Sharing in the built environment is a practice that takes place on different levels. In this design and research, these different levels are explored and an ideal condition for sharing is designed in the M4H area.

A graduation research into the topic feeling at home for the heterogeneous modern household group single-person households. This research forms the basis of a design project for Merwe-Vierhaven in Rotterdam, where the concepts of comfort, social interaction, feeling of safety and identity come together.

More and more people in the Netherlands want to live in the so-called Randstad. This results in a need for densification in Dutch cities. One of the solutions for this is building more high-rise residential buildings. High-rise buildings provide amazing views and house many people on a small plot of land. They do however, have some downsides. According to their residents, the circulation space can be impersonal and the use of the elevator can be experienced as annoying. Even though this is the place to see and meet your neighbours. It has also been proven that there is a relationship between living in a high-rise and poor mental health of children. And lastly, high-rise dwellings are often seen as a home to eventually move on from, to an owner-occupied home, which results in a lack of connection between the residents and the building.

This graduation project aims to rethink the current way of living in high-rise buildings to make it more suitable for families with young children by answering the following research question: How can a high-rise residential building contribute to improving the living environment of children in cities while stimulating a sense of belonging to a high-rise community in Rotterdam? As a result of the research a set of design tools and guidelines is developed to form the base for the design process.

The final result is a high-rise residential building in the centre of Rotterdam that is suitable for children of different ages and encourages social interaction to increase the sense of belonging to a high-rise community.

Ageing of the population is one of the most significant changes taking place in the population of the Netherlands, that will affect the dwelling design in the coming decades. This is also reflected by other phenomenon: together with the higher life expectancy, the quality of the lifetime deteriorates, of which the leading cause are chronic diseases.

One way to stop the negative trend is to change focus from curing the effects of the disease to the prevention of the unhealthy lifestyle, that contributes to it, by implementing changes in the living environment. In the last decades we observed the rise of architecture, that values comfort, efficiency, and entertainment supported by passive technologies, which contributed to decreased human energy expenditure. One of the design strategies, that presents an approach countering this problem is active design, the goal of which is to increase the amount of daily physical activity on all levels of urban scale. These methods are best to be implemented in a vulnerable age of 45-60 (middle-aged phase), when many of the health issues manifest - introducing particular dwelling solutions for this target group could minimize health problems they face in later life. The dwelling-scale design is crucial, as it is where people spend most of their daily time. From these reflections arises my mission for the project – to find spatial characteristics of a dwelling that can improve the physical and psychological health of middle-aged inhabitants.

The design of BIND BY WATER promotes a new way of living in which we rethink the integration of living and bathing into one building. By reimagining the bath as a shared space, the unique timbre of the project offers a space of synthesis, vulnerability, and reconciliation, where the armor of everyday life is abandoned together with one’s clothes.

The project offers a wide variety of dwelling typologies for the heterogeneous group of solo dwellers (the project's target group). With the typologies containing no, limited, or an "extravagant" bathroom. The communal bathing facility on the ground floor provides a stimulating environment for spontaneous and improvisational communal exchange. Fostering community building amongst the ever-growing group of solo dwellers in which communal space becomes an imperative part of their daily routine.

The number of elderly citizens in the Netherlands is growing, but there is a lack of suitable housing for this population group. Because of this, they occupy larger homes that are more suitable for families with children. Since the average age of no longer having children at home is 55 years in the Netherlands, that is the starting age for this project. A design for an elderly specific housing project in the Merwehavens in Rotterdam tries to provide a possible solution. Since there are different social and economical backgrounds there are several different types of dwellings in the building, ranging from small care units to larger multi-bedroom apartments. To still offer the smaller apartments a space for (grand)children to visit, there are also lodging rooms on each floor. The dwellings themselves are all wheelchair proof. This means that the residents do not need to move again if their physical capabilities decline with age, therefore providing a future proof dwelling for the elderly in the Netherlands. This is the next step in the housing career for the modern elderlies of the Netherlands.

Synanthropic Habitats originates from the interdisciplinary quest on ‘how will we live together’ and the personal fascination to critically question the deeply-rooted anthropocentric binary of human (us) and nature (them). The thesis aims to establish an innovative domestic environment that deals with the heterogeneity of people of different backgrounds while reflecting upon the global urgency of the Anthropocene by interacting with nature in a blended game of cohabitation.

The project forms its wider problématique from an amalgam of constituent problems deriving from Rotterdam and specifically Blijdorp as the site under investigation. The high traffic lane that dichotomizes the site, the noise and pollution of the nearby railway station, the large undefined spaces in tandem with the prevailing social degradation, and the need for affordable housing provision are a few of the identified issues of the project’s location. As a response, the Synanthropic Habitats attempts to develop a new paradigm for Dutch housing design, based on the triptych of hofjes as a type, thresholds as interfaces, and cooperatives as nomos.

The project draws from the long tradition of Dutch hofjes as an archetypical sustainable domestic milieu, the epistemologies and multiscalarity of threshold as a key tool to create zones of encounter, and the non-speculative forward-thinking model of cooperatives to shape a framework within which a multi-storey building with integrated nature, a variety of households and common spaces will flourish. Towards that direction, literature research on the topics, typo-morphological analyses of relevant precedents as well as in-situ observations are employed as methodological tools to conclude in spatial and theoretical aspects contributing to an ecology of inclusion in the design.

Utilizing and revisiting the pre-existing type of the hofje, inflected with the threshold character of commons creation and the pragmatic scenario of devising cooperative tenure generate an evidenced-based dwelling design that is as much of a site-specific architectonic product as a universal proposition to be adopted across contexts.