The Dutch population is growing, and cities are becoming more dense every year. Therefore, we have to share the minimal space we have. Collaborative housing, defined as private dwellings supported by shared facilities and responsibilities, could be a favourable housing type for inhabitants to have a comfortable home within the minimal amount of space of the dense city, since sharing enables a sustainable use of this space. Currently, there is a focus on privacy in housing design. For a shift to collaborative housing design there is a need for a collective perspective on the sense of home. Therefore, the research question of this study is: how does sharing space influence the sense of home for residents in collaborative housing in the Netherlands? The hypothesis is that sharing space has a positive effect on the sense of home for residents in collaborative housing projects.
This case study analysis consists of in-depth interviews in two collaborative housing projects and spatial analysis of four collaborative housing projects in the Netherlands. Through this, the perception of home amongst residents that live in collaborative housing is studied. The case study analysis shows that specific shared spatial features positively influence the sense of home in shared housing projects. Most of these features are situated in the transitional zones between the public and private space. The sense of home in collaborative housing can only be obtained in the presence of a private space. The conclusion of this study is that residents in collaborative housing include shared features within their sense of home. This study adds to the body of knowledge of collaborative housing design. This helps to further implement collaborative housing in the Dutch housing stock. Further research should elaborate on the specific effect of shared spatial features in transitional zones in collaborative housing projects.

This thesis investigates the management and transformation of Christian architectural heritage, with a particular focus on Catholic churches. It explores the dynamics of friction and propulsion that shape this process, analyzing their implications in contemporary society and potential future trajectories. Anchored in the case study of the former Church of Santa Rita da Cascia in Campitelli, located in Rome’s Rione Sant’Angelo, the research offers context-specific reflections intended to stimulate broader discourse on the fate of disused churches across Europe.

Structured around guiding research questions, the thesis is divided into three main sections. The first examines the historical and cultural roles of Catholic churches, emphasizing their function as urban landmarks and spaces of collective identity. The second part addresses the regulatory landscape in Italy, shaped by its cultural and institutional proximity to the Vatican, and contrasts it with the more pragmatic Dutch approach to church reuse. This comparative analysis highlights the tensions between safeguarding symbolic religious value and adapting buildings to contemporary needs.

The final section synthesizes the findings to propose strategies for reimagining Catholic churches in ways that preserve their historical and architectural identity while enabling new, socially relevant functions. Through the lens of the Santa Rita da Cascia case study, the thesis proposes a critical yet constructive perspective on transforming sacred heritage into meaningful assets for modern communities.

In a world full of consumerism, climate change, and capitalism, we face a crisis in how we relate to the world around us. Indigenous values offer a new way forward. This graduation project responds to the task laid out for practitioners to include Indigenous values in the practice. It does so by turning to the values of the Sámi people, the Indigenous people of the North and explores how this can inform architecture.
Because of my unfamiliarity with Sámi practices and beliefs at the start of this project, I looked for an alternative to the Eurocentric design frameworks, which often overlook alternative narratives or oversimplify representations. To include these different stories, there was a need to embrace the unfamiliar and employ this knowledge to design a world in which many worlds fit. This led me to the overarching question: How to make space for the Other? By engaging in interdisciplinary literature analysis and design-for-values frameworks, I gathered tools to make values tangible and translate them into architecture. Through this methodology, I intended to be very attuned to Sámi values and make inexplicit steps of the design process very explicit.
These ideas are grounded in the urban context of Tromsø, Norway—a city with limited visible Sámi representation outside of its touristic identity. Through four site-specific interventions, the Fish-Leather House, the Kitchen, the Weaving House, and the Summer Workshop and its Sheds, this project is a creative collection of practical places and relations, a set of activity spaces. They are not fixed but shaped by the times and contexts in which people engage with them, allowing for a space to find community, speak the language, transfer practical knowledge and reclaim Sámi spaces. Each space embodies core Sámi values: craftsmanship, community, care, and indigenuity.
This project is a continuous exploration of how to engage with the people you are designing for and a reflexive positioning on the role of the architect. The insights gained throughout this process not only informed my design outcomes but also encouraged a deeper understanding of how values shape practices. It emphasises that how we work is just as important as the outcome.

This research explores how architectural interventions can foster urban resilience in post-disaster contexts, focusing on the Uzun Çarşı in Antakya after the 2023 Türkiye earthquake. Through fieldwork, discourse analysis, and ethnographic methods, the study examines how materiality, collective memory, and community agency drive recovery processes. Uzun Çarşı, despite severe destruction, demonstrated resilience through community-led spatial adaptation and the reactivation of everyday practices. The study proposes a community-driven reconstruction of a spice market, utilizing rubble as memory anchors and emphasizing participatory building processes. Rather than restoring a pre-disaster state, the design embraces transformation and continuity, highlighting resilience as an ongoing, dynamic process rooted in social, material, and spatial relations.

As urban space becomes increasingly tight and compressed, cemeteries have slowly withdrawn from our daily lives from the highly open public spaces in history. If cemeteries remain as they are, they may become completely inaccessible in the future, leaving people without a common memorial space. In order to cope with this possible future and status quo, I combined new technologies and urban renewal to come up with a conceptual vision of a new prototype for the cemetery.

This graduation comes from a deep interest in understanding why some buildings foster vibrant communities, while others do not. Now that interest in cohousing is rapidly growing, both from grassroots movements and top-down initiatives, grasping the factors that explain why some communities thrive has become increasingly significant. Cohousing may have many advantages from mental health, and informal care to enviromental benefits. Yet it is not simply shared spaces that create these advantages. It is the community itself. The goal of this graduation was therefore to bundle insights on how to design cohousing so that it facilitates community engagement.

A pattern language was developed with the intention of aiding both resident-led initiatives and architects. A pattern language is a network of interrelated design solutions to common problems. After a wide literature review, case studies and in practice testing, a cohousing pattern language was formulated that balances complexity and comprehensiveness. 7 base principles and 40 design patterns explain how architecture can facilitate community engagement. These patterns and principles are integrated into an 8-step framework tailored for the Dutch cohousing development context.

For the design part of this graduation project, the pattern language has been implemented to design an affordable and sustainable floating cohousing building for the Dutch delta. This architectural design addresses the housing and space crisis by exploring the floating frontier of architecture. The floating urban villa may house 5 to 20 people and with minimal adaptions can facilitate a wide range of engaged communities. Up to 7 floating villas can together form a layered cooperative housing community with a layered framework for expression.

There is simple formula or design solution for cohousing so that it facilitates community engagement. Each community, location, and project is unique and requires specific and co-designed solutions. The book may help that process as it has identified abstract principles and concrete patterns that provide valuable guidance for designing spaces that support thriving, engaged communities. These are applicable to a wide range of cohousing lifestyle visions, architectural typologies and contexts. Ultimately, it is up to architects and residents to creatively integrate constraints, principles, context, and patterns to co-create cohousing architecture that facilitates their unique, engaged community.

This research investigates the potential of architecture to shape values, lifestyles, and behaviors, particularly in the context of mass consumerism. The study begins with a chronological exploration of the history of consumer culture and retail architecture, learning how architecture has evolved to influence consumption patterns, behaviors and societal values. Through this historical lens the research identifies the potential of architecture to define constraints and shape human action, illustrating how built environments reinforced consumer behaviors over time.

Moving beyond historical analysis, the research focuses on the ethics of care and the process of responsibilization. It examines how neoliberal frameworks shift responsibility for mindful consumption onto individuals, emphasizing Personalization, Authorization, Capabilization, and Transformation. The research identifies a missing step in this process - the relational and situated awareness needed for cultivation of care. Conscientization, as a necessary step, deepens personal responsibility by embedding individuals within a broader context (nature, others and the self). This situated awareness is essential for transforming consumer behavior from an alienated process to an active and responsible participation. Through speculative method the study explores how spaces can embody the principles of responsibilization creating environments that stimulate care-oriented consumption practices.

This research concludes that architecture plays a crucial role in shaping consumer behavior. While architects cannot fully control the impact of their designs, they can establish frameworks that cultivate responsibility and care in the context of mass production and consumerism, using the process of responsibilisation grounded in care.

Based on the research, an architectural project was developed in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, which integrates a public workshop with living amenities and an urban farm.

Kathmandu is aching, its border neighborhoods stretching out, moving up to the rim of the valley. The city is soon reaching its limits for urban expansion, and perhaps it already has: most agricultural land has been replaced by urban settlements, and the city’s population keeps surging. The architecture is changing rapidly and houses are being replaced one after another, every house a bit more slender and a bit taller than before. The turnover rate is so high that Kathmandu’s streets feel like perpetual construction sites, tirelessly building and constructing and demolishing again. Open spaces are disappearing, as well as the rich cultural qualities of Nepal's urbanism from before. These changes seem to happen without a greater plan in sight, and many say the city is become worse, not better.

Perhaps these issues are just part of a city in development: a Kathmandu that is struggling with its growing pains and the inevitable effects of urban boom. But to move forward from these pains, a couple of things are crucial: experimentation with alternative ways of building, closely working together with craftspeople and inhabitants, documenting and archiving the past architectures, and telling stories about a different city: one that is not pestered by pollution, built smartly to house everyone safely, and one that can resist the earthquakes to come.
These four ideas are the starting point for the design phase: the People’s Earthquake Museum of Kathmandu. This initiative was started after 2015 by a small community in Nepal, but has sadly been discontinued due to a lack of resources. The building aims to connect tradition with modernity: vernacular techniques with the modern needs of Kathmandu’s residents. At the same time, the building, located inside the commercial block in Gongabu Bus Park, is giving space to exhibit stories about the earthquakes, architectures that have been lost, and to showcase ways of moving forward. With museum spaces, an archive and library, auditorium and workspaces, the building revolves around reflection, mitigation, and experimentation.

This thesis is divided in four chapters:
1. Stories from KTM - photographic travelogue of Kathmandu and the Nepali rural
2. The architect, the builder, the researcher- a documentary of three interviews
3. Growing Pains - a short essay connecting the findings in Nepal with existing literature
4. The People's Earthquake Museum - a design proposal that visualizes the research results

This is a story about an archive that could sit in the heart of Appingedam, Groningen, commemorating two diasporic cultures which, against all the odds, found refuge in this quiet, mediaeval city.

The first Ashkenazi Jewish population saw its birth in Appingedam, Groningen in the early 17th century. Despite centuries of difficulties the community flourished in this small rural city for centuries until it was all but eliminated in the 1940s, starting with their forceful eviction to the Dutch concentration/transit camp Westerbork. My grandmother is the last survivor of this community.

After the war, Kamp Westerbork - renamed Schattenberg - saw the arrival of a new community, the Moluccans. Intended to be a temporary stay whilst the Dutch negotiated their independence as a state from Indonesia, the years saw little progress as it became evident that this temporary stay was quickly becoming permanent. In 1960 it was proclaimed that the Moluccan community would be rehoused permanently across the province of Groningen, with the first city of permanent dwelling being Appingedam. A city which can be walked across in 25 minutes now bore witness to the birth of two significant communities within the Netherlands, centuries apart. Although there could never have been any crossover (one community terminated prior to the other starting) this is the story of how to analyse the intrinsically spiritual connections between two vastly different communities, and how a new syncretic direction for commemoration - one the focuses on the power of a multiplicity of memory rather than the privacy and exclusivity of a single collective remembrance - can be brought forward.

1.7 Earths currently, 3 in the next decade.
That is the worth of resources that we are using yearly, and the estimated doubling of it,
by the end of the following decade. Two-thirds out of all those extracted resources end up as waste.
It’s kind of ironic and paradoxical that we go to all that trouble to obtain these valuable resources and materials, design them, form them to become something, just to become nothing, worthless, waste, by a simple toss into the garbage bin.
But one can be wasteful only in abundance - this abundance, however, breeds a carelessness towards consumption, accumulation, and ultimately, destruction.
This is an exploratory (design) thesis that delves into how to reevaluate waste conceptualization, and what would be needed for a collective to do so. How to create a space where the Ethos of Care and Repair becomes (one of) the method(s) of this reconceptualization, and rethinking relationship with waste.

Modern cities are often characterized by their fast paced environments and levels of sensory overload. Consequently, these environments often pressure individuals and can create feelings of (emotional) detachment. These feelings of detachment call for interventions that enable people to connect to the full scale of their emotions and reconnect to their surroundings. Art and architecture have the potential to offer environments and encounters that can stimulate this (re)connection. Therefore, this research investigates the architectural principles and embodied visitor experiences of objects in (semi-)public spaces.

An overview of design principles and accompanied visitor experiences is created. The main types of experiences that have been identified are: contemplation, experiment/play, movement, surprise/wonder, and (unexpected) social interaction. Useful architectural tools to achieve these experiences entail, among others, the use of material, play with light, the relation (or disconnection) to place and its history, shape, sound, and perspective. Lastly, it is important to note that experience is rather subjective, even though these architectural principles can guide the experience. Therefore, urban planners and designers are encouraged to thoroughly investigate the case specific context to determine the most fit design.

These findings have been used to create three interventions following Kostverlorenvaart, a body of water located in the city of Amsterdam. By using the history of place as an additional guiding theme and incorporating a flexible structure that can be adapted to temporary needs, three pavilions have been created to help (re)connect city inhabitants to their direct surroundings. The project outlines a blueprint for urban interventions that can be implented in other cities to help counterbalance these fast paced environments.

The proposal incites the collectivisation of maintenance and organisation of the electricity grid in Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam Zuid.

In times of unproductive polarisation along a ‚Political Spectrum’ and the proliferation of a reactive subjectivity that lacks contextual attunement, the citizen appears to become incrementally more a consumer of politics rather than a productive participant in the organisation of our togetherness.

As the progressive automation of our lives intensifies the general proletarianisation of the citizen, the capacity to productively participate in politics turns quite literally forgotten and invites for determinate governmentality to continue its recursion.

Drawing from Schizoanalysis, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, and care ethics, the research focuses on the exploration of libidinal, political, and energetic engagement with the formulation of individual and collective desires, beliefs, futures, and values through our environments.

Questioning the degree and value of the automations that surround us in our daily lives, the project aims to integrate the subject with (locally to globally) outsourced problems that it has progressively been alienated from and turn the paranoid architecture of electricity into a convivial tool that allows for the experience of collectivity, work as leisure, and political participation on a daily basis.

Through the necessity that is electricity as a collective (political) problem individuals can learn about parts-to-whole relations and dependencies. Via participatory spatial production, immediate material engagement, and the making sense-able of day-to-day automations, the project turns the inaccessible and intangible local electricity grid and transformer station of Afrikaanderwijk into a didactic environment to learn to care and to problematise desire as well as the coming together of individual and collective. It is a plea for an architectural process rather than product that is assisting in the emergence of literate, active subjects that can productively inform local and global collective efforts and challenges via a politics of transindividuation.

How can an open relation between bodies, movement and architecture lead to new ways of bodily attunement in space?

Dancing weaves Bodies and Space with the World. Social and (anatomo-)political conventions compose a foundational understanding of how I experience my former dancer body in architectural space. In my research, the moving body weaves threads between art, architecture, performance, philosophy, body politics, and everyday practices. As a designer, I perceive our bodies as intertwined actors within the spheres of art, architecture, and urbanism. As a former classical and contemporary dancer, I bring a certain sensibility to surrounding spaces, with a high resonance towards rhythms, materialities, and interventions in the built environment. Assembling both aspects, I use the moving body in the city as a tool to design.

The reciprocity between the body, movement, and architecture is historically solidified in well-established systems of power by the repressive state apparatus. (Wark, McKenzie. 2019. Capital is Dead.p.154). Differences in power, entitlement, and access to being accepted as human (bodies) make us all different from each other. The project liberates the body from the state of oppression of social, political, and reproductive regulative systems. Essentially, we are made of the same flesh – we are all bodies that express how we sense space through actions and emissions of our physical energy.

The research explores the relation between the body as a subject and its mirage in space, thus creating endless shapes of being (within) a human body. The aim is to open up a creative dialogue between architecture and bodily resonance ,paging body in space and space in body.’ (Diller, E. Scofidio, R. 1994. Flesh – Architectural Probes. p.23.) I walk, move, dance, and think with my own body as extended matter to absorb the space around me in its energies. By translating these experiences into notational drawings, collages, physical models, poetry and chronophotographic images, the moments of reciprocal attunement between body, dance and space come forth.

Design Brief
:
The floating water theater beats like a heart to the rhythm of Rotterdam’s waves. The desired design will allow new encounters between water and land, bodies and space, spectators and actors. It is a space to make you aware of your bodily potential to climb, rise, hide, run, scream, and dream. It is a manifestation of what it means to move your body in this journey of space.

This project presents a response to the pressing issue of women's safety in public spaces, particularly in Latin American cities. Women worldwide are disproportionately affected by safety issues and fear in urban environments. I explore ways in which public spaces can enhance perceptions of safety and freedom instead. Based on extensive four months of fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews with thirty women and a survey, I identify common themes in women's experiences and propose planning and design strategies for enhancing the perception of safety. These guidelines encompass six categories: temporality and sustainability, inclusive functional programs, equal access to localized and high-quality infrastructure, planning trajectories and areas of influence, supporting existing networks of care, and creating spaces for organizing and collective action.

In response to these findings, I introduce a design concept for pavilions dedicated to women, strategically integrated within the network of the UVA (Units for the Articulation of Life) in Medellín, Colombia. Through the project, I emphasize the creation of a community of mutual care among residents, exploring how bonds can form both during construction and utilization of space. These pavilions are envisioned as transformative places, where women are encouraged to actively participate in construction, subsequent management, and adaptation of the building to evolving needs. The project is tailored for community construction, ensuring local ownership and long-term sustainability.

The selection of bamboo as the primary building material comes from the appreciation of its environmental sustainability benefits but also its transformative potential to empower women in construction. Being lightweight, safe, and easy to work with, it is suitable to facilitate active participation of women in the construction process. To maximize bamboo’s sustainability benefits, I complement it with a choice of biobased materials for the roof, and I propose concepts for demountable foundations and joints to ensure the circularity of the design.

This project contributes to the broader debate on urban safety and social inclusion. Through addressing both social and environmental aspects of sustainability, it enhances women's safety while fostering a more equitable and resilient urban environment.

The Netherlands is facing a housing shortage and adequate housing provision is lacking. Citizens are eager to act on their own through bottom-up initiatives. However, bottom-up initiatives (such as cooperative housing) do not thrive within the current housing market and therefore significant development of cooperative housing in the Netherlands stays off. This research aims to support the development of cooperative housing in the Netherlands. This is being achieved through constructing an alternative reality of the housing market through composing a play script. The script is being informed by interviews, literature review and analysing case study projects. The interviews were conducted among the present stakeholders (the academic, the advocate, the architect, the bank, the cooperative, the developer, the dweller, the municipality). All together, the research hopes to transfer these thoughts and findings on cooperative housing to continue this collective process.