This project forms an exploration of the way in which architecture, as a discipline, might come to a distinctly architectural application of computational design techinques. In particular, it questions the external nature of these techniques to the field, and how the discipline might come to formulate its own critical technicity. This is premised on a systems-view of technical development, which highlights the importance of time and situatedness for any consideration of change, genesis or becoming. In order to then construct an architectural technicity that can grapple with the external character of technical development, I argue using the philosophy of technology of Gilbert Simondon and Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics that what is needed for this is a radical opening-up of the architectural process in the form of a democratization, to augment architecture’s capacity for producing alternate futurity. The design project continues from this with the formulation of a notion of an open architectural system. This is premised on the idea by that taking the passage of time into consideration in architectural interventions the social nature of the processes through which these interventions arise are made explicit: it is therefore an attempt at elaborating a design-, building- and organizational process that continuously engages with the system-environment that constitutes the proposed design location – a concrete plant on the outskirts of Amsterdam. The design is intended as a system that plugs into the existing system on site, gradually supplanting the concrete plant and using it to fashion a material landscape that functions as the substrate for an open residential cooperative. This material landscape is designed as a system that functions to support all processes and flows necessary for the maximization of freedom in architectural expression for the occupants of the site, with the intention of subverting market logic and financialization in Amsterdam’s housing system.

The research attempts to investigate the workings and potentialities of videogames as a medium for participatory design and practices of commoning in architecture. The analysis begins with exploring videogames as non-normative experiences and the effects of those experiences on the players which lead to the emergence of the game commune; a force that is affecting they way games are being made. These phenomena are becoming more than individual and collective interactions as they are capable to generate highly innovative and unique virtualities in digital spaces. If architecture, as it is itself a mean of generating virtualities, adopts the commoning practices similar to those of the game commune, it could lead to a more inclusive and opensource building tradition. By combining the commoning practices of the game commune and maker spaces together, the design of spaces where emancipatory spatial practices can be pedagogically exercised is a necessity in areas where crafting and manufacturing is being deterritorialized along with its workers and communities. Furthermore, the alienation of people from tools, materials and processes (technical and social) perpetuates a cycle of consumption that is detached from broader social and environmental consequences. The design segment of this graduation project takes the Binck Twins building in the area of Binckhorst in the Hague as a case study in an attempt to apply the research findings and conclusions in the built environment.

With the first Five Year Plan of 1928 Stalin initiated a period of massive industrialisation of remote zones of Russia. This lead to the creation of several Monotowns, newly built industrial settlements based on one economical source or industry. The project takes as a study case the town of Togliatti, the largest built in Soviet Union and still functioning. Constructed in the 60s as an industrial complex for FIAT car manufacturing. The plan of the city, designed by the Soviet architect Boris Rubanenko, was inspired by Ivan Leonidov’s project for Magnitogorsk, and was based on a grid of squares of one kilometer per side, each of which contained the fundamental facilities for living such as housing, commercial spaces, hospitals, schools and green areas. The fixed urban layout, together with the very regular organisation of infrastructure was planned in order to facilitate and accelerate citizen’s movements from one place to the other, minimising what was considered an unproductive time expenditure. The city, with its very readable and concrete set of established routines, represents the fieldwork to study the creation of everyday life rituals and to understand their materialisation in architectural space. In particular, these established rituals have been unfolded in the research in order to uncover the eventual problematics that are representative of the critical condition of the city. The current economic stagnation in Russia and the slowing down of the production, has lead the mono towns to a state of inactivity, generating lack of jobs and a general feeling of discontent in the population, proving the need of finding alternative productive sources. Concurrently relating to the contemporary debate on the productive means of the capitalist system, the project deals with the current transformation of the concept of production, that is gradually shifting from production of goods to production of knowledge. In this scenario, the line separating life and work is blurred, and the city unfolds in an endlessly interlinked maze of spaces that don’t host any specific function and yet are able to host any. The project investigates how architecture becomes an instrument of control, bending to the needs of the market and imposing hierarchical systems over everyday life. At the same time, the project experiments with alternative solutions that question the common way we perceive architecture, working places and educational institutions, highlighting the need of a transformation in the design processes and goals, considering architecture not as a problem solving practice or a profit maker tool but rather as a tool to investigate new ways of working and living. More in detail, the project wants to question the possibility of liberating production from pre-imposed economical constraints, therefore challenging the necessity of accumulation and classification and most of all private property, considering knowledge as a common good instead. The criticality of this reflection acts specifically in relation to the economic system and the contemporary lack of attention that is currently experienced in the everyday life, simultaneously putting forward the necessity to improve social interaction and awareness, the processes of thinking and reflection, aiming to the creation of a consciousness that starting from the individual would eventually spread and influence the entire social body. The intervention unfolds design concepts against classification, categorisation, compartmentalisation but also against material and immaterial accumulation. The scale of the project seeks to represent this vision and therefore surpasses the limits of what can or cannot be built to put forward an idea, an alternative that doesn’t want to be a solution but a starting point for a further reflection. In the same way, every aspect of the design is conceived to be able to be appropriated, re-interpreted and re-proposed in a different scale and condition therefore allowing the project to be not only a site specific intervention but a trigger for new ideas, questioning the way we design contemporary architecture.

The mechanisms of satisfying desires have made modern urban complexes extremely fixed and programmed leaving no room for the ‘other’ to happen,the divergent from normative and expected behaviors to emerge. The green spaces, although a great chance to dilute this rigidness, follow the same expected patterns failing to satisfy the various emergent subjectivities that seek to constantly become ‘someone else’. This project was triggered by the need for a different kind of green places, part of an “otherness” of a city. Places that could offer something out-of-the-way, as much designed as random, that could act as counter-stories to the ordinary rhythms and norms of the urbanity. Three new gardens are popping up in the midst of Rotterdam city center, at points, like in acupunctural treatment of the body. All designed in areas with unique characters, they seek to create new affective relationships between the citizens and their quotidian environment through the ‘reading’ of the ordinary as well as the infusion of the paradoxical landscapes of fictional settings. They are chances where you can get lost, or stumble, or even get wet; where you can climb stairs that may fall or scaffoldings that make weird noises; where you can jump above water and walk on narrow surfaces trying to keep your balance. The gardens of deviation are there to oppose the homogeneity and striation of urbanity. They constitute ‘leakages’ in the expectedness of current experiences in the urban realm: they are places that trigger peoples’ mind and stir emotions. Emerging in empty of meaning spaces of the urban tissue, they coexist with the ordinary and through their thresholds they filter it, making the virtualities of the existing places actual.

As labor increasingly takes place solely in the confines of a laptop screen, the office as a building type seems almost redundant. At the same time the profitability of data collected of consumption puts conventional understandings of value production under question. How does information become valuable, and how should we think of value to begin with? The project employs an understanding of value as a qualitative, subjective excess effect of life that can only be quantified as profit through the production of metrics that make it compatible with the field of economy. Helsinki Central Station provides a case study of an intensely public site where original functions have been gradually replaced by opportunities for consumption that economize its life-value. The goal of the project is to counter these processes of capture and re-intensify the experience of moving through the terminal building. Focusing on the habit of voyeurism, the project speculates new constraints to put travellers into unexpectedly close relations to intensify the station’s singular quality as a composite of strangers in a certain rhythmic movement.

The project, while focusing solely on the example of the Nadodrze district in Wroclaw, is trying to call attention to a much bigger problem present in a plethora of other cities. The deprivation caused by long years of imposition of a new order, a new architectural identity and a plan to unify the individual in a collective are still distinctly visible in many urban structures. Leftovers of past changes touch upon both spatial and societal aspects. The main question investigated in this project was exploring to what extent a spatial experience is capable of altering social behaviour, social patterns and the perception of self in a collective. By focusing on relations between people and aiming to trigger and enhance the formation of the local community and its new urban rituals of dailiness, the project is trying to address aforementioned problems. The design process does not aim to provide a ready solution, it is rather focused on exploring and investigating the current situation in hopes of forging a tool. Furthermore, it aspired to introduce a background for the various behavioural patterns and opportunities that might surface in the community of the Nadodrze district by attempting to provide a multiplicity of experiences.

The essay and the design project are an attempt to re-explore the fundamental purpose of architecture as mediating interactions between the human self and the external world. From the intuitive perception of an environment to the establishment of an artificial system of proportion and order, the hypothesis considers the design of buildings as a desire for re-orientation within a scale-less universe, abstracting the vastness of a greater cosmos into tangible, habitable, space in the quest for orientation and meaning.

War renders the characteristic of a territory and over-shadows the affects and desires that have been always a part of it. The Bosnian genocide in the early 90’s not only impacted the political and urban structure but also was a severe blow to the social structure. Mostar and Mostarki were synonymous to tolerant cohesive society. Neretva was one such important element of this society but over the years the people distanced itself from the river. The underlying effects of the war overpower the affordances and affects that are existing throughout the city and especially along Neretva. With these gradually decaying territories co-existing with rampant reconstruction to bring back the just image, a heterogeneity has resulted in present day Mostar. The urban transformations have also resulted in an overused and exploited river with increased erosion, sewage discharge and energy generation. In order to respond to the complex situation as experienced in Mostar, the project adopts a framework based on the theory of affects. The lens enables to see this territory as a chaotic assemblage of affordances and potentials. Thereby, identifying & developing a relevant field of affordances in these chaotic slowly decaying natural and urban spaces. This leads to the development of a rhizomatic network of public spaces based on the strategy of urban acupuncture. The proposal works as an experiment which adopts a theoretical outlook to deal with the practicality of temporal, natural and social issues. The thesis aims to acts as a stimuli in order to reinstate the relationship Mostaki’s have with their city, the river and amongst themselves.

The Spoorzone in Delft is an area that was once occupied by the railway. The historic city grew organically, and later expanded around this transportation hub. Nowadays, the railway is situated in a tunnel underground. Leaving behind a substantial vacant plot in the middle of the city waiting to be reterritorialized. On one side is the historic city centre and on the other many neighbourhoods with their own identities. The Spoorzone finds itself in between territories; in between old and new, west and east, city and neighbourhoods. Given the fact that we live in a rapid changing society, the question arises how to develop a substantial plot in the city in a durable way. How to approach a design project on a site that once was a border in between territories ànd is able to keep up with rapid changes that characterize our time. This project proposes a shift in thinking to approach the design as a dynamic process rather than a final image. This research and corresponding design project is about thinking in territories. The goal of the project is to see architecture as dynamic. The main question therefore reads as follows: ‘How can an architect change its view on architecture from static to dynamic, and become able to trigger a perpetual re-assembling of space, by using territoriality as a working concept?’ The answer to this question will be explored by two ways of working. A theoretical and practical one. The practical part will be examined in the design project. The research paper is the theoretical part and consist of a literature review in the field of philosophy (focussing on Deleuze and Guattari) and design studies. Concepts as territory and in-between are examined in detail to gain a basic understanding and help the reader to approach architecture from a different angle. The main finding is that a building can be approached as subject producing. Encounters between the subject and the building are affective and determine what a body can do and what it can undergo. By thinking in territories, it is possible to discover affects and to open up multiple possible outcomes of encounters between subject and physical environment. By being able to see architecture as dynamic, a building can be seen as durable, because of being able to trigger a perpetual re-assembling of use of a space. The design project proposes a living room for the city that is able to keep up with the rapid changing desires of our time and, additionally bridges the gap two between the different sides of Delft, inviting people to overcome this border. The design is based on a simple structure with set of frames. Variation of this structure are make up the whole building. The frames will affect its users, giving it limits to move in between. However can be can also be affected upon, keeping it open to future activities. The project is organized along a structure that moves from explaining the tiniest ingredients of a territory to the reassembling in new circumstances. This is done by breaking down, including and excluding, and finally re-assembling the components of a territory. The transition from research to the design will be made by constantly following these steps and evaluating them.

Circular economy is gaining global momentum as a new economic system to achieve sustainable development. The built environment plays an important role during the transition to a circular economy. China and the Netherlands share a common basis on enhancing resource efficiency by circular economy, which provides opportunities for mutual learning. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how circular economy is introduced differently in China and the Netherlands, and how circular economy is implemented differently in the built environment.

The Rhythmic escape propose a retreat in Rotterdam based on environmental features in nature that is of significance in rituals held in nature by people living with nature.

A personal problem of dissociation has become the catalyst for a schizoanalysis on the levels of the corporeal, the clinical, and the collective, that uses a philosophical understanding of the unconscious to materialise a design for an urban psychiatric clinic for dissociative disorders.

In times when robustness and optimisation have become some of the guiding principles of design, it is clear that instant problem-solving solutions prove to be insufficient as long-term resilience strategies. In this context, ambiguity is seen as an alternative approach to answering the issues of adaptability and flexibility of delta conditions that accepts the open-ended nature of its complex processes, while challenging the issues of disciplinary interiority and human-centred design. The preliminary research is focused on spatial, sensual, as well as semantic ambiguity and consequently explores architecture’s capacity to challenge perspectives, habits, and intentions. The subsequent design project employs ambiguity as a design resource to address the water-related issues of industry, recreation, and biodiversity in the delta city of Rotterdam.

The relationship between sex work and the city centre of Amsterdam ‘the Wallen’ area, also known as the ‘Red Light District’, already dates back towards 1350 (Majoor 2020, 46). While sex work in most cities happens on the periphery, in Amsterdam it traditionally exist in the heart of the city center. Despite the historical connection between sex workers and the district, they now fear being displaced by the municipality to towards the outskirts of the city into the Erotic Center. Several years ago I became resident of the Wallen area and while living above the sex working spaces I have become familiar with the ways how sex work is part of everyday life. While observing the interactions between sex workers and clients below my window the complexity of the relationship between the profession and the urban structure of Amsterdam fascinated me. It also revealed why spatial interventions in the area should be treated with delicacy. Since I believe sex workers to be essential care givers, who contribute to the diversity and safety of this neighborhood, the intention for this research is to examine how they could remain part of it in the future and to counter the plans that will lead to the gentrification of this neighborhood. To the plans of the municipality the sex workers out of the area have reacted with the message: “don’t save us, save our windows”, a note that is revealing how the area is dealing with a material and social problem at once. This message is also very relatable to this research, since I will be approaching it through the window. The architectural element of the window has an high symbolic value and reveals a lot about societal norms and values. Therefore, to explain a wide range of developments that took place over the last two centuries, this research begins with examanining historical photographs that display the windows of sex workers and are carefully analyzed through hand drawings. These studies will be supported by theoretical resources which elaborate on prevailing societal norms and values that concerned sexuality. What this research will illustrate is how sex work is often concerned with moral questions, like the issue of (female) body determination. As a result, sex work became a familiar topic within histocial feminist debates, having either a liberative or oppressive effect on the profession. Since the goal for this research is to imagine the future of sex work spaces in the Wallen area, it will navigate through these debates in order to take a position in the contemporary feminist debate myself. Hoping to find a appropriate design approach which will challenge the strategy of the municipality.

The current Tuscan agri-food system is unsustainable. The so-called conventional farming practices are still the most commonly used on both global and local scale. These practices include activities such as intensive farming and the use of chemical phytosanitary products that cause the progressive deployment and contamination of local natural resources. Resources that are strongly needed in the future to sustain the agri-food systems against the threats of climate change. Existing policies for environmental engagement and financial support systems meant to increase the participation of farmers in more sustainable farming practices fail to attract enough participants to contribute substantially to the mitigation of agricultural impact on natural resources. The research investigates the reasons behind the inefficiency of such tools. Concentrating mainly on the policies that define the juridical nature of food quality certification. Furthermore, through a scenario-based method, the “Maximization”, the full potential for these non-mandatory policies could have on the preservation of local natural resources is evaluated. The results of the maximization method, together with the analysis, led on environmental threats for the Valdera agri-food system, and the examination of existing policies made it possible to develop a new framework for food quality certificates. A framework capable of combining the strengths and opportunities of existing food quality certifications and simultaneously increasing participation of local agri-businesses and accelerating the shift from conventional to sustainable farming practices and consequently the transition from unsustainable and vulnerable agri-food systems to sustainable and resilient ones.

'Intensely Infrastructural' seeks to question the self-reinforcing 'pan-humanist' logic behind a contemporary spatiotemporal condition I decide to name the Seamless Paradigm – an urban, capitalist economy founded on the ethos of smooth, transnational circulation of bodies, goods and ideals. Despite being a modus facilitated by and generative of a typically postmodern, neoliberal reorganisation of capital, this urbanistic dictum is not a late 20th century phenomenon, but an ever ongoing material-discursive project, following the steps of the likes of Cerdà and Saint-Simon. Naturally, a well-developed mobility network is capable of breaking centre-periphery dichotomies, redistributing capital, providing just-in-time, around the clock goods and services and rendering accessible a greater variety of spaces for a greater variety of people – theoretically enabling everyone to 'choose' their lifestyle. However, the deterritorialisation of internal boundaries always entails a reification of external ones; something of which, to mention one example, the migration politics of the European Union is a clear example – its policies struggling to adapt urban territories to the increased flux of asylum seekers and intra-european economic migrants; an influx which which, although perceived as a threat to the European Project, is facilitated by its very own hypermobile raison d'être Furthermore, transit space is not something to 'enter' and 'exit' - ”you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic” - and all mobile societies require intense synchronisation, monitoring and control - modulation - of bodies and spaces. The project argues that we ought to remain aware and weary of the effects of the positive feedback loop of interiorising forces and hypermobile ideals, on subjectivity in general, and the built environment in particular. As a response, 'Intensely Infrastructural' suggests a permanent intervention for (con)temporary needs for shelter as well as future civic desires of ever more mobile subjects, located in Strasbourg, one of three administrative centres of the European Union, historically defined by a binational identity, and currently in possession of France's most sophisticated multi-modal transportation infrastructure. Wedged between vast train and road systems, and set within the long stretch of artificial slope – glacis - that marks the previously fortified western boundary of the city, the intervention attempts to rearticulate this residual boundary condition, currently defined by technologies of mobility and defense, as a relatively autonomous ”processual ecology”, consisting of factors which affect and are affected by the Seamless without being immediately involved in its system – an 'immanent outside' . Unlike the systemic environment of the Seamless Paradigm, which quantitatively defines its singularity through interior-exterior relations, the immanent outside is defined qualitatively, through the very surplus, externalities and contingencies brought about by the Seamless. By locating, articulating, appropriating and intensifying the immanent outside, the project seeks to provide a facilitating environment for growing truly ”nomadic subjects” willing to not only consume space through vectorial movement, but to produce it by staying put; to change not simply their habitat, but their habits.

The problem adressed in this text is the fixation of capacities to interact by laws, which limits the realization of valuable transformative potential in the built environment. The purpose of this text is twofold: First to uncover the processes behind such fixation-through-laws for the built environment and; Second, to propose a different (Deleuzean) attitude towards power which argues for a release of this fixation and urges the limitations of such laws to be opened up. To this end, Chapter 1 elaborates how a prioritisation of interests contructs a dominant collective mode that excludes alternative tendencies. Chapter 2 elaborates on the fallacies incorporated in the process of abstraction to come to such a priority of interests for a collective. Chapter 3 suggests an alternative, Deleuzean, attitude towards power which promotes differences over their abstraction. Chapter 4 then applies this Deleuzean understanding of power to a housing block in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The advice is to start with opening up the most blatant fixation of use and form in the municpality’s place-specific ‘Bestemmingsplan’ law. Afterwards, chapter 5 concludes that by steering away from fixated hierarchies constructed through abstraction, we arrive at a post-humanist, flat ontology. Using it, we can apply a strategy of promoting new understandings constructed by experimentally opening up, or ‘speculative loopholing’, and thereby delimit transformative potential in our built environment.

Exhaustion is the surfeit of modern society’s excess. Growth is an essential aspect of modern economies and our everyday life. We embark on journeys searching for the infinite, only to find ourselves in the middle of nowhere to realize that the infinite that we have been searching for is not a destination. The project designs an environment with and for play that stimulates people to engage in a playful way of long-term tourism in order to cure the exhaustion brought on them by society and to address their own exhaustiveness.

Venezia, la Serenissima. The most serene Republic. One adjective is sufficient to identify the city of Venice; more complicated is to figure out its singularities: the city of canals, trades, cultural exchange, gate between the west and the east, the city of the myth, the romantic city, the city of the endless descriptions. “At once solid and liquid, at once air and stone”, claimed Erica Jong, almost as if she wanted to seize in a sentence the multiple facets of the Venetian character. The several representations and attributes that depict Venice not only precede its reality, but constitute a determinant part of its character: the island is simultaneously more than its narrations and more than its reality. Starting from this dicotomy, the following project focuses on the analysis of Venice’s reality, the one of its present situation, by keeping its narrations as a boundary condition. The consideration of Venice not being the most serene Republic anymore is a fact. The city is experiencing a transitional moment in its lifetime: events as tourists’ invasion, drop of the population, transformation of the building stock to accomodate tourists’ needs are determinant factors for the future of the city, internationally recognised as slowly dying. The transformations are influenced by the effect that phenomena as overtourism produced on the island. And it is precisely the relationship between overtourism and Venice the topic that is tackled in this project, by taking the city as a case study, a symbol in the broader discussion about city and overtourism. Therefore this project does not want to be considered as a method for the definition of a solution for all the cities that are experiencing the aforementioned situation, but the opposite: the foundation for the development of an architectural proposal for the Venetian context, with the aim of invigorate the international debate around the topic of overtourism and cities’ transformations. Therefore, 'Of Stones and Travelers' is a project that relates with the city of Venice, considered as the symbol of the difficult relationship between cities and tourists, stones and travelers: the situation in which the city is transforming into a productive machine in its own consuming. It is by acknowledging this present condition that I have decided to analyse the city of Venice, by trying to understand what can be done, as architect, in order to affect its condition, with the aim of positively affecting its future. The exploration perpetuated with the project aims to understand and test the way in which the permanence of visitors in Venice can be affected via architectural terms. The theoretical approach adopted to reach this goal is the one of developing an exploration of the logics that undermine the characters of the city of Venice, therefore their understanding and transposition into a modern design. It is important to clarify that such exploration is not an aesthetical re-interpretation of Venice but the opportunity to test how the assemblage of the city can evolve without being stuck in its picturesque idea. Therefore, the value that I have researched is the understanding of Venice as an assemblage, as a combination of different layers which relationship define the character of the city. Its dissection and application in modern time is the value I have tried to pursue in my design.

Saint Petersburg is a second-largest city in Russia, having a population over 6 million people. Located in the northern part of the country on the edge of the Baltic Sea it was founded by tsar Peter the Great in 1703 as a future capital for Russian Empire. Tsar was wishing the new capital to become the most beautiful city in Europe and the city was built with an intention to open up Russia towards western traditions and western European world. Today the first core of the city – its` historic part built through 18-19th centuries – is world known as Northern Venice and conquers the hearts of millions visitors. But through 300 years of its’ history the city turned from being one of the most progressive cities in Russia into the city with the prejudice to anything new. Today the city is trying to keep its’ “historical appearance”, to preserve how it looked like when it was envisioned by one of the greatest tsars in Russian History, but this intension is leading the historic city centre of Saint Petersburg to its` devastation. In this Research and Design project I was reflecting on how to approach the consvervativist thinking about applying contemporary architecture in historically important areas of the city. In my research I explored what are the origins of conservatism among the citizens of Saint Petersburg and the reasons behind historic centre of Saint Petersburg being captured in its` past. I aimed to understand how to re-interpret the gaps in the historic fabric of the city and how to use them to bridge the gaps in-between progressive intentions of the architects and conservative view of the citizens of Saint Petersburg. As a result of this research I was designing a small scale architecture university on the edge of the historic city centre, which main aim is to be as open to the public of Saint Petersburg as possible to invite people for inspiring observations, thoughtful discussions and unexpected discoveries about the approaches that are used in the realm of contemporary architecture today...