Exhibitions and collections of art museums mostly consists of visual art. When we talk about “contemporary art” museums, people immediately think about paintings, photographs and sculptures: visual arts. Monet’s, Van Gogh’s and Picasso’s paintings, photographs of William Klein, sculptures by Richard Serra or Woody Allen’s movie. All these artworks are experienced by observing them with your eyes. Visiting those visual artworks in museums, possibilities to reflect on the social and political situations of today, are offered. However, for a great number of people the world of experiencing visual artworks is not accessible. They do not know how paintings can provoke imagination. Non-visually handicapped people can visit any “visual” art museums, and experience artworks with all their senses. A visually handicapped person, has less museum possibilities to go to and experience contemporary art. Art museums should be more accessible for visually handicapped people but also for people with other disabilities such as hearing impairment or people living in a wheelchair. Synesthetic art is a form of art where more than one sense contributes to the experience of an art work. There are art genres using other senses than only the visual sense. Sound, smell, taste, we can include them. Take music as an example, music has just as many opportunities to provoke imagination as a visual artwork.
A second problem we are facing today is gentrification. The process of upgrading neglected urban neighborhoods, in which the current, less wealthy residents and initial small entrepreneurs and pubs, have to move out of the way for the middle class and their catering industries and companies. Through the experience of synesthetic art, the new museum aims to stimulate and include current residents, offers appropriate daily-life activities, which are accessible for everyone, and where visually handicapped people are no longer excluded. A node of multiple scales (urban and social) will be created in my design. 
To respond to the lack of synesthetic art museums and the problem gentrification, the definitions and experiences of aesthetics and synaesthetics will be explained and discussed. It is fundamental to have knowledge about the relation between architecture and the human sense. The main question of this research plan therefor will be:
What architectural means are essential to provoke and reinforce our imagination while experiencing synesthetic art?
In order to answer the Research Question of this study, literature about synaesthesia, synesthetic art and gentrification are necessary. The “Van Abbe Museum” in Eindhoven has established to create a “multi-sensory museum”. This museum project is used as a case study to understand what people with impairments need and miss in current contemporary art museums. During a visit to the museum called “MuZIEum” in Nijmegen, the visual sense has been taken away, an experience of being visually handicapped leads to the awareness about the kind of art that can be experienced without seeing. 
The aim of my graduation project is to re-wire Tarwewijk, Rotterdam-Zuid, through an art museum. A museum that is able to contribute to an improvement of social conditions in a neighbourhood. And where current residents from the direct surroundings are stimulated and included. 



Since the neoliberal implementation in the government plans of Rotterdam in 1987, the vision of the city changed quite radically. A decade before the change, the city rejected high-rise buildings. But since this new vision, called ‘Nieuw Rotterdam’, got approved, Rotterdam implemented a high-rise vision which made the city as it is today; defined by a modern character and full of high-rise buildings, at least for Dutch standards. Yet, this high-rise implementation is only a small attribution of the conducted vision that was established in the late previous century. Neoliberal implementation goes further than merely implementing American-like high-rise buildings. It concerns the economics; particularly the liberation of the market and the multinational business trend that defines the contemporary economical appearances of both city and country. Since the drastic changes in city vision, Rotterdam opened up its borders and adopted a desire for foreign business, to upgrade their economical game and compete against the economic prosperity of other cities. Rotterdam therefore changed quite radically since Nieuw Rotterdam was practically implemented. Its buildings grew, its habitants grew and it became a popular place for tourists. In the Netherlands, Rotterdam is known today for their rich modern architecture and its modern appearance. However, the aspect of business, is less thriving. While it started to aim at welcoming more foreign business about thirty years ago, Rotterdam today is still struggling to find and welcome foreign companies and multinational business into its city. One of the primary reasons for this, is that both the city centre and its economical heart of the RCD, lacks an economical identity. Rotterdam did have its identity of the industry and the port, yet the neoliberal growth and privatization of those instances led to the translocation outside the city centre. In addition to this, the economic sector of industry became less favourable, since the tertiary sector of a business service economy predominates a neoliberal oriented city. The project of the Vertical High Tech Campus explores the promising economical sector of high tech in combination with its research and business aspects in an urban environment as a step towards providing a new economic identity for the city of Rotterdam.

The idea of mobility nodes has been migrated and developed over time. A lot of research has been focused on those (inter)national nodes of a train station, this article is focused on the ‘Secondary Nodes’. Those regional nodes, of multiple transportation flows, are situated in densifying metropolitan cities. In Rotterdam, the Node Beurs is situated in the inner-city and contains a junction of traffic flows of the metro, tram, bus, ferry, car, pedestrian and bike. Prospects indicate that the rising densification, leads to almost double amount of people using the metro at Beurs. At the moment Beurs is already an overloaded and fragmented node that forms a barrier within the urban tissue. While the Node Beurs has the potential to be a clear entrance to the inner-city and guide the traffic flows that cope with the capacity increase. The Node also has the potential to be part of the patchwork of public spaces, adding to the public floor-line of Rotterdam. Generating a multiple leveled open space and place to stay, with leisure, shops and other facilities. The project is establishing new urban connections, as well as strengthen the existing once by interweaving the hard infrastructure with the soft program and public space by making it pedestrian-oriented. The main goal of this architectural project is creating a new entrance that functions as a gateway to the inner-city, connecting the surrounded neighbourhoods, unravel the flows and directly connect the different types of transport. As well as it is an area that gives breathing space to the densifying city. The multiple leveled square function as a social place where people meet and are invited to explore the daylight perforated underground world. The recognizable entrances adding to the human scale and add to the local and regional character. As well as the pillars influence the local climate, by giving shelter for the rain and heat, function as a sounding board translating the weather to the underground area. The flexibility of the transport hub is key for future developments, as the underground is already quite full, there is still some room to extend the entrance or bike facility or add an extra metro line possibly. Interweaving, perforating and breaking the underground open, increase the accessibility and mobility of the secondary node Beurs and the inner-city itself.

Have you ever wondered what the food you eat everyday can tell you about where you come from? Have you ever wondered why people from different parts of the world eat different types of food? There is more connection between food and culture than you may think. On an individual level, we grow up eating the food of our cultures. It becomes a part of who each of us are. On a larger scale, food is an important part of culture. Traditional cuisine is passed down from one generation to the next. It also operates as an expression of cultural identity. Immigrants bring the food of their countries with them where cooking traditional food is a way of preserving their culture when they move to new places.
With the influx of immigrants, cultural diversity in the city of Rotterdam has increased since the 1980s. More and more places where you could try foreign culture began to appear. This is Rotterdam, the city of diversity, the city of immigrants, who add both cultural richness and social encounter to this town. But as time goes by, exclusivity in the city Centre also progresses. Hot spots in Rotterdam are becoming more and more exclusive, which results in a slow displacement of cultural diversity.

The Bank of Maas is a project which explores the changes in the urban fabric of Rotterdam, occurring as a result of technological developments. The project reflects on these developments, and utilizes them in order to create a condition for urban production to take place. The Bank of Maas is a project which provides Rotterdam with the productive resources necessary to the functioning of a modern-day city. It does that by creating spaces for production and storage, supported by smart production tools and an innovative storage technology. The project explores the relationship between the industry 4.0. ( production based on automation and smart technologies) and dense urban environments. By bringing production back into the inner city, the Bank aims to consolidate industry 4.0 with local skilled labor and local raw materials. The project of the Bank of Maas is an experiment, imagining a future in which cities exist as productive, well connected bodies in itself, facilitated with a network of productive resource banks.

With global urbanization, cities all around the world are changing. Rotterdam is expected to grow significantly in the upcoming decades and therefore will experience densification. This densification takes shape in the form of Rotterdam’s high-rise strategy and will have a direct influence on the way residents live in the inner city center of Rotterdam. Therefore, the need for leisure amenities in dense area’s is of significant importance. With leisure-time being an important part of the day, investing in a wide range of amenities is crucial for a city center. In this project, the focus is on leisure sports, which is known as a space consuming function. This results in the following research question: How can space consuming leisure sports be implemented in a densified city center, in order to be a social condenser? The design assignment will be a leisure sports facility in the city center of Rotterdam. This building aims to engage the residents in sports and social activities and thus intensify their social interaction. By looking to other countries, this project can be a future migration of the Athletic Club; a combination of a social club and a sports club. This typology is the main reference for the final design; a tower filled with stacked sport facilities and social amenities.

New Urban Front investigates how waterfront densification can contribute to interiorizing the Maas river in Rotterdam. In the past decade, the post-industrialization of Rotterdam's docks has created a new urban front: the Maas. However, this waterfront lacks character and scale, while water and city lost their programmatic relation after industry migrated out of the city. A mixed-use high density transversal typology is proposed at the Linker Veerdam, the historic crossing of the Maas river, to heal this schism and place water back at the center of urban memory. A sectional base, large floating plinth, and towers connect water and city with a programmatic cut and add urban scale to the river. Urban program is loaded onto the river by introduction of a boat-in cinema, a Maaspodium opening towards the water, and multiple pools and piers. This creates a multi-layered and multi-scale relation between water and city. By doing so, New Urban Front contributes to interiorizing the Maas river and convert it into the central public space of Rotterdam.

Cities are expanding and populations growing, the phenomenon of global urbanization causes cities to change. Rotterdam is the most progressive vertical urban city in The Netherlands. Starting from the 1990’s Rotterdam’s high-rise strategy caused the city to densify its city center. The vertical expansion is set to grow even more, especially in the city center. Which is expected to grow exponentially as Rotterdam is building more 50.000 homes in the city center aiming for people and most importantly families. Our group vision enforces living in the city center by supporting the city living by redesigning the urban public space and our projects that take on the specific missing functions.
One of these important missing functions in the Rotterdam city centre is education. But the conventional Dutch school typology is no longer applicable to the dense urban city. This results in the typology of the urban school which has not yet been explored in the Dutch setting. The Rotterdam Urban School explores new urban educational typologies in a building combining diverse student bodies. The Internal design of the project will enforce 21st century concepts of learning in its design.

Make Food Great Again is a prototype for the future of Urban Agriculture. Thereby its a spatial strategy to address the urgencies connected to the biochemical pollution of agricultural enterprises on the example of the Netherlands. It aims to find a solution for the burden of ultra effective state of the art agriculture on the environment, while sustaining the foodsupply in a circular economical manner.
It’s the architectural answer to the question of how can our food become local and approachable again, while being an actually integrated part of infrastructure in contemporary urban society?

This graduation project will be focussing on revitalising the CBD North- East Midtown by using the current building stock respectively the Lever House along Park Avenue designed by SOM Architects. This building is also caught by the large migration to Hudson Yards as more than 50 percent of the building is vacant. A planned raise of lease due to large losses make this build- ing unattractive to potential tenants. Neverthe- less, the Lever House is awarded as a landmark because of its large influences on the ‘interna- tional style’. Therefore demolishment of the Lever House is undesirable making it the perfect case to make an example on how to revitalise North- East Midtown by using the current building stock, hopefully creating a precedent for future local de- velopments.
By adding a new volume to the current building a collaboration can be created between program, energy and labour force variety. By using environ- mentally aware and local materials the depletion of earth’s resources, energy and waste can be reduced.

The focus in Northeast Midtown on a highly lucrative and luxurious housing market resulted in a severe shortage of affordable apartments. This project shows that it is possible to develop affordable housing in Manhattan. Increased apartment density, combined with new amenities, provides the neighborhood with spaces to live, work, teach, and relax. Creating a modern, more balanced social situation.

The worldwide crisis in environmental resources, such as deteriorating water resource is intensifying. In Manhattan island, a metropolitan area, the risk is also extremely remarkable. According to the United Nations sustainable development goals, at the current time, more than 2 billion people across the world are living under the crisis of insufficient freshwater resources, due to poor economics or inadequate infrastructures. Likewise, In recent years, the increasing water pollution, mainly due to climate change, aging infrastructures and the regional expansion, have had a significant negative impact on Manhattanites’ habitat and health, which are embodied in the growth pollution level of natural waterways, such as East River and Hudson River. Based on the context, the main objective of this thesis is to research the system of local water systems and the resource crises. Several main questions raised during the study process: What are the causes of the regional resource crisis? What’s the ideological expression of the water infrastructures to Manhattanites? How to ease the climate- induced crisis, or even to end up the emergency by architectural interventions? Within these questions in mind, the main research question is formed: How can the architecture, concerning climatic crisis, cultural loss, evoke a more livable and healthier community for NE Midtown’s future development?

In today’s cities, global urbanisation has created a fragmented, unresponsive and socially divisive landscape. Intensifying agglomerations to urban centres across the globe due to the displacement and mass migrations of large populations has increased the pressure of organising a dense urban habitat. In its dominion over nature modern life was so caught up in establishing the narratives of individual life that it was naive to the complexity of everyday activity. The celebration of the Individual and the rationalisation of nature and society attempted to find order amongst the chaos of a city. The intensity of diversification in cities due to agglomerations to global centres highlights the changing face society and culture in dense formations and its immediacy. But when the practices of a past epoch continue to pervade themselves into the contemporary narrative, when the ethical practice of past time refuses discontinue for the continuity of a new ethical practice and the development of collective memory then we find ourselves in a cycle of self-contradiction. The condition it creates formulates something hybrid, repetitive, standardised and universally proliferated. There is an inherent issue with creating a dense urban ecology, especially in verticality, that is both equitable to its inhabitants and sustainable to its environment. Between establishing forms of density and the articulation of diversity in our cities there exists an inability to inform the everyday perspective, the continued withering away of political character in our public space and a lack of avenues to establish resilient forms of citizenship. Creating a future perspective for our city becomes increasingly unclear and clouded amongst the ubiquity and generic nature of universal design and the destruction of our urban heritage. When the ability for the urban to produce space for the possibility of specificity is reduced, whether through urban segregation, stratification or fragmentation, then the reference plane for the city wither’s away. A loss of identity in density that cam as result of the modernisation for cities and city life.


The Future Primitive is a reframe for looking at the city, one that can enliven the stories of the common and everyday. It means to see the city as a continue process of collective memory and reflection. The research project was to use this concept of as a way to establishing the city as a common future. Through a series of theoretical discussions which aimed to enlighten an inherent paradox in the way we deal with the relationship between space and time in our cities through aesthetics and territory the research pretend how this is proliferated in the articulation of diversity and density in our cities ultimately constraining the possibilities for our common future and furthering the divide of Earth and World. This produced a set of theoretical notions and principals that established the basis for a design brief for prototyping the development of civic common space through the vertical densification of an existing urban landscape.

Through researching information flows and their territorial footprint around the North Sea, we observed that the global production of data and its subsequent surveillance is growing. The data emerging out of the health sector (Health data) is today leveraged to speculate on its potential futures and processes. Namely, its physical, technical and social requirements can be forecasted in order to mitigate its territorialisation as redundancies and opportunities can be observed. However, future trends in healthcare are always fluctuating, calling for flexibility within projected future scenarios to cater to changes in population health and technology development.

In a parallel line of inquiry, in the context of the North Sea, a probe is set on the relationship between healthcare and the sea. With the coast becoming a therapeutic landscape, the project’s objectives outline the equalisation of digital and natural infrastructure as means of treatment. In marrying the latter to future medical trends such as automation, the proposal results in an acute, modular and semi-automated treatment facility (medical village) nestled within a coastal territory for healing. With the evolved understanding of healthcare, the research re-asserts that the notion of cure and care has expanded into the idea of well-being and continuous care. Therefore, like a feedback loop, the reconfiguration of the architectural typologies needed in healthcare inherently redesign our approach to it.

In the current geopolitical climate, where Arctic nations are at the brink of conflict in their pursuit for influence and resources, mining has acquired a political character, establishing a delicate equilibrium between resource claims and the protection of the territory. This equilibrium is manifested in the Svalbard Free Zone, where all nations are free to make use of its resources, yet the presence of Norwegian population, and mining as raison d’etre of inhabitation, has acted as the entity of governance and ambassador for the best interests of the region. Nonetheless, with the ongoing end of coal mining in Svalbard, and the demise of Norwegian presence in the archipelago, the ‘free zone’ will face a state of uncertainty, vulnerable to the interests and disputes amongst the Arctic nations. As the ‘free zone’s’ uncertainty threatens the stability of the entire region, mining waste becomes a glimpse of hope towards a new form of political representation. While the Arctic communities face the havocs of such waste, its potential reuse makes it a novel resource and a chance for cooperation to counterbalance both its environmental effects and the political crisis that is about to unfold. Hence, the Embassy of Waste is a political manifesto that introduces the recollection and recycling of mining waste in the decaying mining community of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in an attempt to become a novel tool towards the governance and self-sufficiency in the region.

The project emerges from the acknowledgement of the growing phenomena of archive fever (Derrida, 1995). Driven by the need, obligation, desire or simply possibility to store a growing amount of both - physical objects and digital data, and encouraged with a constantly increasing capacity of digital media storage - we keep on gathering more. Often unconsciously or with little curation of the collected content, we keep on creating a limitless cloud archive, that has an overwhelming physical presence that takes over hectare after hectare of land. Huge, anonymous, dark and hot space, placed in a remote location – that is a typical data centre. Blending into the neighbouring storage halls is easily omitted and stays hidden from the public sight. Data storage came a long way from the representative architecture of banks, archives and city halls to a unit defined storage facility. Therefore, one may say that data centre is a continuation of the typology of storing and archiving. And a storage type that emerges is an opaque container defined by the size of a stored unit - server. These content defined buildings, technical as they are, allow for almost no human presence, but do potentially manage through their sheer size to organize and control the context they inhabit, the territory. One cannot underestimate their urban impact. Current trends in technology, among others, the Internet of Things and a growing amount of latency dependent applications will generate a need to introduce data into the cities. That gives a unique opportunity to redefine existing data centre typology. Even though data is already fully integrated and present in our lives, we rarely acknowledge it. What is more, due to a lack of understanding of data flows we are often excluded from the discussion on the degree of its presence in our lives or surveillance. The proposed project, is a gesture that brings data, technology, citizens and urban context together, emphasizing interconnections and interdependence of all aforementioned. This way introducing one of the most significant elements of our infrastructure physically into the culture, giving digital data a physical weight and interface. Creating friction between public and private, human and machine – that are completely dependent on each other and cannot function without the other.

Within the main geographical contexts of the North Sea and the Scheldt estuary, the Doelpolder area stands out for the conflictual relationships between human settlements, environmental crisis, and man-made infrastructures, which are all paradigms of the so-called Anthropocene era. The site comprises the village of Doel, the natural reserve of Saeftinghe, the nuclear power plant of Doel and the largest dock of the Port of Antwerp in a 2 km long prone-to-flooding area, which is currently facing some anthropic phenomena such as pollution, infrastructural expansion of the harbor and dismantlement of the nuclear power plant. In its process of northbound expansion at the expense of the estuarine territory and the polder-land, the Port of Antwerp has turned Doel into a ghost town by means of expropriation and economic pressure, while the flora and fauna of Saeftinghe are endangered by the alteration of their brackish habitat caused by pollution and water level rise due to both infrastructural growth and climate change. This everlasting dichotomy between natural and anthropized processes poses here the dualistic problem of extinction/preservation and if/how can architecture depict a self-healing survival scenario for this specific site in the Post-Anthropocene, attempting at climate change mitigation and nature metabolism at the same time. The project first addresses the aforementioned issues within a regional strategic and energetic plan which foresees the “de-polderization” of the area, its transformation into a controlled tidal zone for soil and water recovery and the simultaneous expansion of the natural reserve. Moreover, the thesis wants to takes a position regarding the future re-use of (parts of) the nuclear power station starting from 2025 (the date Belgium is supposed to start the phase out of nuclear energy). On the architectural scale, the building here implemented is a “knowledge ark” with laboratories and academic-related spaces, a facility which can exploit not only the world-level Port infrastructure for an optimized logistic (coldchain) but also the proximity of the natural reserve and the former agricultural vocation of the area. This repository building consists of a seed vault and a frozen zoo for the conservation of species through cryopreservation technique, but most importantly is an architectural object designed to resist or accommodate time and territorial transformations, for guaranteeing a possible rebirth of both nature and culture. To do so, the architecture imagined for the Doel site is physically linked to the water-level-rise process. When/if the level of the Scheldt rises above 2 meters (worst case scenario), the whole area will be flooded and any human survival unlikely. In these circumstances, the water will trigger the self-destruction of the facility, spreading the seeds contained in the vault all over the area and thus favouring the rebirth of nature in unpredictable climatic conditions. In the end, the Seed Vault/Frozen Zoo constitutes, like Doel, the nemesis of the Port but, also like Doel, will eventually evolve into a ruin in case of loss in the fight against, pollution and climate change.

The project I propose is not the child of its time, it rejects the lexicon of current affairs (climate change, pollution, exploitation of resources) as well as that of social issues. It does not want to solve the problem of the site in which it operates, but it embraces a horizon of analysis and observation of man in his existential dimension, completely isolated from the dynamics determined by the homo faber. The project focuses on the relationship between the homo figurans 1 and the territory in which he lives, an archaic, but never anachronistic, relationship. The project I propose focuses on architectural language, on how to act in the place rather than what to do in the place. For this reason, I believe that it has a markedly political valence. As the political valence of a work of any type - literary or architectural - is not determined only by the issues it deals with, but above all by the choice it operates. There is not a more purely political operation than an operation on language.

Homo Figurans, term used by Eugenio Turri in The landscape as a theater 2001.
Homo Figurans: Man as a figure among the figures of the world.

Port-city interfaces have grown apart over the last few decades, resulting in a disbalance between ports and cities. This thesis focuses on finding an approach to reuse and remediate unused industrial sites in sensitive port locations while making them ready for a post-carbon era. The project uses phytotechnologies for remediation of polluted soil on an old refinery site and the construction of a series of laboratories that are made from reused materials and productive phytoremediation landscape around the old refinery installations and are hosted by the old refinery installations,.