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 Bajau Laut or Sama Dilaut people are an ethnic group of sea nomads who used to roam between the Filipino, Malaysian, and Indonesian maritime zones. The Bajau are known to be amazing freedivers, being able to dive in depths of up to 30 meters and having the ability to hold their breath for more than 5 minutes, making them a group of people that biologically adapted into an amphibious lifestyle.

In 1877, most present-day Sabah, Malaysia, was surrendered to the newly constituted British North Borneo Chartered Company. The reforms constituted by the Company gradually forced them to self-build the first pile house setlements in 1955 and abandon nomadism for a sedentary lifestyle along the shore in 1979. Due to their nomadic lifestyle in the past, none of the three SE Asian countries have recognized the community as indigenous people, making them stateless and hence depriving them of the right to civil registry, subsidized healthcare and education with the exception of Alternative Learning centers that are run by NGOs and volunteering teachers. However, what is the position of Alternative Learning Centers regarding indigenous educa􀆟on and the importance of school as an establishment?

Alternative learning centers offer basic literacy classes such as Malay language and Mathematics. Still, volunteering, uncertified teachers have the freedom to improvise by introducing classes related to their major or the children’s wishes. However, only a small part of the curriculum has anything to do with the community’s traditional ecological knowledge or identity.

How do we define literacy nowadays? What deems a person illiterate? This project aims to redefine schooling by introducing a culturally responsive curriculum in a community waterscape that acts as a mediator between the community's built environment and the surrounding marine landscape, prioritizing knowledge stemming from both environments.

This thesis project studies the possibilities of designing a new space for migrants to construct their diasporic identity in a post-colonial language. The thesis is situated in the context of the mass migration from Hong Kong from 2019, specifically looking at Reading in the UK as a key arrival location. The thesis explores the design hypothesis of the alimentary-spatio-identity triangle and proposes an "open kitchen" based on intervening into an abandoned English pub in Reading to afford a new space for strange encounters for the HK migrants to construct their new belonging.

The master thesis "Risveglio Marittimo - Awakening Maritime Identity in Messina" answers the question of how the concept of maritime identity facilitates the understanding of existing assets and offers opportunities for the design of Messina as a port city. Through the collection of micro-narratives and their organization into categories, Messina's maritime identity was (re)discovered in following topics: heritage and culture, water and environment, threshold and transition, transformation and production, quoditiantity and symbols.

The quadrilatero site, between the Ex-Granai and the maritime station, was chosen to design a new maritime space, with the aim of fertilizing the perception and value of Messina's maritime identity. The renovation of the abandoned silos and the fish market allows to offer spaces for culinary products of the sea and the hinterland and their consumption on the edge between land and sea, creating a vibrant public space for exchange and transition at the most important traffic node bridging land and sea transportation.

In July 2021, heavy floods hit the Dutch province Limburg after days of rainfall in south-west Germany, the Ardennes and southern Limburg. Rivers like the Geul, the Roer and the Maas couldn’t discharge the large amounts of water. Many parts of these regions flooded, and approximately 50.000 people have been evacuated from their homes (Task Force Fact Finding hoogwater 2021, 2021, pp. 8 - 10).
How safe residents feel in the river landscape is affected by the floods. The sense of safety people get from the landscape depends on how they perceive that landscape and how they perceive their safety in it. How landscape and safety are perceived relates to the relationship residents have with their landscape. Due to centralized supervision, local communities are increasingly cut-off from their water system, and they are changing from active workers to passive users. Ultimately, their knowledge of the water systems is forgotten. Another aspect of perceiving a sense of safety is related to the Dutch water management strategies. Optimizing and directing water has dominated the Dutch attitude. Engineering strategies including dikes, storm surge barriers and regulated polders are dominant in the Dutch landscape (Metz & Van den Heuvel, 2012, p. 281). With these strategies, the Dutch have outsourced their water safety to engineers and water boards. As water safety is primarily the concern of professionals, people themselves are decreasingly aware of their dependence on these defence systems, and simply perceive dikes and other defence systems as objects in the landscape (Metz & Van den Heuvel, 2012, p. 79).
As a result of this strategy, the relationship between humans and river has become a rigid one. Humans dominate water by force, pushing it away hard as possible. However, because of the changing climate water is now pushing back, which resulted in the floods of 2021. Changing how we relate to rivers, and water in general, can help to establish a new spatial relationship that is not based on dominance but rather on equality.
In light of the recent floods in Limburg, this graduation project deals with the question of perceiving a sense of safety in river landscapes. The research project deals with the leading question “What is the role of architecture in perceiving a sense of safety in Dutch river landscapes?”. Central in this project is a cycling trip from Delft to Maastricht, including research methods like interviewing, immersive analysis, sketching and annotating.
The design project deals with a public building that provides a safe evacuation centre in times of high water, while in the everyday functioning it expresses its position in the water landscape and in turn provides a lens on the water conditions in this landscape. Chapter 8 elaborates on the resulting design project, in which a permanent platform provides the base for a temporary evacuation centre. Together with other design objects (a hiking trail, a bridge, water basins) the project addresses river dynamics and flood dangers in Valkenburg aan de Geul, in Limburg.

The deaf and hard-of-hearing live in world that, from an architectural standpoint, is designed for hearing people. Which causes a set of challenges for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.These problems have major effects at schools for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. These schools are mainly located in buildings that happened to be empty or that already had an educational function anyway. These buildings have never been specifically designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, which causes a problem. If a school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students was never designed for them, how can these buildings reflect and be good for them?

This project deals with spaces for a historically neglected collective: sex workers. It aims to destigmatize the practice by representing the workers and the material conditions that determine their safety and well-being every day, of which architecture is part.
Articulated from an intersectional feminist point of view, the research evaluates how the design of these spaces has been and continues to be a technology to control the workers. At the same time, it visualizes the workers and how they construct processes of emancipation within their (legally and spatially) subjugated position.
The design offers a working space that houses these emancipatory practices, in the context of the recent decriminalisation of sex work in Belgium. In order to do so, it draws from feminist and queer theories to construct an understanding of space that materializes the emancipation from the scale of the neighbourhood and urban block, until the detailing and use of material.

In our effort to control it, water in our cities has progressively been confined between lines, canalised or culverted underground, resulting in its gradual isolation and erasure from our sight and collective imagination. As freshwater availability and water-related hazards are brought to the forefront of sustainable development goals, the long-neglected role of urban rivers and their watershed needs to be addressed. Tiber Waterscapes is an attempt to re-imagine the complex relationship between Rome and its primary river, the River Tiber, at the point along its course where it historically intersected River Almone, within the Gasholder park "Ostiense". This polluted post-industrial area is transformed into a wastewater treatment park and thermal bath complex, with ecological, cultural and social value.

The greatest of all arts, music, can evoke deep emotions and memories. It has the power to transfer the listener to a different world. The first few notes of Brahms allegro amabile (op.120) instantly brings one in a state of presence, whereas Mahler’s fifth symphony’s adagietto or Wagner’s Lohengrin prelude slowly invites the audience in a trance of reverie. It’s something that touches and engulfs the soul each time it enters the inner ear. Pieces that are an assemblage of rhythms, tensions and proportions form a certain expression. To listen to and be embossed by such expressions of life is something that we do every day. We listen to music, read books, watch movies, go to museums and immerse ourselves with culture from all over the world. All of these things combined make us who and what we are. They serve as incubators for new ideas. When you work in the creative field, everything you do is connected to who you are, therefore making you a part of the past. A thread of cultural life populated by objects, things or human activities that explain us where we came from and how we can move forward. Culture is thinking about the world, looking closely, asking questions, listening and comprehending.

From a personal fascination that grounded itself during a working period in Switzerland in 20’-21’ the idea arose to observe the villages in the valley of the Lower Engadine in Switzerland. A specific fascination and deep love for these organic but simultaneously traditional places manifested itself focussing on the perspectives of craft, material and an overall attitude towards life. This research intends to identify which values are embedded in these rural Alpine settlements, understand how they were formed and fathom how the local architectural typology works in order to find out why the presence embedded in these places is so strong.

My personal experiences with these places made me realise that architecture has the power to arouse deep emotions and feelings. It might not be on the same level as music can be, but by investigating and describing the qualities of these place I believe that it can give us an insight into the hidden poetical side of these places. This physical journey accompanied by personal anecdotes, drawings and models allows one to travel into a physical place hidden away deep within the Swiss Alps to introduce new feelings and emotions to our personal world. This work is a translation of a fascination throughout new experiences, personal conversations, insights and knowledge that formed the basis for my graduation design.

Starting from the Lefebvrian notion of urban society as a society that can realise itself only when urban occupants collectively use their ‘right’ to shape it, this research explores the impact of alternative socio-spatial processes on the contemporary cityscapes. At the same time inspecting the everyday human condition in relation to the evolving built environment. Where economic competitiveness acted and acts as the prior imperative of policy-making, the struggle to empower its consequent heterogeneities corresponds to a variety of inhabitants dispossessed in their own (everyday) space. This calls for the need to promote the production of new forms of (inclusive) ‘agency’.
While the current economic drive is affecting the notion of sociality and the ecological dynamics of our cities, the city of Rotterdam prefigures as testbed for a transgressive rebirth.
Its patterns of discontinuities stage the return of the Lefebvrian experimental utopia, which could become more concrete by accepting a heterogeneous urban approach that recognises their diverse value.It’s the search for a Heterutopia.

'A Wakening' entails a coming home to our innate essence of what it means to be human and living as part of this interconnected web of life. Through being present with the now, we can envision and work towards desired, collective, and whole futures for all on this earth. 'A Wakening' should be patient. For me, the first step in waking up is to dream. Dream more and deeper and lose myself, first trusting soil and gut and instincts. It is only coming out of the pure egoless dream of making and noticing that 'A Wakening' might be useful to me and, by extension, to the turbulent times we live in. Those whose work I admire are rooted and quiet and know how to go deep and slow and feel things before acting on them. Meanwhile, the earth itself may be waking up and considering spitting us all out.

This graduation project aims towards a new understanding of intimate and domestic space through an experimental hands-on research method and a thorough analysis of the black box theatre stage to reveal layers, scales, dimensions, transitions and connections that define dynamic atmospheric space with the use of light, movement, perspective and reflections.
Part of the research outcome is then translated into the Tiny HomeStage. A small scale theatrical house that creates Wonderment on the threshold of domesticity, and in which almost everything is adjustable to the moment’s need. The project is designed mainly with the method of thinking through making, which resulted in a 1:5 model of the entire design.

This project focuses on the architect’s attitude performing in non-urban landscapes. As a case study the landscape of the Reitdiep river in Groningen (NL) has been intensely researched. Here, a strong interaction between myself and the physical landscape has been informing the design process. Through defining characteristics of the landscapes by iterative visits with observations, interviews and archival research sensory information and more factual based information of the landscape formed the understanding of this landscape. Altogether, the definition of a set of characteristics creates a thorough and balanced understanding of a place stored in memory. This memory can be expressed in personal, communal and historical lenses. The characteristics are always present in physical and mental constructs. The design project intends to allow these to enter, to live and to harass the structure. In the contemporary Ommelanderhuis sensory presence can be found between abstract and detailed scale levels. For exam¬ple, in entering the building one will be confronted by the subtle relief of the landscape, confronted by seasonal change of drought and intense showers. This example of sensory presence is something in which rituals are leading factors. The Ommelanderhuis is a political place where citizens, politicians, policy makers, environmental experts, farmers and creatives come together to speculate about the future landscape.

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.

This project is about transforming existing buildings that are facing demolition. In opposition to the constant renewing of our physical world for better performing building, this graduation proposes a gradual mutation of a locality.

This project is about transforming existing buildings that are facing demolition. In opposition to the constant renewing of our physical world for better performing building, this graduation proposes a gradual mutation of a locality.

The reason for this choice of topic is a life-long bewilderment towards the self-destructive potential of humankind. Supposed continuous accumulation of value is nurturing some of the most destructive and unvaluable events that this globe has ever seen. In many cases, the driver for what we do - our idea of what is valuable - seems to be leading us to do things which are anything but valuable in the long term.
A rationalizing approach has led to the establishment of one-dimensional evaluations: Quantity is attempting to express quality. The resulting introduction of a level of abstraction is distorting the evaluation of what makes a decision valuable. This attempt of capturing value is very much not capable of expressing it to a satisfying degree – necessary information is lost in the process of reduction. One establishes a distanced perspective on how a decision becomes valuable in its qualitative and specific sense.

Especially the profession of the architect - as taking decisions from a very distanced perspective towards the real-life engagement with the architectural product and its construction - is at risk to rely on general typologies and predeveloped solutions as proposals for their designs. In this graduation, it is therefore the goal to challenge this plane of abstraction while decision taking by introducing a conscious engagement with the real-life interactions and material processes of the architectural object which allows to focus on the affective specificities of place and time.

The project explores forms of architectural practice which situate the architect as a mediator. In opposition to the Architect singular author, so present in architectural historicism, the magazines, cultural institutions, competitions, prizes and mainstream media; the project recognises the process of building as a product of innumerable human actions by policy makers, land owners, inhabitants, developers, regulators, data analysts and contractors just to name a few.

As such, temporary architecture is used to design networks of collaborations and evidence social capital, whilst the architect assumes the approach of listening rather than prescribing and contributing to the project in multiple capacities.

Taking a single architectural artefact, the Jacoba van Beierenlaan student housing complex (my house) as a centre of the investigation, research was carried out into challenges, opportunities and conflicts that exist between the institutional and social agendas of stakeholders in student housing provision in Delft.

Then, the design project became to design and build an outdoor, corona-friendly exhibition in the basketball field at the JVB. Exhibition was intended as a tool of communication making visible the qualities of communal living which are overlooked.

The design of the exhibition was primarily derived from constraints of the reality, including ongoing pandemic, small budget and limited volunteer workforce. Rented construction fences became primary building elements and the design focused on framing critical views to reveal aspects of the existing building and the inhabiting community to the visitors.

The content of the exhibition was developed collectively and arranged into two main sections: photographs from currents and former residents as well as the results of the international analytical drawing competition.

The question central in this research was: What are the structures used by successful innovative firms and how can the understanding of these structures help growing firms to maintain their innovative nature? Three case-studies have been conducted among innovative firms with an innovative record. In the analysis of the cases five important structural factors where identified: collaboration, communal identity, collective working, connection with social resources and creative space. These five structural elements support a way of working that facilitate the environmental factors for creativity. To Summarize this, the innovative success of these firms can be explained by their ‘collective character’. Most Young firms have an environment very much suited for creativity and innovation, although they might not have the experience or capacity to develop these. When firms grow they do so along a number of paths these paths are ‘one way streets’. As a side effect these bring systems into the organization that could be counterproductive to innovation. When innovation is the main purpose a collective structure is more suitable than the traditional business structure. The firms incorporated in this case study have found a way to grow without losing the characteristics needed to stay innovative.