In an attempt to unpack Antwerp as intimate city, distill the principles of its public exteriors and interiors and shed light into how a library can unlock its civic qualities, the Berchem Library is proposed, a public building in brick.

The Productive City in Antwerp, a material research and textile production with integrated residence: The notion of working and living in the same place has been a particular aspect of every city in the past. With industrialization, especially production and crafts have been driven out of the inner city. With the emergence of the idea of the ‘Productive City’ many cities aim to reintegrate small scale production within the urban fabric to reactivate manufacturing and local production. This contributes to the development of an active community within a neighborhood. The design of a textile manufacturing workspace with integrated residence addresses the question of intimacy within work environments and how this can be translated into an architectural project.

The Ikebana gallery school positions itself in a dense urban context with a secure connection to its didactic elements and the reappreciation of the chosen craft. It is a multi-faced project which sheds light on education, residents and parties to re-direct the urban context. My interventions for the Gasthuisplaats allow me the opportunity to communicate my view for a contemporary school building in the historic city centre of Delft while improving the public realm.

on the threshold of the space

Under the year theme, “Intimate City”, the task was to create “City Rooms” for the city of Antwerp. The method for developing this notion served as a common ground for the whole graduation process. Each of us in the chair chose one specific site to insert our idea of an urban constitution. My site is a private garden located on the street corner in the rural Oud-Berchem district, which consists of a villa and its back yard. The function is an elderly social house with community center.

An architectural design for a silver- and goldsmithing craft school in Rotterdam Delfshaven. The design will consist of different scales, from the large stone architectural design to exact details. Building technology will be involved in the design.

Abbey Roosenberg in Waasmunster, Belgium was designed by Dutch monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan. This monumental and iconic building will no longer be used as a monastery. As KU Leuven is going to be a new host, they defined a program that would suit this new special location: a conference and study centre for architects and artists with expectation for it to become a new breeding ground for reflection and new forms of education. Therefore, our task was to make an academic facility that would include existing building and a new extension hosting this new function.

The growing need for housing in the Netherlands comes with a new set of challenges for planners and designers on how to design new buildings in a country that already has every square inch planned out and dedicated. This lack of building land naturally leaves us with the question on how to increase the density in the city without overburden its citizens and infrastructures. In this regard the town and city-centers should be given especially careful attention in seeking out potential spaces that plug into the existing infrastructures and building cultures. Filling up vacant lots and adding top stories to existing buildings is a particularly sustainable and non-destructive way of increasing the density in the city. Another way is the refitting or removal of existing building blocks and structures in order to enhance them with structures that offer more space and opportunities for the citizens of the city in question.

The project discusses the topic on how to design within inner cities where there is an enormous lack of building ground. Cities must densify throughout the years. To successfully achieve this, architects could expand on top of existing buildings. By building stories on top of existing buildings architects could extend the lifespan of buildings with a non-destructive approach. Due to reconstruction over time spaces in cities have become harsh, neglected and unused public spaces. For this project, the used method was to preserve the original historic pattern while using a new modern architectural language. The ambition, to ultimately design a building by reconstructing from the past while using knowledge from the present. In brief, to engineer a building with a sustainable impact on the environment.

While appropriating the walled garden as the city room, the project also constantly engaged with the studio theme, the intimate city. The evaluation of designing an intimate space becomes an essential struggle throughout every stage and scales of studies. For example, how the massing is related to its urban context in an intimate way, is resolved in a way that the building volumes offset from one another to form smaller courtyards. The sequences of courtyards mediate between the spatial discrepancy between nature and the urban, creating an intimate meeting point at their border.

Recent international events, such as the 2018 Women’s March and the MeToo movement, show an increasing awareness for gender biases present in society and governments. One of the consequences of a disempowered female position is the ‘feminization of poverty’, which is an phenomenon referring to the widening gap between women and men caught in a sequence of economic deprivation and scarcity. One particular group of women effected by this phenomenon are single mothers. These women often get caught in a downward spiral of social isolation and poverty. In worst cases, ending up homeless and unable to take care of their children. Seeing the seriousness of this problem, in 2015 project MIRIAM was initiated by the city of Antwerp for these women to aid and support in getting their lives on track. However, social housing and daycare remains an issue for the mother’s in urgent situations. As such, if we understand The Intimate City as a place which makes space for shifting social and political conditions, the manner in which architecture can carve out city rooms within a dense urban fabric in order to facilitate these new societal needs and norms becomes essential.

Our hospitals will start to get larger and larger as the number of people on this earth will rise. Due to medical solutions our stays in these hospitals will get shorter as we can cure ourselves from diseases. But as we are getting older, we will spend more time in the hospital. The paradox of healing from diseases and becoming more and more dependent on the medical environment in order to heal causes the need of the hospital as a welcoming and comforting place to becomes more and more meaningful. Experiences of patients and their relatives showed that dealing with disease can be all consuming, while at the same time ‘normal’ life goes on. “I am in the hospital even when I’m not in the hospital” said Clara (Mukherjee. The Emperor of All Maladies, 398). Living in these two worlds at the same time can be hard to bear and I think we can have an influence on that as an architect. It is up to the architect to bring these worlds together. Daily life should not stop the moment you end up in the medical environment. As I just stated, the medical environment will increasingly become part of our lives. It is therefore essential that we design the medical environment to our wishes of “normal” life and not to create a second world in which medical knowledge is placed first and us as humans second.

The Roosenberg Abbey in the Flanders village of Waasmunster needs to get a new function. The new owner of the building is the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), who envisions a campus on the site (Campus Roosenberg). The campus that the KU Leuven envisions should be a study- and congresscenter focused on the domain of reflection and should be a breeding ground for new education forms.

The Netherlands is building to little in wood and relies way too much on high-emission materials, such as concrete. The building culture is changing, but way to gradual. In response to the scarcity of resources, nitrogen crisis, climate change and the housing crisis, the Netherlands has to turn more to biobased materials, foremost wood, as a resource, in particularly for construction. There are to many outdated prejudices, to name one fire safety issues, which technology solves. In order to achieve the required change, the knowledge of wood and the crafts related to woodworking should be given more awareness and education has to be improved and intensified. In response, a centre for woodworking is proposed, where education and practice takes place on a daily basis and visitors are welcome to explore the world of wood and woodworking.

Rethinking Roosenberg is the topic for the studio of the Architecture Interior and we are supposed to change the Roosenberg abbey to a study center. Rossenberg abbey is designed by Dutch monk architect, Van de Laan. This project is located in a remote forest of Waasmunster, a small village in Belgium.

Interiors, Buildings, Cities project on the intimate city; Het Water Ensemble is a series of wunderkammer exploring the journey towards disassociation from the bombastic city around.

The transformation from place from religion, to place for study, shares the culture background in western Europe, since the establishment of medieval university is related to the study function in medieval monasteries. Therefore the typology of monastery works as the physical and cultural context in the project, a timeless reference. Starting with the studies of European monastery type and the study of on-site precedent, the Roosenberg Abbey, a juxtaposition is set as a way of extension in this project. The courtyard of the extension building is enclosed by 4 different wings in respect of function and atmosphere: a open workshop area, public study area with cafe corner and a exhibition lounge. The surfaces to the courtyard owns its own character for the 'cloister'.

Het barokke Predikherenklooster in Mechelen kent een bewogen geschiedenis. Het was eerst een klooster, later een militaire kazerne en hospitaal. Elk van die levens heeft zijn sporen nagelaten. Sinds 1975 stond het gebouw leeg en veranderde geleidelijk in een indrukwekkende ruïne. In 2010 besliste de stad Mechelen om het monumentale pand te restaureren en in te richten als openbare bibliotheek. De bijzondere sfeer en de schoonheid van de ruïneuze ruimtes vormden de belangrijkste inspiratiebron voor het ontwerp. Dit boek brengt een fotografische ode aan het gebouw en zijn transformatie. Verschillende stemmen nemen het woord: ontwerpers, archeologen, historici, kunstenaars en gebruikers. Ze schrijven en reflecteren over de omgang met een ruïne, over de leesbaarheid van de geschiedenis en over restauratie als eigentijdse ontwerpopgave. The baroque Predikherenklooster in Mechelen, Belgium, has an eventful history that has left many traces in and on the building. Vacated in 1975, the Preachers’ or Dominican Monastery gradually turned into an impressive ruin. In 2010 the City of Mechelen decided to renovate the monumental building and to convert it into a public library. The special atmosphere and the beauty of the abandoned spaces were the main source of inspiration for the design of the new library, The Predikheren. This book is a photographic ode to the building and its transformation. It gives a voice to designers, users, theorists, archaeologists and artists who describe the design approach and place it in a broader context. The main concerns are the legibility of history and the reflection on conservation as a contemporary design task.@en