This master thesis explores the notion of social space by searching for ways of how architectural elements can encourage social behavior in the public domain. Both spatial planning and architecture offer us places for encounters, freedom and creation. Architecture has therefore an important social task, it gives meaning to a place and can stimulate certain activities. The research is structured in three parts which all influence the project and all operate on different scales. These parts are experienced in daily life, together they form and influence the everyday life and create an order of enclosure. The first part will explain the city of Maastricht, how it is perceived and used today and the historic events that changed the identity and appearance of the city. The second part will focus on the building scale, the transition from the city to a building, the level of public and private and the sequence of spaces in buildings. The last part will show the human scale in and around buildings. It will clarify the way people use spaces, their behavior and the places where people intersect and interact.

In this history thesis, the role and use of daylight within modernist architecture is explained. Daylight differs not only throughout the day, but also in lattitude. This causes a different approach to the organization and shaping of a building, which is dependent on geography, culture and climate. On the basis of a comparative study, the modernist architecture of two areas with a different latitude, namely Scandinavia and the Mediteranean, is examined in order to gain insight into how natural light is utilized in modernist architecture in Northern Europe and Southern Europe during the twentieth century.