In Oxford and Cambridge, higher education arose around the 13th century and has undergone major developments. One of the first colleges in Oxford was Balliol College started as an act of charity in 1260 by the King of Scots, John Balliol, where Balliol housed poor students in a house rented by him (Jones, n.d.). Over the years, several colleges have been built, each with its character and identity and mostly horizontally organised. These colleges are, sometimes, connected by footbridges but are mainly self-contained complexes. The complexes are organised out of several courtyards to which university facilities are attached. The resulting colleges are introverted due to the courtyard-facing facades that create close street frontages and have little connection with the public realm. Many campuses continued developing using the traditional layout and are mostly still segregated from the surrounding city fabric. The densification of cities necessitates the integration of campuses into the city. This ensures that cities are open and more accessible and spaces and programmes of the city and campus can reinforce each other and contribute to challenges within the society (den Heijer & Curvelo Magdaniel, 2018). As an answer to the studio brief, the Temporary House of Representatives of The Netherlands in The Hague was selected as a project site for the new campus. This building is an obsolete office building that is, due to its function, for many parts closed for the public. The new campus will accommodate lecture halls, workspaces, housing and other public functions. These programmes have specific requirements and dimensions and therefore the building needs to be transformed. However, in The Hague’s densely built Central Innovation District (CID) there is little room for a horizontal extension and creating a horizontally oriented campus as in Oxford. In fact, in the future, the Municipality of The Hague plans to densify further the CID (Municipality of The Hague, 2021), leaving even less space for buildings and public spaces. On the other hand, it creates opportunities for more multi-use high-rise buildings with different types of public programmes and spaces. Therefore, the campus needs to grow in height which causes implications for the more “traditional” circulation patterns between different floors and functions within and around the campus. How can vertical circulation be created by breaking through the stacked floors as Musiatowicz (2008) argues? Additionally, at the moment the building of the Temporary House of Representatives of The Netherlands, colloquially named the Monkey Rock, is seen as a monotonous closed structuralist building. Although the building has a distinct identity and is part of “the unity of the archipelago” (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 296), how can the new campus incorporate the local identity which could be represented by the kiosk typology of The Hague, which is now lost in the high-density area? ... Read more

The 20th century consists of technological improvements and societal changes due to industrialisation and the two World Wars. Architects, urban planners, artists, critics, and other professions sought to create a better future using different themes and available technologies to visualise an ideal city based on their ideals about people’s needs. This research focused on Van den Broek and Bakema’s ideal city and how it emerged over the course of the 20th century. The study investigated how the ideal city developed in their work from 1900 until 1965. The research identified that Van den Broek and Bakema’s ideal city was formed through thoughts and outcomes discussed during meetings within different modernist groups. The period after World War II had a significant influence on how people perceived the world and how the living environment should operate. Van den Broek and Bakema attempted to combine these aspects in creating their ideal city, emphasising the importance of interactions and social communities through transitions between different layers in the living environment to counter individualism. The study also revealed that Van den Broek and Bakema’s approach was in line with the principles of De Stijl, the C.I.A.M., and Team 10 which are discussed during this research. ... Read more