This graduation project is an exploration into the notion of play in architecture through the design of a neighbourhood healthcare centre. Set within a former aluminium foundry in Hoboken, Antwerp, the project proposes a series of public spheres, both indoors and outdoors, where moments of play are thoughtfully integrated into the spatial experience.

Former 20th-century industrial complexes and their landscapes were once determining the socio-cultural fabric on a local and regional level. While such buildings were originally designed for machines and streams of production, the stories of those who worked there remain entangled within the industrial realm. These factories therefore act as “time shelters” of the past - tangible evidence of materiality and spatial configuration, interwoven with intangible traces of human discourse. One such time shelter of the maritime industry is Nedstaal Fabriek – a closed-cycle steel production complex in Alblasserdam, The Netherlands.
The project explores the adaptive reuse of Nedstaal and its landscape in a socially sensitive and heritage-based manner. The oral history method was employed to examine the factory’s hidden industrial values as perceived by those who worked there or lived in Alblasserdam. Six direct oral interviews were conducted and summarized in oral history fragment maps. The values that emerged from this research method, were then directly implemented in the proposal for the adaptive reuse of Nedstaal in a maritime innovation campus. These outcomes featured the importance of the “objects” of Nedstaal – the machinery and facilities used during the steel production process, as these tangible elements, that formed the interviewee’s spatial perception of the factory’s realm. Furthermore, the overall industrial atmosphere was highlighted as an important intangible value.
The project focuses on redeveloping the former annealing department building in a startup mixed-use office building for the maritime technological demand of the Drechtsteden area. This repurposing is executed within the constraints of the existing building and its “shell”. Internally, a new steel gallery system, connecting the various spaces is introduced. This gallery features reused steel arches from another building on the terrain, currently in the process of demolition. These arches were specifically designed for visitors to the factory and therefore represent one of the few elements, oriented towards human use. Reusing them is a symbolic gesture, aimed at restoring the connection between past and future in the new redevelopment. Furthermore, two atriums used as laboratory spaces extrude from the ground floor to the rooftop. Adjacent to them, newly built startup cubicles are introduced. Finally, the former annealing basins – facilities used for the treatment of steel, are repurposed in various ways, thus actively participating in the new design. On a landscape level, several points of the plot had been altered to showcase the industrial past while actively participating in the urban fabric for future use.
Overall, the project proposes a human-centered, value-based manner of adaptive reuse where the human experience and its implementations for designing within the context of industrial heritage rank equally important to other scientifically straightforward approaches.

This thesis focuses on research and design of future airports. The innovations in the aviation industry are guiding for the design. The main innovations that the design is based on are the supersonic airplanes fueled by hydrogen and efficiency focused technologies.

In 1299, Count Johannes I van Holland and Count Johannes van Avesnes granted Dordrecht staple rights. Consequently, all goods that were transported over the rivers Merwede and Lek had to be offered on the market of Dordrecht first before they went anywhere else. This secured Dordrecht’s position as a trading city, which it had become due to its strategic location at the intersection of east-west and north-south trade routes. Significant for Dordrecht was the trade of wine, grain, and wood. The latter had already started in 1287. That year, the first known report was made of a German wood raft flowing down the river to Dordrecht. This marked the beginning of Dordrecht as one of the most important Dutch centres of wood trade for more than six centuries.

Physical remnants of the pre-industrial wood trade in the Waterdriehoek, the area around Dordrecht, were looked for during the research part of this thesis. Landscape remnants were found by comparing old maps to current satellite imagery. Timber buildings were found through archival research and fieldwork.

The design focuses on one of the five remaining pre-industrial timber barns in the Waterdriehoek. This barn stands in Kinderdijk, the village that is world famous for its mills. The outer dike barn was part of a shipyard and millrod-producing factory. Its rich history is the starting point of the reconstruction design.

On the other side of the dike stands a former boardhouse of one of the two former waterboards in Kinderdijk. It was built to meet, eat, and sleep in. These functions are again accommodated in the redesign. Meeting rooms, a bakery shop and lunchroom, and a B&B are placed both in the original boardhouse and in newly added nature-friendly barns behind the boardhouse.

These functions serve both the village inhabitants and the tourists who come to see the mills. Its position between the mass tourism zone and the small village prevents the tourists from entering the village, reducing the tourist nuisance for the village inhabitants.

Furthermore, the masterplan design enriches the tourist experience. Routing, functional, and design alterations are made to make the tourist visit complete, logical, and pleasing to the eye.

Architecture embodies cultural, social and historical values which shape the human experience and our identities. Nevertheless, the past and present destructions of historically significant buildings erase part of our collective memory, silencing stories of the past. One solution to the vanishing matter of the past is the reconstruction of those historic structures.
This research aims to explore the process of reconstructing vanished structures to remind of the history rooted within structures, particularly focusing on authenticity. Through tracing the historical background of heritage preservation, official rules and guidelines and the analysis of case studies, a holistic understanding of authenticity beyond tangible aspects is achieved.
A conclusion is drawn that authenticity in reconstructive projects involves preserving the full historical narrative, acknowledging each period – the ‘golden days’ as well as the destruction and absence – within the design.
Within the project developed, the idea of fully representing the historical narrative is tested and applied.

The revitalisation project, called 'Navigating Tourism', focuses on the heritage site of Kinderdijk in the province of Zuid-Holland, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997. Kinderdijk's historic water management system and landscape, with a striking contrast between the horizontal canals, dikes and fields and the vertical mill systems, are key elements of the site's universal value. The project focuses on the challenges posed by the influx of more than one million tourists per year to the small community of 790 inhabitants.

The study compares Kinderdijk with another heritage village, Zaanse Schans, and identifies common problems such as tourist pressure and the need for better infrastructure. The proposed design aims to streamline tourist access while maintaining the integrity of the site and improving the quality of life for local residents. Key findings include the separation of different mobility flows, the creation of a centralised entrance and the separation of functions for tourists and residents.

Currently, the point of arrival at Kinderdijk depends on the mode of transport chosen to reach the heritage site. New arrival points for boats and buses are therefore proposed, together with a car park just outside the core of the heritage area, in order to reduce the arrival points currently scattered throughout the area to one, so that all visitors arrive at the same point. A new entrance building, integrated into a reinforced embankment, will serve as a visitor preparation area and will include a cinema, restaurant and exhibition spaces. This building will be strategically located adjacent to the heritage area.

The project also focuses on preserving the cultural memory of Kinderdijk's industrial past. The Pot Barn, an important historical building in the outer dike area, will be dismantled, restored and rebuilt, and will then form part of the new entrance complex. The Pot Barn was traditionally part of an ensemble of three barns that together functioned as a shipyard. The ensemble will be restored by rebuilding the trio on top of the new entrance building, preserving their original orientation and architectural details. One of the barns will act as a gateway to the tourist facilities and the other two will house communal areas for residents, creating a clear distinction between areas for residents and visitors.

Overall, the project aims to strike a balance between tourism and heritage conservation, enhancing the visitor experience while respecting the needs of the local community and preserving the historic significance of the site.

In this project a casestudy is performed on the location of the former steel factory of Mercon Kloos in Alblasserdam. The structures of Kloos are located on an outerdike plot and are of high cultural significance for the Dutch industrial history. Therefore the main challenges is maintaining the structures and tackeling the issue of flooding. Based on casestudies and research the important characteristics of maritime heritage are layed out and combined with the posssibilities of adapative reuse in this context. In this way the structures were adjusted, repurposed and redesigned to ensure a future existence of this heritage site while always maintaining the important heritage characteristics of this location.

The article discusses the challenges of revitalizing shopping malls as heritage sites in the 21st century, due to their vacancy and deterioration resulting from depersonalization. The proposed approach called "tabula scripta" embraces the existing layers and context, requiring a broadening and deepening of the profession of architecture to focus on sensory perception, particularly tactile experiences. The article highlights the homogenization of architecture due to a reduction in observation by designers and suggests the use of natural materials to convey age and multiple layers of development. The research project focused on the materiality and design of shopping malls, particularly the Lijnbaan ensemble in Rotterdam and the Leyweg shopping mall in The Hague. The results revealed the loss of coherence over time and the need for culturally sensitive interventions in the Leyweg mall. The discussion highlights the importance of site-specific design, particularly in the unique cultural context of the Morgenstond district in The Hague, emphasizing the need for interventions that account for specific materiality and reflect diverse community experiences.

The present graduation project entails the heritage re-design of a shopping center, specifically Winkelcentrum Leyweg in the Hague Southwest. The project aims to investigate a potential sustainable future for the shopping center that would be mainly based on one of its heritage aspects. This aspect was the spatial coherence with its urban context; hence the re-design focused on creating a system of spatial relations, legible and translatable to different scales, in such a way that the shopping mall could accommodate a change of function and yet maintain its consistency with the surrounding area. For that purpose, research was conducted, following the ‘research by design’ methodology and the space syntax method, also combined with observations in order to explain functional aspects, as the people’s movement and use of space. Subsequently, a method was developed to assess and test the spatial impact of previous and potential re-design interventions and a framework was composed to assist in the re-design of the shopping center. This framework focused on the spatial aspects of the mall’s urban identity that influence the continuity with the urban fabric. Attention was also given to the shopping center’s role as the heart of the district it refers to, its spatial significance, and its social function.

According to Henri Lefebvre (1991, p.341), ‘’the commodity is a thing: it is in space and occupies a location. The commodity world brings certain attitudes towards space, certain actions upon space, and even a certain concept of space.’’ So, a commodity and its consumption create a consumerist space. Consumerist spaces are designed to encourage consumption and were continually reinvented and reshaped to keep up with the most subtle changes in society (Chung, Inaba, Koolhaas, 2001). However, today's society is urged to move towards sustainable consumption patterns by 2030 (12th sustainable development goal). This project explores how Dutch post-war shopping malls could be adapted for this future, where a society would consume less. The project proposes to create a shopping mall, which is more embedded in a local context and more significant to a local community. The project especially focuses on textiles as a connecting element between the shopping mall and the local context (Tilburg’s history). Textile is used both functionally and physically. Functionally, the buildings are converted to facilities focused on the recycling, reuse, and repair of textiles. Physically, textile is used as an exterior finish of the building. The possibility to use textiles combined with solar films is explored.

The goal of this project was to preserve the heritage aspect of Post-war reconstruction era Malls, which frequently face vacancy and demolition. The concept of Authenticity in heritage was an important factor to consider while transforming the design subject. The final design took into account the authenticity of materials, cultural authenticity and authenticity of concept, staying true to the original ideals of the designers while future-proofing the structure and function of the heritage Mall. In this way, it built upon the strengths of the original design while providing current and future users with possibilities for future reuse, upgrading the building systems and utilizing its huge size as a tool to filter water and produce energy for itself and the surrounding neighbourhoods.

The mall was initially conceived as a community centre where people could converge for shopping, cultural activity, and social interaction. Nowadays, one lives generally in a consumer society where leisure is predominantly used to acquire goods or services. These might not reflect the complexity of users’ contemporary needs in functions such as shopping malls. A sign of this mismatch is that Dutch sixties malls face issues such as vacancy and deterioration. There is an opportunity for them to be adapted and redesigned to match socio-economic values. This research aims to determine if the Dutch postwar shopping mall typology is suitable for the contemporary needs of the users. If otherwise, a values-based redesign proposal will be developed with the users’ participation, which can be replicated to some extent for other cases in other contexts.

The thesis mainly focuses on defining and redefining the essence of designated heritage architecture under the framework of the grounded theory. Heritage architecture essence manifests in chosen building’s value, characteristic and potentials, which are the foundation for continuity and change aimed at guaranteeing its future life.3 However, unlike other graduation studio, in which architectural research as the starting point of design, the conclusion from the heritage research serves as a guide book that determines designers’ choice throughout the design circle. The guide book is non-universal that it will be revised through the design process in order to have a better compatibility with the building. From this point of view, the research process of the thesis should be able to be continuously defined and redefined. Compare to other qualitative approaches, in the grounded theory research, “it is assumed that the object of study is not fully explained ‘on the first take’; rather, repeated observation, data collection, and structuring the data into a working explanatory framework are all part of an iterative process that leads to an emergence of a theory.”