There is an urgent need to address the shortage of student housing in Delft. However, the current design approach for student housing often fails to prioritize the creation of high-quality private spaces as well as social connections between individual housing units. While addressing the pressing need for more student housing, it is essential to reimagine the design of newly built accommodations to cater to both the private and social needs of students without compromising affordability.
The focus of the thematic research paper is to enhance the visual quality of students' private spaces through the use of computational evaluation. Recognizing the significance of factors like daylighting, outdoor views, and privacy in residential architecture, the study emphasizes the need to explicitly consider these factors during the early stages of the design process. By developing a parametric evaluation model, this research aims to evaluate visual quality in student dwellings and inform design decisions. The model is constructed based on conclusions drawn from literature review, interviews, and experimentation to identify visual quality parameters and provide clear visual data through heatmaps and number tags. This data helps highlight areas for improvement and allows for comparisons between different design alternatives.
The resulting project, Campus Village Delft, addresses the increased quality of private spaces by maximizing the hours of direct sunlight, view distance, and visual exposure representing the level of privacy. At the same time, the project aspires to create a community between the students, through carefully designed collective spaces, where unintentional encounters with your neighbors create a greater sense of belongingness.

This thesis investigates the squatting community Freetown of Christiania as a case of self-built housing that is both affordable and circular. Affordability of housing has been an existing problem in Europe, followed by a relatively recently identified need for transition from a linear to a circular economy. Squatting communities have emerged in Europe as a response to the lack of availability of affordable housing, while the conditions of their existence have also provided a stimulating environment for the circular reuse of materials.

To gain further insights into building processes and the origins of the used materials, I have visited Christiania, where I made observations and conducted interviews with its inhabitants. Additionally, the conducted archival and literature research provides the historical context of Freetown, demonstrating its development over time. The thesis begins with the analysis of changes in building policies and processes that have occurred in the last 50 years of Christiania’s existence, followed by an investigation of material availability in Copenhagen and general building considerations based on the experience of Christiania.

Although in recent years the use of secondhand materials in Christiania has reduced, its development has shown how self-built housing can be more affordable and at the same time also circular. It also presents the current challenges of reusing materials in buildings as well as the existing possibilities for solving them.