can be the very thing that gives space its social intelligence.
Therefore this project doesn’t aim to re-design but to re-read. Here, seemingly inefficient architectural details are not interpreted as “flawed” technical junctions but as successful social ones. Through a non-linear, foldable storybook/map the building’s human and architectural “voices” unfold through scale and interconnect in all directions without a set beginning or end. This way, each fragment stands on its own, but (through folding out) always in relation to the bigger whole. Not as a fixed format or static object but, like the building itself, as a layered and living network of human stories.
Understanding space through social life expands the boundaries of what architectural education considers valuable and opens new ways of seeing, practicing, and representing architecture.
Istanbul's Queer(ed) Space
A process of collective building and celebration
Accordingly, the project proposes an architecture that listens, brings together and resists fixity. Collaboration is engrained all throughout the project; during research, knowledge is not extracted from ‘subjects’ but constructed collectively: a process that’s messy, embodied and always in flux. By breaking down traditional research and design hierarchies, it shifts authority away from the architect and toward shared authorship, embracing transdisciplinarity and intersectionality as vital conditions, centralizing care and hospitality.
This approach unfolds through shared drawings, communal dinner nights, collective dreams and finally, a 1:1 scale spatial exploration in a queer nightclub in Istanbul. A space scavenged, assembled and transformed through improvisation and shared labor. The storyline reveals key anchor points for queering the architectural process: to value process over product, to embrace temporality, to reintroduce craft - through working hands-on, playfulness and solutions beyond cognition are invited. Very much an unfinished product, this is an inquiry of gathering and holding space, an act of resistance and care - architecture seen as part of a larger celebration. ...
Accordingly, the project proposes an architecture that listens, brings together and resists fixity. Collaboration is engrained all throughout the project; during research, knowledge is not extracted from ‘subjects’ but constructed collectively: a process that’s messy, embodied and always in flux. By breaking down traditional research and design hierarchies, it shifts authority away from the architect and toward shared authorship, embracing transdisciplinarity and intersectionality as vital conditions, centralizing care and hospitality.
This approach unfolds through shared drawings, communal dinner nights, collective dreams and finally, a 1:1 scale spatial exploration in a queer nightclub in Istanbul. A space scavenged, assembled and transformed through improvisation and shared labor. The storyline reveals key anchor points for queering the architectural process: to value process over product, to embrace temporality, to reintroduce craft - through working hands-on, playfulness and solutions beyond cognition are invited. Very much an unfinished product, this is an inquiry of gathering and holding space, an act of resistance and care - architecture seen as part of a larger celebration.
In search of water Enchantment
From disappearing water cultures to reviving water experiences on Mallorca
During the heavy winter rains, water is collected and stored for use in the bathhouse. In the dry summer months, when water cuts are increasingly common in the village, only the communal showers remain in use, reviving a shared water system rooted in collective responsibility. The rest of the bathhouse transitions into a dry space for events and the drying of herbs. This project reintegrates a caretaker into the site and embraces the storytelling potential of water and enchanting infrastructures, allowing new narratives of care, resilience, and community to unfold. ...
During the heavy winter rains, water is collected and stored for use in the bathhouse. In the dry summer months, when water cuts are increasingly common in the village, only the communal showers remain in use, reviving a shared water system rooted in collective responsibility. The rest of the bathhouse transitions into a dry space for events and the drying of herbs. This project reintegrates a caretaker into the site and embraces the storytelling potential of water and enchanting infrastructures, allowing new narratives of care, resilience, and community to unfold.