The Public Building studio studies the importance of the public domain within the built environment and the atmospheres formed around the relations between individuals and/or groups and the designed building. The task is to design architecture for music, and these atmospheres will now include a very important cultural factor in the determination of their value. Architects will assume the
position that is defined by participation in the revitalization of culture for all users of the space. Individuals’ understandings of culture will be detached from their biological nature and patterns of emotional behavior through the use of virtual technologies that will help each person explore their own external consciousness. One that is independent of previous knowledge and experience and reacting only to a manifestation of isolated synesthetic experiences.

This design is embodied through the ephemeral architectural form that challenges subjectivity in design by including all users of the space in the never-ending process that provides this building with an ever-changing appearance. The architect stops acting as a sculptor of that which is built. Instead he creates a mechanism that shapes the building based on the data collected from all users. The users are participants in architectural expression and the public building is now made by the public.

The Festival Machine is an experiment that tests the feasibility of the urbanization of the contemporary festival. The project provides a sustainable indoor festival experience that encourages the exploration of music, which is a hybrid between an outdoor music festival and indoor music venue. It covers a wide spectrum of music genres that include all walks of life and it consist of flexible music halls that can be divided. Dual functions are integrated to keep the building running on a festival and a non-festival day.

As part of the Public Building studio, the track 'Music Marvel' was offered. The goal of this track was to create a music building in the Binckhorst, The Hague, that not only provides a space for musical performance, but does something greater, by contributing something to the location, city or music as a whole. The Binckhorst is a former industrial site that is in full transformation by the municipality to a lively urban area. The old industrial character of this site often gets lost in the process. At the same time, as has come forward from the site and manifeso research, what the Binckhorst is lacking is exchange. Both old and new projects are often walled off or turned inwards, and don't contribute to the site as a whole. The same is the case for the Binckhorst in the city of The Hague. It is where the municipality put all the functions it did not want elsewhere, and the location has barriers on all four sides, giving the people of the city and surroundings no reason to go there. The design brings this exchange back in the form of musical exchange. From case study research, four functions and their interrelations were derived that contribute to musical exchange. The four functions are performance space, practice space, workshop spaces and meeting space. In practice, these functions together lead to buildings becoming musical incubators, bringing forward musical interaction and musical talent. The design combines these functions in different ways to create different scenario's of musical exchange. It does this by re-using containers found throughout the Binckhorst and transforming them into modules with different musical and auxiliary functions. These modules can be rearranged in any manner within the space of a re-used canopy from BAM, the square that is created in front, an old craneway, and the waterfront of the old Binckhaven. The containers are moved and stacked using the old harbour cranes, and moved by using transport casettes. With this modular system many different configurations are possible. The design illustrates the possiblities of this system with three variants that play into the capabilities of the building, missing concert capacities in the city, and the ambitions of the municipality as mentioned in the Popnota 2017. Material re-use, circularity and the identity of the site are important themes in the project. The majority the building consists of re-used materials, sourced from the Binckhorst. Wherever this was not possible, mainly circular alternatives where used. The building is assembled in such a manner that is can be taken apart again. By re-using materials from the Binckhorst, using the characteristic elements of the site, and incorporating elements in the Binckhorst lost in redevelopment, such as street art, the identity of the Binckhorst is preserved and shown in the design.

Embodied cognition suggests that human beings are emotional machines whose experience of the world lies on the interaction between the body and the environment. This can be seen as the echoing of the twentieth century philosophers such as Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari that breaks from the disembodied concept of mind. The research elaborates on architecture and music as domains of immersive experience. The study borrows from recent developments in musicology and cognitive neuroscience, specifically embodied music cognition. This framework is used to address the irreducible multiplicity of the experience of music as cerebral, corporeal, emotional, sociocultural and contextual. Thus, the architecture of musical experience should incorporate all these dimensions. The Binckhorst, a post-industrial area in the Hague, will be treated as the dance floor where spaces can be activated through the movement of bodies. Through the cathartic release of immanent properties of the site, local sub-culture and industry will be preserved. Unpleasant characteristics of the area will be reevaluated as emotionally moving musical elements, such as discordance. Without any preconceived architectural program or concept, similar to a musical arrangement, these elements will be reformatted and played back to the crowds.

Mental health issues are becoming ever-more common in contemporary societies as urban landscapes are over-stimulating and stress-inducing. Studies suggest that lacking access to green infrastructure may be a fundamental factor. In post-industrial cities and health care systems, nature’s healing abilities are however commonly neglected and have only recently become subject to scientific research. This project explores how health is impacted by the built and natural environment.

Caused by the environmental crisis and dynamics of the global market, many European port cities are in transition leaving the territory vacant and afficted with industrial leftovers. In Dunkerque, the former refinery grounds bordering the old habour are such vacancy. Stricken with remnants of an industrial past, both structural and in form of contamination, they have been abandoned and become in a sense wild. At the same time, they are testimony to the city’s relationship with the North Sea that has been shaped by its industrial heritage as well as historic war events drawing an invisible boundary between land and water.

Seizing the void, this project comprehends an urban garden and a mediator of health; environmental, socio-cultural and human health alike. As a novel form of green infrastructure it endeavours to renegotiate existing thresholds –
between the inhabitant and the territory, the city and the port of Dunkerque, between land and sea – to become a piece of collective conscience of place, nature and health.

Through a sequence of gardens, the visitor is invited to reconnect to and explore the natural world present in a place so foreign to nature due to its anthropomorphic history and heritage. It is precisely this atmosphere that grants a new perspective on the vegetative actors of the place and not only stimulates a re-joining with the territory but also with the inner self. The territory itself is subject to remediation through the vegetation on site. Phytotechnologies degrade substances and allow a subtle opening of the site through time. By that, hitherto marginalised port areas and the North Sea foreshore are increasingly reconnected with the city converting the site into a link between land and sea.

This project is motivated by the voices of the Amsterdam artists, for whom it becomes increasingly difficult to live and work in the city. The independent artists, activists, working-class people, among many other low- and mid-income groups who gave Amsterdam its unique, diverse and open character, have been driven out of the city centre for decades. Their place in the city is increasingly being taken by a homogeneous high-income group, leaving a unilateral street culture. Most striking about this issue is that artists are often accused of being contributors to this process called gentrification. The creativity of artists is often used by urban policy makers and developers to revitalize deprived urban areas. Their presence changes the perception of an area and forms an attractive business climate for today’s creative-knowledge economy. This adds value to the assets of property owners which causes an increase in house prices and leads to the eviction of the local inhabitants and even the artists themselves. In their search for a new place to live and work, groups of artists started inhabiting old, mostly industrial light spaces but it seems that no matter where they go, gentrification is just around the corner. As a response to this unfair gentrification process and the decreasing amount of affordable live- and workspaces, the final design facilitates a new and permanent ‘live-work’ building for many different types of artists to give them back their right to the city.

The Dutch sea water level raised with 24cm over the last 128 years. From a linear increase, we can see an increasing trend since the 1990s. According to recent scientific research, the sea level in the Netherlands will rise 1 to 2 meters by 2100 with a maximum global warming of 2 degrees Celsius. With a temperature rise of 4 degrees, the North Sea water level will rise 3 meters. At the end of the next century, the rise can increase up to 8 meters. This project focuses on the Wadden Sea, one of the last remaining large tidal areas where the forces of nature are free to do as they please. It is the last of the authentic nature in the Netherland and is essential to millions of birds and fish. The whole Wadden Sea area, which stretches between Den Helder in the Netherlands and Esbjerg in Denmark, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. Along the coast of the Northern Netherlands, salt marshes were created outside the dikes through the deposition of sand and silt with a spontaneously established vegetation on them. The plants, such as sea lavender, samphire and sea aster, are resistant to the regular flooding by salt tidal water. Salt marshes are one of the few Dutch landscapes of very great international significance. Salt marshes can play a role in protecting coastal regions from flooding. These intertidal zones are delimitated by wooden barriers created by man in settling fields, in order to reclaim land from the ocean. With the tide come sediments that are then held back by the wood enclosure as the water retreats. Salt tolerant species then stick to the mudflats making it more stable and bringing oxygen into the soil for regular plants to grow in these coastal ecosystems. The project therefore includes a territorial intervention: environmental engineering for coastal protection, a landscape Intervention: increase accessibility of the site, and a building intervention: offshore cabins inserted into the primary structure. The tidal area can be saved by the same forces of nature that make it unique: sedimentation can potentially be increased at the same pace as sea level rise, with help of low impact and low cost brushwood dams. With salt marshes breaking the waves, the impact of incoming seawater is muted, it promotes the wealth of species, and retains sediment. As a result, the marshes can grow with rising sea levels. The eroded brushwood dams from earlier times can be rehabilitated to reclaim land in front of the dike. The dams are extended into a floating boardwalk, which unlocks the engineered intervention as common ground. Offshore cabins are inserted into the primary structure on every intersection, overlooking the different landscapes. This increases attractiveness of the land in front-, on- and behind the dike and makes it better accessible from the Frisian hinterland, despite the sea level increase.

Agitation takes control when distance collapses. Contrast of different states of existence and change of the environment are easier to detect than those constant ones. Drawn from climatic, geopolitical and socio-economic scenarios of the North Sea, intermodal transport of goods, particularly the last-mile which crosses land-sea boundaries, will be prone to climatic threats such as storms, as well as social upheavals. Therefore, alongside sustaining the smooth transitions, there lies the need for managing risks. The project looks into the double sides of a coin during the flow of goods around these boundaries: connection - flows of materials in the North Sea - and disconnection or contingency that breaks the chain. Investigations of spatial mechanisms of the two dimensions, namely the logistic space and the congested space, show antithetic ideas for chances. This gap can be merged under the condition of contingency. A critical reflection on the existing displacement stratety provides the counter-model for the project’s territorial gesture. By joining the act of displacement and the act of conglomeration, an annex island is envisioned: the delightful infrastructure, the labyrinthine city and low-key architecture.

This project initiates by looking at the space as a territory (Raffestin, 2012), constructed through social interactions and networks. I believe the design project must anticipate the global social and economic shifts that are present within the territory of the North Sea and must be shaped in relation to the effects of these changes on local societal level. Mapping is used as a tool of associating, ordering and projecting the changes in the qualities (territorialities) of the space rather then a mere visualisation tool (Corner,1999). Equally important, The scripting of scenarios based on literature and statistical data allows for the depiction of the alternate realities that the societal shifts could produce. Taking Port Landscapes, Automation and the energy transition as drivers of change, the project aims at redesigning an automated infrastructure for windblade production, storage and maintanance, and with that reshaping the coastal form based on this process. The aim is in determining the relationship between automation, form and the port landscape. Taking both automated and natural processes into account when designing, the project is inspired by the writings of Martin Pawley, in his work Terminal Architecture (Pawley, 1998) he writes: “ The real barometer of the value of buildings today is not their aesthetic pedigree, but rather their usefullness as terminals in the maze of networks that sustain modern life.Authentic Architecture has been disurbanised. It survives only in the shape of building like distribution centers, factories, petrol stations, that are designed as instruments not monuments.” The design depicts the process and actions of the machine. An automated line, hatched by the elements involved in the different processes along it. An attempt of containment and exposure of the ever expanding developments in automation and production. Human actors are no longer present within the confinement of the interior space, and instead as automation is pushed further out to sea due to increasing vessel size and production capacity, the Human remains on the coastline, to bear witness to this new separation between themselves and production. The human is now the spectator of this ever ending automated line.


Key words: North Sea, Ports, Infrastructure, Automation

The story about the relationship of human with water has been always linked with the fear of the hidden, natural power of water. By identifying the historical position of the North Sea, it is confirmed that the sea has been perceived as “the edge of the world” in its past. The sea and its cold northern waters was seen as an evil in itself, as a physical and a mental border, difficult to pass and coexist with. Looking at the present conditions, we (man) are being confronted with powerful nature again. In the past, the North Sea was difficult to navigate. Today, we are facing the issue of forecasting sea level rise and unpredictable weather. This shows the phenomenon of nature’s power is once again taking control over human. The subject of the project is focused on the strategy of overcoming this fear but once again harnessing it power as an opportunity for humans.

In the past, people faced the challenge of passing the fearful water by improving sailing boats, discovering navigation techniques and studying its natural movements, currents and tides. This process helped us to familiarise ourselves with the initially unknown and to learn how to coexist with nature. Today, we are confronted with the increasing power of water, which we have fortified ourselves against from it by building high advanced dams, walls and floodgates. We are using physical, monstrous engineering interventions to protect ourselves from the water rather than embracing its power – like we did in the past.

The design in itself aims to tackle the current issue of water level rise in a more traditional way, to open up to nature, to understand its behaviour and draw on our experience and knowledge.

The project has been set on the Shetland Islands, to metaphorically connect the story of the project with the first settlers of the Isles first settlements of the Vikings. Historically they embraced the fear of the waters mystical power and sailed through the unknown sea. As a link to the present, the geographical location of the Shetlands’ dictates that their coastal line will be one of the first to be impacted by the rising sea. Moreover, the island is by definition a transitional territory, the link between the Norwegian Sea and the North Sea.

The relationship between the power of water and the site was further explored in the architectural proposal. It was important to develop a cohesive narrative in the design, to bridge the past and present perception of water’s power with the site. This specifically related to the introduction of using renewable water energy as the main component of the project. By analysing local issues of the Isles’ residents and researching current knowledge of using water’s power, the site issues with the advanced technologies were combined into one coherent solution. By following this, I had to consider how far I can use the aforementioned natural power to not to damage the rough beauty of the site as well as the rough beauty of the natural power of water. This led to the introduction of the three architectural elements of my design– the harbour, the tidal power plant and the experiential path which links these two - the traditional way of using water (the harbour) with the advanced one (tidal power plant). Given the poetical nature of my project, the three interventions act as one line of experience, the deconstruction and analysis of building the tension and reflection of the story around the natural power of water, was an important procedure of translating the narrative into an invented design.