Raising the awareness of history and embedding the past in the present and thus the future is one of the urgent challenges of our time. Architecture can constitute a powerful bridge with the past. A building for the public is proposed, to strengthen the memory of the past while connecting with the present in Prague. Recent political turmoil once again demonstrates the great significance of history and emphasises the necessity of constructing an edifice on a location which has the burden of the past. History is a continuous process and the past can be immensely absent in the presence. But constructions are concrete and present. The remnants are a physical and undeniable concrete manifestation of history. But even then a narrative is required, just as attention and interest are necessary.

The design theme is to create a subterranean cultural compound including hybrid programmes under the general theme [Vyšehrad Spring] on the historical site in the north of Prague. The goal of the project is to add a secondary identity to the site, a place which will be characterized not only by its historical value from the past but also its creativity to the future. The definition of selected programs includes a theatre, performing art centre, library, gallery, artisan studios and a sanctuary (meditation centre), encouraging creativity from multidimensional knowledge and responding to local culture and tradition. After the midterm, the design scope has been narrowed down to one single building, a Performing Art Centre, which is the most complex and collective programme from the masterplan. This building includes a professional multi-form theatre for performing arts, a learning centre for young professionals and amateurs, and public access areas for various collective activities. An phenomenological approach has been applied during the process of designing the architectural language. The inspiration source for architectural language are the indigenous images and city experience of Prague, including contiguous colonnade, traditional crossing house typology, color & materialism of the old town, and its unique townscape in the castle district.

In the architectural profession we often encounter the notions of the unjustified distinction between research and design, putting them in the antipodal categories of science and art. During a lecture in 2017 on Methodologies of Architectural Reuse, Martin de Jong brought up the highly discussed issue of the relationship between the two aspects and if they affect each other within the architectural process - does being a good analysist make you a better designer and vice versa. [1] Buildings, as part of our living environment, are always situated within a certain context, be it man-made or natural. Through their superimposition they react to the present surroundings, affect and change them, therefore become active components of the setting. In order for the architect to design an edifice that responds to its locale and creates a pleasant user experience, one must learn how to extract knowledge not only from the present context, but from as many practices as possible. Design and research are interdependent practices that cannot be separated by hard borderlines within the field of architecture. They complement and inform each other on the way towards a humanitarian built environment that successfully responds to the needs of its users. Just as the traditional notions of science and art do not exist in detachment, since even in the scientific context every new, not yet proven theory or paradigm is a product of a creative process [2], in architecture design is the tool which asks the right questions while research provides with the right answers.

The cultural centre will provide the city of Prague with a community centre combined with several large scale amenities (a cinema, a club, a big event hall and a skybar) to complement and, at the same time, relieve pressure on the inner city. The building is situated in a green, livable, accessible and diverse new area (outside of the clogged inner city) for both tourists and Praguers to experience and enjoy. Pedestrians are placed on a pedestal and find themselves in an unprecedented new inviting and exiting public space. The cultural centre will work on a city scale and a quarter scale. The goal should be to bring together different social groups. It will function as a community centre for the to be developed urban area as well as the existing neighborhoods (Letná and Holesovice). A place where they can meet, relax and use the wide variety of amenities. Concomitantly the building will give the Praguer an additional place to relax/go out during the weekend.

The project investigates the possibility of integrating new technological processes into the public realm in the city of Prague. This will act as a statement against the legacy of the new industrial capitalism, which has disconnected production, distribution and consumption spaces in the city. The focus is the design of a grocery re-distribution center as part of a larger network of sub-centers which make use of the shared-economy system and the Internet of Things (IoC)7. This emerged from the growing pressure to find feasible, environmentally friendly solutions for last mile deliveries and to keep up with the current market trends of same-day or 24 hours delivery. This process will deploy a paradigm shift in the architecture of storage and delivery on the one hand and on the other it will help Prague transition to the status of a Smart City.

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is a river dominated floodplain in southeast China. Long known as one of the country’s richest agricultural regions, in recent years it has also become known as one of the world’s most densely urbanized areas. Decreasing space for water through dyke-ring construction, channelization and urbanization has led to increased flood risk from the river, rain, and the sea. To protect residents from flood risk, a more adaptive urbanization strategy is required, one that takes account of ecological agriculture (e.g. the traditional dyke-pond system) as well as historical water-management methods, which uses a multi-scalar approach. The objective of this thesis is to identify landscape architecture principles for multiscale water sensitive design based on traditional agri-aquacultural practice in this region. In Shunde district, a flood prone lowland located between the West and North rivers in the PRD, there is a century-old tradition in working with water via integrated agri-aquaculture systems. By learning from traditional agri-aquacultural practices, new design principles can be developed to mitigate flood risk while allowing for increased but sustainable urbanization, not just for the Shunde district, but also for the Pearl River Delta, so that they can be more resilient to flood risk in the future. Finally, an article called "Learning from Agri-Aquaculture for Multiscale Water-Sensitive Design in the Pearl River Delta" is also written by the author and Steffen Nijhuis and Gregory Bracken about principles and application through study.

Due to the major flooding disasters particularly in the Southwest region, the Delta works were needed in order to protect the people and the land. During the Delta works a lot of water infrastructures were built in the area as technical solutions, such as the Haringvlietdam. The Delta Works brought safety and made the area more accessible. However, nowadays we realized some negative effects as well, since ecosystems were damaged and lost. Additionally, the climate is changing and in the future the sea level will rise. Due to storms and heavy rainfall rivers will have higher peak discharges. These changes will have considerable consequences for the Southwest Region and therefore innovative long term solutions need to be designed so that the area stays protected. In this specific framework, it could be argued that the protection of coastal landscapes from flooding disasters is traditionally approached by engineering perspective that often resulted in negative impacts on local ecology and ecosystems. As well as massive mono-functional infrastructures that act only as intermediate space without culture and program value. Taking this in to account, it could be indicated that there is a strong need to incorporate landscape architecture and ecological services in coastal protection. For this reason, the design assignment of this graduation project is the partial opening and slow transformation of the Haringvlietdam to an operative landscape infrastructure along with the creation of a group of islands for protection. It is important to slowly transform this area in such a way that people will be part of the development and can profit from it. The design should be considered as an open ended slow process towards an adaptive coastal self-sufficient region. This slow process, would give people the time to realize what would change and understand the future possibilities of this area and could develop a self-sufficient region which is producing energy from alternative resources (water, wind, sun), producing aqua agriculture that is consumed domestically or is exported to other countries, attracting tourism to the extended coastline (islands) and providing a unique experience both for the residence of the region and for the visitors.

The idea of this lecture series is to enable various full professors, associate professors and researchers to present their positions held in architectural design within the faculty’s master track in architecture. Next to their collaboration in the actual lectures, the faculty staff each has handed in a contribution to this reader, in which the lecturers reflect upon both contemporary key problems within the field of architecture, and/or their own sources of inspiration and illumination.@en