Redesigning from the permanent, in which the people using the building need to be more adaptable instead of designing a flexible building was the starting point for this graduation project. Therefore the following research question has been formulated: How could the space plan of a monument like the Koudenhorn be redesigned to accommodate changes in use over time?

Designing a building for the future means giving a definitive form to something for an unpredictable amount of time. One could say that the task given to architects is to design buildings that are constantly subject to change. Taking this into account, adaptability is one of the keywords coming to mind when facing the unpredictable. Therefore it was the aim to conduct research into redesigning a space plan in such a way that it can accommodate changes in use over time.

This project is part of the graduation studio Vacant Heritage of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at the Delft University of Technology. The ongoing research and design processes of this graduation project are documented in the project journal.

How will we live together? With this graduation project a strategy has been developed to transform vacant heritage into cyclifiers, buildings that have a positive impact on their environment by creating a way of living together in balance with nature, humans, and buildings. Social public functions with a focus on healthy living, as well as a wide variety of housing types, create social interaction and the possibility for personal growth within the building. The concept of urban metabolism has been used in order to define and close cycles, on both the building scale as well as the surrounding neighborhood scale. In this way, a heritage project is created that has a positive impact on its environment.

The project “Activating the glass box” aims to find out how the existing built heritage can be not an obstacle, but the key to the comprehensive dense city of the near future. It showcases the contextual design approach and opportunities for the unlisted 50’s-60’s international style office buildings - “glass boxes”- whose potential is not yet widely seen today, especially in the context of densification. The project puts a focus on a building’s adaptability for different future uses as a resilient solution to urban densification.

The vacant former police office building at Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam has become a testing ground to find guidelines for dealing with an existing building and reviving it for as long as possible.

This project is a part of the Adapting 20th century heritage studio that deals with vacant police buildings in the Netherlands. The police want to adapt their real estate to the new organization and the changed structure of the services, with larger teams, in fewer places, and more digital presence. This reorientation to denser locations is also taking place outside of police institutions on a larger scale, both nationally and globally. It is estimated that by 2050 nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities. Denser construction reduces transit emissions by adding more stories and provides more livable and usable area in the same amount of space.

With my research, I was looking for ways this site could contribute to the future challenges of densification in central Rotterdam. There are 4 scales of impact this building could have: urban, architectural/heritage, social, and technical. The strategy of each scale developed for this building is an outcome of the research.

On the urban scale, the building is to become a landmark for the street and have an active and inviting plinth. Regarding the architectural/heritage scale, the majority of the original building is reused, recreating the original lobby, and a new extension on top is introduced. New functions - restaurant, cooking school, shop, urban farm, co-living and roof terrace with rentable bar for celebrations - will have a positive socio-cultural impact, providing locals with fresh food, education, job opportunities and making the neighbourhood more inclusive. Adaptability for different uses over time will be introduced on the technical scale by implementing Open Building principles and introducing new, more spacious, vertical circulation cores in the places of the existing ones. The project’s flexibility limits were tested. For this reason, four subjects were looked at in more depth: program, storey height & installations, raised floor and the facade, yielding interesting findings.

To conlcude, this adaptive reuse project introduces the abovementioned solutions as a strategy that addresses impact on the urban, architectural/heritage, social, and technical scales. The design’s goal is to activate the building, guaranteeing its long lifespan by re-connecting it with the street, introducing environmentally and socially impactful program, establishing an architectural landmark, all while implementing adaptability for different future uses.

"Uncovering Thresold Spaces" is about uncovering and designing a sunken architecture landscape. The intervention ties different layers of the built environment, human movement and the surrounding to regenerate the existing metro station. As well as, providing a place where students, commuters, or people from around wanting a break, can come.

The project started with the disconnected Vukov Spomenik Station, that was full of potential but was left hidden, underground. The designed threshold space reactivates it by acting as a gateway between itself and the rest of the city. The station is the initiator of the project, however, there is an inversion of importance, and the sunken squares becomes central and operates independently.

Ethiopia is a flourishing country with a rapidly growing economy and population. This is one of the reasons why the capital Addis Ababa is increasingly urbanizing. Due to the free market only providing housing for high incomes, many households live in poor conditions. In addition, these private developments are often built as gated communities out of fear of insecurity and resulting in segregation. This segregation is further enhanced by the government's Integrated Housing Development Program (IHDP), which realizes subsidized housing for middle and low incomes, but by doing so it also segregates these groups. While Addis Ababa has traditionally been an integrated city with an inclusive society, which is still of great importance for the living standard of especially low-income people. This research offers an alternative design for the current scheme of the IHDP and proposes a mixed-income neighborhood whereby stimulating mutual trust between residents through the built environment is central to the project.

The graduation project is about transforming the vacant V&D department store building in Dordrecht into an new urban living room. One sentence to conclude the background is: Revitalizing the obsolete. What happens to the traditional twentieth century commercial areas in major Dutch cities in an era that everyone is shopping online? The result is many physical stores, including my site-famous Dutch retail company V&D, closed down and left many empty holes in Dutch city centers. These vacant buildings, which used to have close interactions with Dutch citizens’ urban life, are not accessible anymore and are gradually segregated from the vibrant urban life. They are urgently in need to transform to rescue the livability. The value of the heritage buildings will be the starting point of the redesign process: restore the previous identity, responding to its historical events, and capturing the core values as the redesign concept. The building was used as an interior gathering space for almost one century and became part of the urban routing. In addition, the building is located in the prime area inside the historical city center and surrounded by the typical urban fabric consists of canal&bridge. Therefore, I would like to extend the public characteristics and make the building an extension of the public space. To create a similar spatial experience inside the building, ‘bridge’ is used as the main spatial concept for the interior design.

When the V&D in Haarlem was first built in the 1930s the building had a very open and inviting character. However, this changed after the 1960s when the shopping window passages were closed, views through the windows were blocked and escalators were installed. To make matters worse, the store went bankrupt in 2016, which meant that the shops also literally had to close. However, this large and flexible building at a prominent location in the centre of Haarlem asks for a re-design to open up the building. When researching the department store, it was noticeable that although Haarlem is a city surrounded by green, the centre lacks this quality. Therefore the design tries to open up the building by creating space for learning, social encounter and biodiversity. This is done on the ground floor by bringing back the window passage halls as an intermediate space between city life and the interior of the department store. In this way, these shopping window passages open up the department store by blending the outside with the inside and enhancing flows of mobility. In addition, a butterfly garden is installed in the core of the building, which opens up the building by maximizing views, inviting more natural daylight and integrating green. Also, large squares are installed on the higher floors, which open up the building due to the mixed and diversified programme. Lastly, the use of the roof and balconies is encouraged by adding green spaces to the building.

The area was once called Arcadia in the history because of the specific nature landscape and the fact that the rich came here from big cities to build private estate for vacation, holiday and hunting etc. However, this cultural layer is almost missing now and the remained estates are just staying there individually in the area.

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,.

The purpose of this master thesis is to gather information from current practices and make recommendations to facilitate implementation of circularity in the building process. The past years, circularity has become a popular term in the built environment. This approach prefers a more circular way of perceiving the building process. Literature indicates that implementation of circularity in the building process, probably, will require different actors to be involved and different decisions to be made.
The following research question is proposed: “Which actors should be involved (in the beginning of the building process) to ensure circularity (implementation of circular building) throughout all phases in the building process and which actors should influence decision-making?”
The following research method is adopted: a literature study, and case study research including interviews. From this literature study, assessment criteria for the case study research can be conducted. The case study research evaluates the actor network and decision-making processes based on three building projects. These projects are:
Townhall in Brummen by RAU built in 2013; The Green House in Utrecht by cepezed built in 2018; and EDGE Olympic in Amsterdam by Architekten Cie. built in 2018.
This thesis concludes that circular-related actors and traditional actors with circular-related resources should be involved and be influential in decision-making in the building process of circular building projects. This study particularly demonstrates the benefit of early on involvement of the following circular-related actors: transformation agent, circularity expert, reclamation expert, dismantler, and legal officer. In order to increase their influence on decision-making these actors should become part of the project
team, or at least be taken seriously and offered room to influence decision-making. Especially, if traditional actors lack knowledge and resources for implementing circularity. Moreover, contribution of their resources to implement circularity is facilitated, if these actors are involved early on. Early on decision-making on circularity, particularly for long-lived layers (in comparison to short-lived layers), is beneficial for its implementation in practice. Later on in the building process, after the initiation and preparation (and design) phase, implementation is difficult.

Exhibition at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture, from 20 May - 30 June 2016. Included also a round table discussion with Piet Tauber about Education at TUD.

November 2016 TUDelft