Classical music oftenly is associated as boring, muddy; as an activity for the older people. Eventually this older generation will be gone for good, leaving even less pubic than it now has. As this problem grows the relationship between classical music and the public shifts. The lack of connection becomes more obvious, making it more and more distant. Through the case study of the concert building De Doelen in Rotterdam, a design study with the concept of the "promenade architecturale" is held to explore the insights on how to revitalize this subculture by making connection with the public on many different levels. In order to also design an acoustic well-functioning concert hall, a research paper is written about the architectural interventions in optimizing the acoustic aspects of a concert hall.

Historical campuses enabled post-Age of Enlightenment organizations’ operations and allowed them to adapt with times, supporting their processes of adaptive reuse transformation throughout the institutions’ recursive managerial cycles. However, the radical reforms which concerned these organizations since the second half of the 20th century, disabled those mechanics and instated a diffuse phenomenon of dismissal of their historic campuses, instating processes of abandon, demolition, degradation or degeneration and entailing the steady loss of their architectural, urban, functional, economic, historic and socio-cultural values.In the perspective of re-enabling, promoting and fostering fully-sustainable adaptive reuse transformations of the heritage to avoid the value losses, this research recognizes the lack of integration between the intervention domains participating in adaptive reuse operations as the main cause of the phenomenon. Specifically, it points to the impossibility for organizations to inform, support and assess such cross-domain broad-spectrum transformations following the serial structure of current adaptive reuse operational models. Once observed the specific managerial, entrepreneurial and architectural characters of such transformations, the research focuses on the analysis of their processes and procedures in order to define the extents up to which they can be integrated and synchronized. This results in a parallelly-structured operational model in which the coherent processes of the three intervention domains are executed synchronously throughout the identified procedural and operational phases. These phases are then consolidated by defining the conduction tools available to the process managers (and to the ones of each individual domain), the nature and the relevance of the information transfer among the processes within a same procedural phase and/or the previous/next one and finally the reciprocal contributions of each domains in respect to the others. The research then focuses on the theoretical validation of the proposed alternative operational model for adaptive reuse transformation of defunctionalized historic campuses. A comparative analysis reveals an increased ability of adaptive reuse operations conducted through the integrated operational model to consistently address the interests of the involved stakeholders and to be backed by major support networks. Additionally, it shows their higher aptitude in managing the risks inherently related to the operations by allowing its incremental phasing, which provides an otherwise absent degree of tolerance for ambiguity and proofs them from the excessive hindrance represented by intrinsic and extrinsic transformation factors. The integrated operational model also prompts to more fully sustainable transformations thanks to the coexistence of the control processes pertaining to each intervention domain. Overall, the proposed model better allows to restore, preserve and enhance the architectural, urban, functional, economic, historic and socio-cultural values of the dismissed historic campuses rather than the current ones. To achieve these performance increases, however, it relies on the presence of a favorable stakeholder environment at the local, regional and possibly national scale, whose involvement in the entire transformation process requires their availability for greater time and effort investments. Due to these requirements, the inclusion in the intervention program of elements such as a flagship project-orientation, the reliance on triple, quadruple and quintuple helix innovation models and the constitution of public-private partnerships should be strongly considered to facilitate the transformation process.

The water tax in the Netherlands provides the funding for all the water management in the Dutch deltas. In the US there is no such tax, this means funding big civil projects may be problematic and not so easy. Therefore it is necessary to explore smaller scale solutions for the problem of sea level rise. In the San Francisco bay area, there are many communities which are prone to flooding in the near future. Some of these communities have a high social vulnerability for disasters like flooding. This means preparing and recovering from flooding’s(or earthquakes) proves to be very difficult for the communities. That is what this project is about, providing a small scale safe location and give the opportunity to decrease the social vulnerability in these communities. The solution that is suggested is a terp(dutch) on with people can flee when the area is about to flood. On this hill a school and community centre are located. The school functions in times of need as an evacuation centre and provides food and drinking water to its inhabitants.

The question central in this research was: What are the structures used by successful innovative firms and how can the understanding of these structures help growing firms to maintain their innovative nature? Three case-studies have been conducted among innovative firms with an innovative record. In the analysis of the cases five important structural factors where identified: collaboration, communal identity, collective working, connection with social resources and creative space. These five structural elements support a way of working that facilitate the environmental factors for creativity. To Summarize this, the innovative success of these firms can be explained by their ‘collective character’. Most Young firms have an environment very much suited for creativity and innovation, although they might not have the experience or capacity to develop these. When firms grow they do so along a number of paths these paths are ‘one way streets’. As a side effect these bring systems into the organization that could be counterproductive to innovation. When innovation is the main purpose a collective structure is more suitable than the traditional business structure. The firms incorporated in this case study have found a way to grow without losing the characteristics needed to stay innovative.

In today’s cities, global urbanisation has created a fragmented, unresponsive and socially divisive landscape. Intensifying agglomerations to urban centres across the globe due to the displacement and mass migrations of large populations has increased the pressure of organising a dense urban habitat. In its dominion over nature modern life was so caught up in establishing the narratives of individual life that it was naive to the complexity of everyday activity. The celebration of the Individual and the rationalisation of nature and society attempted to find order amongst the chaos of a city. The intensity of diversification in cities due to agglomerations to global centres highlights the changing face society and culture in dense formations and its immediacy. But when the practices of a past epoch continue to pervade themselves into the contemporary narrative, when the ethical practice of past time refuses discontinue for the continuity of a new ethical practice and the development of collective memory then we find ourselves in a cycle of self-contradiction. The condition it creates formulates something hybrid, repetitive, standardised and universally proliferated. There is an inherent issue with creating a dense urban ecology, especially in verticality, that is both equitable to its inhabitants and sustainable to its environment. Between establishing forms of density and the articulation of diversity in our cities there exists an inability to inform the everyday perspective, the continued withering away of political character in our public space and a lack of avenues to establish resilient forms of citizenship. Creating a future perspective for our city becomes increasingly unclear and clouded amongst the ubiquity and generic nature of universal design and the destruction of our urban heritage. When the ability for the urban to produce space for the possibility of specificity is reduced, whether through urban segregation, stratification or fragmentation, then the reference plane for the city wither’s away. A loss of identity in density that cam as result of the modernisation for cities and city life. The Future Primitive is a reframe for looking at the city, one that can enliven the stories of the common and everyday. It means to see the city as a continue process of collective memory and reflection. The research project was to use this concept of as a way to establishing the city as a common future. Through a series of theoretical discussions which aimed to enlighten an inherent paradox in the way we deal with the relationship between space and time in our cities through aesthetics and territory the research pretend how this is proliferated in the articulation of diversity and density in our cities ultimately constraining the possibilities for our common future and furthering the divide of Earth and World. This produced a set of theoretical notions and principals that established the basis for a design brief for prototyping the development of civic common space through the vertical densification of an existing urban landscape.

Architectural theory has illuminated the inherently connected relationship between fashion and architecture. Both disciplines shelter the body, react to spatial volume, rely on a process, and take a work of creativity from its two-dimensional concept into a three-dimensional reality. But the end result does not come out of the blue. It is the design process that leads to a building or fashion collection. And even though designing is just one verb, it actually is a chaotic sequence of activities; a complex, personal, creative and open-ended skill as described by Van Dooren et al. (2014). Is the framework of generic design elements that is developed for explicating the design process helpful to compare the design approaches in fashion with the architectural design process? The results of interviewing three fashion designers show similarities, differences and unique design tools and opportunities used in fashion. These can then be reflected on the architectural design process, and approaches of applying fashion tools in architecture can be considered.

This Master's thesis project is conceived in two parts. The first part is the research project and is titled <<The Art of Acquiring Flow>> where the study assesses an architect’s ability to experience ‘design flow’, during the ideation phase, based on the type of design tool utilized. In order to test the hypothesis, I conducted a workshop with a group of MSc architecture students. The students were asked to engage in two design conditions: where they sketch with analogous tools and where they sketch with digital tools. The comparison of these two conditions was based on an EEG and protocol analysis. The results indicate that the use of analogous sketching tools led to a ‘richer’ and prolonged ‘design flow’ experience that was non-tool focussed. The study provides insights into why analogous sketching is an essential activity during conceptual ideation and why it should be emphasized as a tool in design education going forward. The second part is the design project and is titled <<A Living Lab for Flow>> where the design thematically focuses on the notion of flow in the emerging context where creativity and working deep have become the most valuable skill sets in our society. We spend, on average, more than 90% of our time indoors and with that being the case, the psychological and physiological impact of spaces on our well-being are critical aspects that can be explored. Thus, the design project is conceived as a neuroarchitecture research center where research is conducted on how spatial settings can feed and nurture the brain.

The world is experiencing climate change. Environmental problems are substantial and it's known that economic growth contributes to them. In addition, social inequality in society has grown. As a response, the concept of sustainable development has come up, but to date businesses find this hard to implement in their ways of working. As societal pressure is increasing, a growing trend can be seen by pioneering businesses, social entrepreneurs and impact investors working towards an impact economy. In the built environment, however, the concepts of ‘impact thinking’ or ‘social entrepreneurship’ are still very much unknown. Although some institutional investors have adopted an ESG-approach for their investments and a number of developers have started to brand themselves as sustainable, to date there is barely no evidence suggesting that this actually leads to positive societal impact. Very few parties in the built environment place impact first in their corporate strategy or measure the impacts they make. As the built environment is responsible for many environmental and social problems, this is something that needs to change. This thesis therefore researches in what ways impact thinking can be implemented into (urban) development, from the perspective of the social entrepreneurial developer. The first part of the research was conducted through a literature study, the second part through a combination of qualitative and design research. A total of 16 interviews have been conducted with impact developers, impact investors and urban development experts. Based on findings, a first definition for impact development is given, its barriers an drivers are formulated and six principles for impact development are proposed. Through a collaborative research through design approach, also an example impact development was designed: a social-impact based plan for the gentrifying neighborhood Wielewaal. The research outcomes aim to inspire private parties in urban or real estate development to place impact first in their ways of working. In doing so, this thesis aims to open the dialogue about the responsibility of businesses to society and our cities and help developers and municipalities work towards more long-term sustainable and fair urban developments. For impact thinking to really take a flight in (urban) development, taxing or incentivizing impact by the government is necessary.

Currently people with physical disabilities do not have the option to be away from home for a short or longer period of time to relieve themselves from the medical situation at home. This creates a feeling that there is currently a building typology missing in society and forms a challenge to be further investigated. The objective is to gather knowledge about how physically disabled adults experience a place and in what way an architectural design can influence this in a positive way. The focus for this research is on the physically disabled adults who live at home, are dependent on a wheelchair and daily care. The following main research question has been formulated to answer the problem statement above: “In what ways can architecture overcome the limitations that adults with physical disabilities face in daily life?” To be able to answer the main research question literature research was carried out and interviews were conducted among 5 participants. Two physically disabled, one informal caretaker and two medical professionals. All these participants are representative for both the interview as well as physically disabled adults in the home situation. The interview responses showed that there are 4 main important themes: spatial, social, independence and healthcare. This indicates that these themes are important for all participants. To conclude, the current built environment is missing an accessible building typology, a place that provides care without feeling so for both physically disabled adults as for able bodied people to spend time away from home. Based on this my advice for follow-up research would be how to create awareness among architects about the life of physically disabled adults and how they can design for them?

aghdad, once the cultural and social centre of the Arab world, has become a theatre of violence and devastation. Simultaneously, altering people lives, social interaction, urban fabric and Iraqi’s identity. This paper examines this situation by sharing five narratives of five places in Baghdad. Those places are public spaces, each different in function, but all essential to the urban fabric and all historically charged. The five public spaces are: 1. Swords of Qadisiyah 2. Nasb Al-Hurriyah 3. Al Mutannabi Street 4. Al-Khilani Mosque 5. AL Zawraa park The analysis is based upon an ethnographic case study, which is grounded upon fieldwork, interviews and plan analysis. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the development of the five places, allowing the reader to grasp an idea of the recent events and the meaning of the public space in a conflict environment. The narrative presented has shown that the public spaces are neglected, in shortage and segregated, which results in a decrease of social life and aggravation of sectarianism.

The outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 took a huge toll on Wuhan. The community in metropolitan areas has played a key role in China's pandemic control as a key battleground for closed management and become the focus of society under the pandemic prevention and control. However, its exposure of weak coping capacities makes building community resilience from an outbreak perspective urgent and critical. Besides, there are many inadequacies in the existing research on community resilience in China. Therefore, it is urgent and valuable to explore community resilience in the context of the Wuhan pandemic perspective. This project aims to establish an integrated strategic framework to improve community resilience and achieve a liveable and smart urban environment in Wuhan in the long term. This project is developed from the main research question: What can we learn from the Covid-19 response in Wuhan to enhance community resilience in the long term by adopting planning strategies? Taking the community response in Wuhan under the pandemic as a departure point, this project explores a framework for increasing community resilience in the long term, using spatial planning, governance, and human capital as measures, and proposes a toolkit of corresponding strategies: including temporary planning, urban renewal, digital transition, and public engagement, hoping to realize a vision of a liveable and smart future. Next, the Strategy Timeline provides an overview of four main stages with stage milestones, strategies, and key actions. Then the project-specific upgrading goes through four steps: deep analysis and data gathering, co-design, implementation, and evaluation. In the evaluation part, the rules guide the user to test the quality of the project by combining objective site-specific assessment and subject public feedback. At last, a diverse range of typology sites are selected. Through local design, the community resilience schematic frameworks and strategy toolkit are examined on the ground. In general, this project focuses on urban upgrading with the theme of community resilience, using the new crown as a starting point. It is hoped that it can give more insights for later studies, including the resilience evaluation framework, the strategy toolkit, and the mechanisms of community planning to design implementation.

In this research light earth building is assessed on its possibilities to be applied in a more urban manner. Through literature studies and key performance indicators a view on which light earth building methods could be applied on larger scale development is established. Also, the possibilities of harvesting the resources in the region of Amsterdam, through provisional services of the Amsterdam wetlands and the residual earth flows of the city, is investigated. Through literature studies and an interview, a quantification is given of an annual, regenerative number of facades that could be filled with different types of light earth mixtures.

Abstraction plays a central role, as both a language and an essential tool for design. However, because it can be vague, confusing, and even paradoxical at times the process of abstraction is rarely explicitly investigated in architectural education. As a result, inexperienced architects often do not have a clear idea of what abstraction is, or how to best use it. The following research sets out to address this problem by proposing a simple, yet comprehensive teaching model that would aid beginner architecture students in their understanding and use of abstraction.The designed extension for the national library of Bulgaria is an example of the proposed teaching model and the described abstraction process applied and tested on an architectural project.

As an architect we experiment. Architectural experimentation is the process of generating design ideas and making design decisions. The traditional tools, drawing and modelling, have proven to be fruitful. However, when zooming in on the essence of experimentation, one may wonder if drawing and modelling are the only possible tools to support the process of exploring and deciding. By detaching drawing and modelling from the act of experimenting; the research tries to broaden the traditional laboratory and explore the meaning of experimentation within design education. Furthermore, the research provided knowledge in, and experience with, non-traditional experimentation tools. The latter two have been applied into the design project. In the design process, traditional tools have been combined with non-traditional tools, such as film, blogging, movement and writing poetry. These experiments allowed for a sensitive and reflective approach towards the design (location). Especially the non-traditional tools allowed for looking at the design (location) from multiple perspectives. This resulted in the discovery of existing and potential qualities, but also in design principles and a guiding theme. The design takes place in the Bossche Stadsdelta. The Bossche Stadsdelta is the name for an area in ‘s-Hertogenbosch that will be developed in the coming years. However, due to physical separation by water and the lack of a shared identity; the area is not yet experienceable as the Bossche Stadsdelta. Luckily, the experiments with traditional and non-traditional tools imply that the area has a lot of existing and potential qualities. Therefore, a folly route is introduced. Follies are ornaments of the Bossche Stadsdelta: born from what is already there. They amplify existing (potential) qualities and are open for human action. The follies are mutually connected by sightlines and a shared architectural language. Together it allows locals and visitors to consciously move and stop throughout the area: to experience the Bossche Stadsdelta as a whole.

You can find them in almost any major cultural city. Combinations of museum-clusters and public parks: museum-parks. What are the (urban) advantages of these cultural clusters in the middle of the city and what role does the museum-park play in the urban fabric? In this architectural study of museum-clusters, Sophie Kugel dissects four museum-parks on different topics, such as spatial composition, route and architectural representation. By creating drawings on different scales for each case study, all four museum-parks can be well compared in order to answer the research question: What is the interaction between the museum-park and the public space in the city and in what architectural way makes the museum-park use of the advantages of museumclustering?

Homes for sustainable living ‘’The good intentions and creativity of citizens and their willingness to make a difference is one of the most underutilized resources we have today’’, says Global Ecovillage Network Europe (GEN). Bottom- up initiatives like ecovillages and the recently emerged Dutch ‘Tiny House Movement’ are sustainable projects organized and shaped by people who adopted a sustainable lifestyle and with that contribute to the reduction of climate change. It appears that similar people, who are also willing to reduce their carbon footprint, can’t find a suitable living environment in the current housing stock that fully meet their needs. While, in a world where nowadays climate change is a big problem, we should encourage this group of people to get most out of their willingness by giving them the right circumstances in the built environment. As architects, we can learn from the way residents of tiny houses and ecovillages organize and shape their environment, and use this knowledge in the design of future dwellings. By visiting and interviewing the residents of tiny houses, and by visiting and talking to the initiators of ecovillages, aspects that are being integrated in tiny-houses and eco-villages that support a sustainable lifestyle are found. Mainly, sustainable methods for energy- and water consumption, food consumption, the way they deal with transportation and product consumption are discovered.

This paper investigates the factors that can be utilized in the redesign of public buildings to achieve vibrant, sustainable, and social public spaces. The research identifies and examines ten aspects, which are categorized into social and sustainable aspects, following regulations, standards, and recommendations formulated by organizations such as LEED and BREEAM. The social aspects include Human Health, Bio-Diversity, Public Spaces, Accessibility, and Visibility, while the sustainable aspects include Energy, Water, Nature, Materials, and Climate. The paper examines four case studies to demonstrate how these aspects can be used to create vibrant areas within public buildings. The case studies reveal the importance of factors such as ease and diversity of accessibility, biological diversity, and climate control in creating dynamic public spaces. The research aims to provide a guide for designing green and vibrant spaces within public buildings and suggests that future research could focus on developing new strategies for integrating sustainable and social aspects into public buildings more effectively.

Background More and more people have to deal with dementia themselves, in their direct or indirect environment. However, this problem is often not part of everyday life in our society. Our living environment is not designed for the increasing dependence of these people and the problems that they daily face remains often behind closed doors. The quality of life by this people is declining fast and there is an enormous increase in the demand for taking care of them. Based on the forecasts, the demand for care will become so enormous that we cannot meet this, based on our current health care system. Study aim The aim of this research is to find out how the living environment can respond by collectiveness to the demand for help and care of the people that suffer from dementia. So, to what extent can collectiveness support a neighbourhood in which people with dementia, with a demand for care can live?Methodology To answer the research question, literature has been studied, several people with dementia have been observed in their daily functioning and in-depth interviews took place with relevant people.Results The Literature study, observations and in-depth interviews show that the current method tries to create a suitable environment for people with dementia. but does not meet their needs properly. Conclusion Based on the results, it is recommended to develop an inclusive living environment for people with dementia. This inclusive living environment will create a more collective neighbourhood, where the help and care will be provided in a natural way by society.

In the Netherlands, there is a large amount of buildings that are outdated according to today’s standards. Those existing buildings represent about 70% of the building stock in 2050. Updating these buildings in terms of functionality but mostly in terms of sustainability is therefore a highly relevant task at hand. To quote Prof. Mauro Overend in one of his lectures: “The most sustainable building is the one that has already been built”. Among those buildings, what we could call brutalist buildings from the 1970’s and 1980’s represent a large part of our cityscapes. Those buildings are mainly built of concrete, are in general structurally sound, but although they are not to everyone’s taste, would cost a lot of energy to tear down. What’s more, due to poor insulation and dated climate systems, their energy efficiency is generally atrocious. One good example of those brutalist buildings is the Academic Medical Centre (Academisch Medisch Centrum) in Amsterdam. Built at the beginning of the 1980’s, it is a concrete megastructure, Europe’s largest at the time of completion. This graduation project is approaching the AMC building as a case study of how the brutalist buildings of the 1970’s and 1980’s could be renovated in a sustainable fashion. The project has two components of sustaianability: the spatial design aims to introduce a social aspect to the layout of the research facility of the AMC ; the climate design introduces natural ventilation as a means to make the building more sustainable. The education in the field of medicine has received new insights as to the advantages of exchange between researchers of different specializations. The current research facility is however not at all fit for such socializing. Where the official meeting rooms are already scarce, the informal meeting spots are practically inexistant. The spatial design of this project addresses that issue by creating informal meeting spaces, re-thinking the work floors’ layout and offering an inviting route to connect those spaces. The climate system of the AMC, an all-air system with central air handling units, generates a high energy demand. By exploring the possibility of retrofitting natural ventilation couple with passive thermal treatment of the air, this design aims to show that very sustainable solutions are possible for apparently very un-sustainable buildings.

The main object of this study is the migrant laneway, which refers to the old community in the city center that attracts migrant workers because of its low rent and good location. This kind of community in urgent need of renewal contains three aspects: spatial, social and the process of renewal. This study regards these three aspects as the main line running through the whole research, and studies the current space situation, residents' life and the problems in the existing renewal process of migrant laneways. Pattern language is the main analysis method and design tool of this research. By sorting out the patterns in the migrant laneway, these messy spaces are standardized. In addition, pattern language can be used to increase public engagement. This study introduces a new co-design toolkit: pattern buffet. This toolkit helps residents and designers co-design their communities. Work efficiency and program feasibility can be increased while public engagement is being added. More importantly, the result of this design with public engagement is more sustainable and inclusive. At the social level, this study also proposes a soft strategy to help migrant workers better integrate into the city. The authors reskill these residents towards the opportunities found in a social trend: the senior care industry. While vacancies in the industry are being filled, migrant workers can get longer careers and higher wages to integrate into the city. Therefore, this thesis develops an approach which enables the urban dilapidated areas to be regenerated in a co-design way. This regeneration framework is very new in the Chinese context. Pattern language, as the most important tool in this study, has been examined for its role and function. However, due to the epidemic, the pattern buffet part lacks practical operation, so the author cannot get feedback from the actual situation, which is also an aspect that this thesis can be further expanded.