This graduation project finds its origins in my fascination for cities and its atmospheres, which are endangered by the process called gentrification. Gentrification is the effect in which urban areas are renovated and upgraded causing for lower-income classes to be abandoned towards the outer city. Living in the inner city becomes only affordable for higher income classes who have all the same needs for their living environment causing for the cities to change to these needs and loose their authentic spirit. Dealing with gentrification is difficult since it’s a process that slowly starts without noticing and ones its there there’s no way back. Therefore for my graduation project I developed a new strategy on how to deal with gentrification. I experimented with this new strategy using architectural design as a tool. Since the overpopulated inner city of Paris is rapidly changing due to gentrification I focused myself on this location and in particular on the street Rue du Faubourg du Temple. For my strategy it’s important to be ahead of the gentrification process and while visiting Paris I found out that this street still possesses its authentic character. I immersed into Rue du Faubourg du Temple and used all my observations to create a design that is enhancing and exaggerating the important qualities of the identity of the street, hoping these will resist gentrification in future.

A guide for the landscape architectural design of an urban forest that helps create realms of experience in order to make people more aware of our connection to nature. The imbalance between how we live and how the natural world around us works leads to a disconnected relationship with nature. Because of this many people see nature that is far away as idyllic, while they see nature that is nearby as a nuisance. If people keep seeing nature as a destination it fuels the belief that real nature is separate from daily life, which creates the feeling that caring for nature is not people’s responsibility or within their power. Therefore this guide contains a method for the design of an urban forest to help people experience nature in daily life. The method is illustrated by a design example through realms of living, moving and visiting in the Hague.

Transform is the keyword for the situation we are in. The climate is changing and we do to. Our needs change every day, and we like the change. We like the transformation, because that is life. We search for goals. Goals that help us to become something we always wanted to be. This year was all about learning and evolving and I enjoyed every minute of it. Even the lows with all that happened in the world and around us I tried to make the most of this year. I found my self as a student that is slowly transforming in something that looks like an architect. I learned to trust myself and my decisions and followed my fascinations. This book became a journal, a collection of my memories, thoughts and designs. It has been a journey. And you will see that though out this booklet. In addition to this booklet I have written a story that explains the coversation between me and the project. The project ‘The Spring’ is not only a search to master the science and art of making space, but also to search for the poetics of space. Architecture is more than making room for people, it forms people and how they live. With this project i tried to study the changes we can make to solve the problems of to day and the future.

Erosion for Betterment is a graduation project within the Landscape Architecture master track at the TU Delft. The project examines an underdeveloped coastal area in Ghana that is sadly facing severe erosional threats due to previous unfortunate human activities. It offers an unexpected direction in handling issues as such by proposing an inventful and sustainable way of living profiting from the originally presumed risks.

The amount of elderly will increase in the future and elderly homes were abolished by the government due to cutbacks in 2012. There is no room for the target group that is too good for the nursing home and too bad for home care. In this Graduation Studio ‘Designing for Care I will anser the following question, ‘What kind of buildings and neighbourhoods do we need if (older) people take care of older people?’ In this context, care is seen as non-professional care. To answer this question I lived for one week in an elderly home to study the target group in their context. The main observations are passive behaviour and ‘being alone together’. Life in that elderly home reminds me of a factory. An ‘elderly factory’ that produces passive elderly. The relation with a factory is because of the daily routines and the behaviour of the residents. Everyday is the same, everything is planned, nothing is spontaneous. My goal is to transform the ‘elderly factory’ into a ‘fun factory’. A design where elderly live together and take care of each other. Fun in this context refers to the lifestyle and the living environment. Fun can be for instance social interaction or making yourself useful to help someone else. To come up with a concept I asked people in my surrounding how they would live when they are old. The main answers focused on the people. Interviews gave me insights in what people are willing to share with others. Namely a kitchen, living room and a garden, a good balance between private and collective space is important. The kind of support that people are willing to give to their roommates is divided. They like to do leisure activities, are willing to do some household tasks but not provide medical care. Caregivers are needed and will offer home care. To create a place where you are together, help and motivate each other we can learn from an existing co-living typology for a new target group, namely ‘student houses for elderly’. A house with private and collective rooms that are shared with a small group of selected people. The design is a modern courtyard typology. A collective greenhouse is surrounded by elderly houses and care-free houses. A surrounding that stimulates small talks, interaction and social control.

Architecture is made for the user. It needs to fulfill their wishes. When a building is taken into use the architecture of the architect partly disappears. This is not because the architect did not do a good job. This is the cause of being use. The users will always change a space to their wishes. This can be small by hanging a painting or bigger by using the spaces differently. More or less the user is the final layer and finishes the architecture. However this layer is a forever changing elements since users come and go and no user is the same. This process should be let go by the architect. Even when it is hard to accept the design changes. Because the architecture was made for the users. The architect served as a tool. However as a architect you can take the wishes of the user in account during the design process. Listen to their wishes and translate this in the design. This way the user will be more satisfied and less changes will be made by them in the life time of the building. During this research I went to the users. Asked them about the current buildings and how they use these. What are the flaws and what works good? This was implemented in the design at some level. I, as the architect, made the design for the new school with the wishes of the users in mind. Of the design the grey drawing is made. This represents the layer of the architect. A new layer is added by the children of the school. The colours of the children make the design partly vanish. This represents the layer of the users. This layer works with the layer underneath but is adds new things to the architecture of the architect. This way a new building is created, which will change into newer versions.

Challenging a predominant focus in academia on studying societal and spatial challenges primarily in the Global South or non-Western environments, this project investigates the urban fabric and hidden socio-political mechanisms of precarity in the city of Munich, Germany. Houselessness appears as the manifestation of a global housing crisis and is with its implications exclusive to the neoliberal city. Within the context of housing distribution and provision, the neoliberal housing market's association of performance with ownership implies a necessary exclusion based on financial capacity. Accepting that the scope of this reality lies outside of the discipline of architecture, shifted the focus on an analysis of the city through the lens of the guiding motif of urban displacement. The aim was to find out how the city defines spaces for public use, what mechanisms are at work in terms of inclusion and exclusion of certain groups of people, and which spaces are essential - but missing. The visibly precarious conditions of public living imply that public space is not a place meant for all functions. Theories on human motivation suggest that basic human needs are not linked to spaces per se but to an action rendered possible by the protective frame of the built environment. Thus, the project explores the potential outcomes of reimagining domestic patterns outside the confines of conventional residential units. Through ethnographic fieldwork paired with experiments on filmmaking as an architectural method of analysis, a human-centred design evolved that aims at transforming "street dwelling" into a tangible and viable alternative to conventional urban living. The design endeavours to embed a system for both residential and commercial use within the existing urban reality of Munich. Building on current and necessary transformation processes of the urban fabric, the redevelopment of an exemplary streetscape of the Baaderstraße in Munich houses different acts and scales of appropriation in a design frame that works at various temporalities. The first and most permanent intervention docks on the cities' above- and below-ground infrastructure. On top of it, units are placed that in their design adapt in shape, size, and functions to the local ground-floor conditions. Different lifetimes are included in the temporalities of the site by designing the initial unit for a possible future disassembly. The modularity of the prefabricated wooden construction and sanitary units also allow for a possible scalability to other streets. Highlighting a necessary shift of the role of the architect to a mediator between the user and the corporate client, the project presents a compromise at the intersection of realism and utopia, offering new dimensions to concepts of urban, communal, and private notions of comfort and emphasizing the importance of inclusive spaces and innovative approaches to address the housing crisis in Western cities.

This thesis aims to develop a new urban and architectural condition for the site of the existing Molenpoort shopping centre, within Nijmegen’s city centre. The project aims to investigate how play can be considered as part of urban and architectural design in an attempt to make a healthier and more engaging city to live in.

The city of Nijmegen transformed drastically during the last century during its reconstruction period after the war. The city we know now is characterised by the commodification of city centre. With the proliferation of shopping in the city, the community and neighbourhood became overlooked. However, the people's mentality is still very much rooted in the social activism that identified the city of Nijmegen during the 80s. The need for commons stems from a global socio-economic crisis on the inability of market and state to govern the city. Commons is about building working systems for the subsistence of households outside of the market and state. It is also about the political dimension of approaching the space for non market functions in our neoliberal society, instead focusing on local industries, initiatives and communities. Increasingly there is an idea that architectural projects are not single-authored ventures, but rather complex and layered processes that depend upon multiple agencies that establish a commonality. Commons are constructed in the sense that their creation, existence, operation and persistence are matters of not pure accident or random chance, but instead of social practices and institutional design. An architecture of the commons should be understood as an intervention in these commons resources and in the collection of people, skills and knowledge that are part of them. The process of making architecture is strongly rooted with the notion of constructing commons and sharing between different people, skills and materials. Engaging in local material industries is not only important for the material itself, but also holds knowledge on the processing and construction techniques of the specific context. Memories, secrets and craftsmanship are part the network that commonalities of architecture are focussed on. It consists of different people with different knowledge, skills, materials and construction techniques. The artist community in Nijmegen has been pushed to the margins of society and the city due to exponentially rising market prices in the past decades. Whil Nijmegen promotes itself as an artistic city, it does little to actual facilitate the community. On the other side, while there are many artists and creative organisations present in the city, they rarely communicate or interact with each other. The program and location of the art school thus tries to address these two problems by providing an institution in the city centre. Being part of a collective urban plan, the art school presents, together with a public library and collective housing, a new urban proposal for the city of Nijmegen at the site of the Molenpoort. The urban plan fragments the bigness of the site into smaller pieces and changes the focus of the current program from shopping to more community oriented and driven functions, a more sustainable and habitable future for the city of Nijmegen. The thesis proposes an alternative look at how architecture can be part of the rise in bottom up iniatives in urban settings. As practice of architecture takes a turn towards the community and the local, architecture can provide a spatial foundation to bring different agencies to assemble a new network of commonality in the city. The shared knowledge of people and local industries can come together. It is about reconnecting the pieces of today's disconnected society.

This project delves into the transformative potential of human-centric architecture as a catalyst for social connection, urban revitalization, and empowerment in the neighborhood of Droixhe in Liège, Belgium. Drawing inspiration from the collective Les Amis de L'Étang, comprising 15 social organizations, the research explores the concealed narratives behind facades and the daily lives of the communities residing in the neighborhood. Uncovering a pressing need for suitable spaces and housing tailored to the requirements of marginalized women and poorly represented social organizations within the modernistic ensemble of Droixhe, the site specific project proposes a women's house as a multi-functional complex, re-interpreting the role of the public, communal and domestic space. Aiming to promote social safety and empowerment for women, the project at the same time revitalizes and enhances the neighborhood through its public functions, with it's community kitchen as main urban connector. By transcending conventional design paradigms and activating curiosity through architecture, this proposal seeks to invigorate Droixhe, forging a vibrant, inclusive living environment that empowers its inhabitants.

Polders in the Taihu basin have a history of over two thousand years. The low-lying topography and dense water network create convenient geographical conditions for the reclamation of polders. Later, with the rapid population growth, mulberry-dike-fish-pond was constructed in order to make full use of the limited land resources, which is a sustainable and ecological agricultural model, supporting biodiversity and water resilience as well as providing a basis for settlement in this region. The historical polder landscape closely linked the water system, agriculture system, and settlement system, and then derived water culture, rice culture, fish culture, and silk culture. However, since1950s, the Taihu Lake basin has been under drastic urbanization, which caused a threat to water safety and cultural heritage. The city invasion of the rural area and road construction leads to the siltation of the watercourse. As a result, the polder landscape was fragmented and lost its water resilience gradually. Water crises including eutrophication, flooding, and drought become more frequent, influencing the cultivation of crops and the traditional settlement’s safety. Additionally, the region has lost its unique cultural identity as a result of the standardization of agriculture. In conclusion, the polder landscape in Taihu basin is facing three main problems: city invasion, water safety issues, and loss of cultural heritage. Compared to the civil engineering method to solve these challenges, landscape intervention costs much less, builds up a more adaptive and resilient system, and brings aesthetic experience as well. Therefore, how to learn from historical practice to protect precious cultural heritage while restoring the water resilience in the Taihu basin through landscape approaches is the key challenge. The landscape approaches start from the base layer like soil and water, helping to create a sustainable social-ecological system as well as being flexible enough to adapt to future challenges.

Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands, is characterised by its topography, scale, and liberal attitudes. Described as ‘old city, young vibe’, Nijmegen is known for its left-wing politics, stimulated by the presence of Radboud University. It has a heterogeneous population of different subcultures, social groups and nationalities that create a vibrant community. However, the public realm does not currently reflect the bricolage society of Nijmegen, instead mirroring the capitalist agenda of the global retail industry. Shops dominate the city centre, providing a limited realm for social participation or interaction between residents. Furthermore, ownership analysis of the city highlights the poor participation of the residents in making the city. Local organisations are instead situated on the border of the city, absent of footfall or public engagement. With the acceleration of loneliness, isolation and unemployment arising during the global pandemic, the value of the community needs to be reaffirmed in Nijmegen now more than ever. My design proposal aims to provide an alternative solution by democratising the public realm of Nijmegen to harness the social potential of the city. Inspired by Lefebvres notion of ‘The right to the city’ which called for a reclamation of public space back to the community, Common Ground aims to provide an alternative public realm for Nijmegen residents to create a new relationship to their city and community. The Molenpoort mall personifies the commercial city centre of Nijmegen, opened in 1972 as the as the first enclosed shopping centre in the city. Today, the Molenpoort is a void in the city, unloved by residents with a high number of abandoned shops. The current state of the Molenpoort represents the changing needs of society. No longer are people interested in shopping for leisure, instead favouring the convenience of online shopping. I therefore propose a redefinition of the Molenpoort plot from a dilapidated shopping mall to a community centre and coworking space for local businesses, aimed at strengthening the social and economic structures of your city.

In the face of the prevailing norms and practices in contemporary architecture, there is a growing need to find alternative ways of making architecture that prioritize human experiences, social interactions, and a deeper connection with the built environment. The examination of empowered play as a revolutionary approach to design is the focus of this thesis, "Retreat the Line," which offers a break from conventional paradigms. It emphasizes the importance of challenging the prevailing urban planning trends that prioritize financial gain and rigid quantification, often leading to the commodification of public spaces. Instead, the argument for a qualitative approach put out by suggested moments of architecture embraces wastefulness, unexpected moments, and the co-creation of spaces that encourage serendipity and delight. "Retreat the Line" is an appeal for architects to adopt a more all-encompassing and human-centered approach to design. In order to build lively, inclusive, and meaningful built environments that improve quality of life and develop a feeling of community and belonging, it urges practitioners to investigate the potential of the architectural agency.

Shopping malls are failing around the world. This global process highlights relevant questions about the future of our cities and the inclusion of the shopping heritage. Are these places valuable? How can these places offer a spatial quality within the city? Departments stores are the consequence of an absolute process which does not establish a sensitive relationship with the physical and social context. With a similar condition of big infrastructures such as airports and stations, a shopping passage is a “non-space” since it consists in a mere place of transit. People are treated as individual and numbers. They are not human beings. They are their passports or credit cards. Even if this process has a global nature, the solution cannot consist in a methodological response. The rule of the Architect-Bricoleur refuses to apply a general idea or theory to a specific condition. On the other hand, his approach establishes a syntonic relationship with the urban fabric and starts with the art of seeing things looking for opportunities that are apparently invisible. The rule of the architect is to create something new with the physical and emotional materials offered by the site. It is impossible to overtake the ambiguities of the city. We need to deal with contradictions and inconsistencies trying to find their posture within the urban fabric. Our focus needs to shift towards the existing heritage. Demolition is not an option. New interventions need to alter existing conditions re-using materials, traditions, and techniques. Ambiguities can become qualities. Contradictions can become particularities.

The central point of the thesis is formulation and testing of a design method with a strong focus on the user activity and personal experience in the designed space. The design algorithm consists of a series of iterative steps based on architectural and sensorial sequences of activities. The experimental method was tested in the process of re-designing an underperforming shopping mall in the city of Nijmegen. The new urban plan proposes a mix-use neighbourhood that is better connected with the existing city tissue. The main focus is the design of a Health Center that includes spaces for treatment as well as promotion of a healthy lifestyle. The new public building is created in the process of adaptive reuse of the existing structure.

The Working Home Project seeks to create a social housing residential neighborhood that affords opportunities for financial betterment through the use of integrated workspaces. This project stems from an interest in people. How they live and interact with each other through exploring their likes and dislikes, their needs and wishes. To explore this notion of people and their interaction, the research undertaken looked at compiling people’s stories and contextualising them within the city of Nijmegen. Considering the context of Covid-19 and a pandemic aware society, this thesis explores the coexistence of live and work activities within the home. Prior to, but enhanced by the recent pandemic, we increasingly find more people living and working in the same spaces and therefore this thesis project looks at creating a solution to the issue of designing for the contemporary family lifestyle. To adequately create design solutions for these current issues, the thesis relies heavily on the observation and study of the everyday mundane activities that take place within both the private and public realms. The studio theme Bricolage sparked several topics of interest within the working home thesis project. On a social scale, this thesis took the stories of the people of Nijmegen and began to stitch them together in order to create a broader picture of the essence of the city. Architecturally, the existing building stock was a starting point for the design. With the knowledge that the majority of our cities are built to capacity, why don’t we look at the current building stock for future use. Here we can create opportunities through interventions that repurpose and reimagine spaces within our cities by giving old buildings a new lease of life. Through the retention of the ramp and the structure of the Molenport Shopping Centre, my thesis project explores this avenue of repurposing. I find this project fitting with current issues such as sustainability and exploring new ways of repurposing materials.

Bricolage is a way of thinking, researching and designing. From the perspective of architect, we build our realm using the existing constructing logic and limited materials, to make something new from the old, which seems to be a low-key but efficient way for renovation of Passage de Molenpoort. Date back to 1972, the popularity of the American shopping mall gave birth to de Molenpoort in Nijmegen, the first shopping mall in Europe. Because it is a product of emulation, the Molenpoort did not take root in the city, but isolated from the context and grew savagely in the city center. On the one hand, ignoring the problems and simply protect it as a heritage building make no contribution to the rebirth of “dead mall”. On the other hand, totally replace the Molenpoort with another building will also be a loss for Nijmegen. In my proposal, I step back and review the whole evolution history as well as thinking over the existing problems hiding in the Molenpoort. And then I use all the materials in hand and all the ideas in my mind, to bricolage a Commercial Fulfillment Center, which is not only a solution to reinvent the "dead passage", but also a transitional product between retail architecture and public realm aiming at returning our public life back to the urban realm.

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.

The Master's thesis "A Spatial Dialogue in the emerging city of Addis Ababa" explores the intricate dynamics between formal and informal housing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Authored by a German-Ethiopian architectural designer, the thesis critically examines the oversimplified categorization of traditional "sefer" settlements and modern condominiums, shedding light on their impact on social, economic, and cultural aspects. Through the combination of architectural and ethnographic research methods, the study uncovers the unique cultural nuances and spatial needs of Ethiopian dwellers. It challenges stereotypes associated with informal settlements, revealing unexpected similarities in how residents creatively appropriate their homes, irrespective of architectural differences. The subsequent design proposal for a housing complex in Yeka Abado integrates formal and informal elements, emphasizing flexibility, communal spaces, and income-generating opportunities. The thesis advocates for a holistic, inclusive approach in architecture, emphasizing the importance of incorporating cultural heritage and community engagement. The design project serves as a conceptual exploration rooted in extensive research, aiming to bridge the gap between modern design concepts and traditional practices for inclusive and culturally responsive housing solutions.

The design and research developed in a Lexicon of bricolage definitions of Nijmegen, becoming a new way of recomposing an understandable language as a research product that could be shared but also interpreted by everyone. The research highlights the value of the context, related to typologies, fragments using beguinages as a guiding reference as urban enclaves that generated positive alterity worth re-propose in the contemporary city. Moreover, in the “Bricolage layout” I propose an interpretation of the term bricolage from a theoretical and practical framework including works of art, literature, architecture, design as representative elements of the approach. The layout concludes with some of my critical conclusions to design with the aim of diffusing the concept of bricolage as a guiding approach that everyone should consider, and find the bricoleur hidden in them.