This research investigates how architecture can create conditions for spatial and public belonging. This is done through the transformation of an abandoned granite quarry in Colmenar Viejo, Spain. This research draws on theory based on material systems, co-optive and constructive making, material and spatial continuity, and situated practice. It is acknowledged that belonging is not a fixed result or something that can be created, but should be approached as a set of conditions. These conditions are translated into criteria based on the theoretical framework, which provides two principles: transform without displacing, and co-optive making before constructive making. To map the quarry, photogrammetry techniques are used. This provides a sufficiently detailed 3D model that can be used to study the quarry walls, edges, and level differences, allowing a co-optive approach. Further research was done into excavation techniques. Two methods are suitable for granite extraction, which are drill and blast and diamond wire cutting, both of which are used in this project. This results in gaining material that can be used for constructive making and spaces that can be co-opted. Research by design shows that there is a conflict between a co-optive approach and a program-led approach. The planned event space is flexible in program and can therefore easily be adapted based on the conditions of the quarry. The restaurant is less flexible in its program and was less suitable for a co-optive approach. Material continuity is achieved by using the excavated granite in the new building and by making the transformation of the material legible. The main finding of the research is that excavation can act as a mediator between co-optive and constructive making. Spatial conditions are continued by creating new spaces that can be co-opted, and material conditions are continued by producing granite, which can be transformed and used on site for new construction. This way, architectural belonging is approached by continuing the logic of the quarry. ... Read more

The Upper Silesian Coal Basin in Poland is a fragmented post-industrial landscape dominated by anthropogenic coal mine heaps. Traditionally perceived as hazardous environmental liabilities and spatial barriers within the urban fabric, these monumental landforms are deeply embedded with regional cultural identity, industrial memory, and novel ecological systems. This research investigates the latent spatial, ecological, and cultural value of these post-mining structures, arguing against their conventional erasure or purely technical remediation.
Addressing the central question of how architecture can coexist with the evolving, unstable conditions of post-industrial terrains, this project uses the Makoszowy Heap as a primary case study. The methodology is grounded in Christophe Girot’s theoretical framework of the “Four Traces” (Landing, Grounding, Finding, Founding) and combines regional-scale territorial mapping, on-site sensory fieldwork, and physical material experimentation.
The resulting design proposal shifts from concealing the heap’s toxicity and instability to revealing its ongoing material and ecological transformations, such as acid mine drainage, erosion, and natural vegetation succession. The core architectural intervention is a Thermal Bath Complex situated in the stabilized, forested base of the heap. This complex operates on a circular material and energy strategy: it draws low-enthalpy geothermal energy from flooded underground mine shafts to heat the pools, and uses locally recovered mining waste - such as fly ash, crushed concrete, and limestone as primary construction and water-filtration materials.
This project provides a transferable design framework for post-industrial regeneration across the Upper Silesian Coal Basin. By integrating architecture, landscape, and infrastructural remnants, the thesis demonstrates how former sites of extraction can be transformed into dynamic spaces of public engagement, ecological adaptation, and collective memory. ... Read more

This thesis investigates how urban brownfield sites can be reintegrated into the
contemporary city while preserving the openness, indeterminacy, and temporal
depth that define terrain vague. It explores how architectural intervention can
respond to environmental and social challenges without reducing these sites to fully
determined urban conditions.

The project is situated on the former Delicias railway site in Madrid, Spain, a centrally
located post-industrial landscape positioned between commercial redevelopment
pressures and the public and ecological needs of the surrounding district.
Through research into brownfields, terrain vague, fourth nature, and nature-based
remediation, the thesis reframes such sites not as vacant land awaiting completion,
but as layered urban terrains whose value lies partly in their naturalness and capacity
to support spontaneous ecological succession while retaining their existing spatial
qualities.

The design proposes a strip-based framework that structures the landscape
in surface and spatial programs while maintaining openness and adaptability.
Responding both to the characteristics of the site and to longstanding local
demands for educational and public amenities, the programme includes a
remediation research centre, educational spaces, a public library, neighbourhood
café, and flexible communal spaces. Moving away from a conventional figure-ground
relationship, these functions are organised as a field condition composed of earthen
walls and lightweight canopies. Together, these elements create gradients of
enclosure and openness that mediate between built form and landscape.
Rather than proposing a fixed end state, the project understands reintegration as
an ongoing negotiation between environmental recovery, historical continuity, and
contemporary public use. In doing so, it proposes an architectural approach that
privileges continuity of place over replacement and recognises uncertainty and
naturalness as productive conditions for design. ... Read more

Modern urban life produces continuous flows of discarded materials that are collected, sorted, incinerated or buried out of public view. Waste therefore disappears socially before it disappears materially. This research examines how waste-derived landscapes, particularly bottom ash mounds produced by waste-to-energy plants, can be reconsidered as constructed grounds rather than closed technical infrastructures. In the Netherlands, landfills and bottom ash mounds form artificial elevations within a flat landscape, yet they remain largely absent from spatial and architectural imagination. Focusing on Het Groene Schip in Amsterdam Westpoort, the research addresses a hidden bottom ash stock shaped by incineration, regulation, containment and possible reuse. While bottom ash contains mineral fractions that can enter construction chains, its application depends on processing, quality requirements and public trust. The project asks how architecture and landscape can make this hidden material condition visible, accessible and productive without ignoring its environmental and operational constraints. ... Read more

With a changing climate, the problem of urban heat is becoming increasingly important to address. Although air conditioning is widely regarded as a solution, this cooling method requires a significant amount of energy, which unfortunately can be unaffordable for low-income households. It results in these households experiencing heat vulnerability, which is worsened when living in a neighbourhood without a sufficient social infrastructure.

Therefore, the project’s architectural intervention improves heat resilience in a vulnerable neighbourhood through the principle of thermal commoning: the collective sharing of cool spaces. The project is located in the low-income neighbourhood of Pradolongo, Madrid. After studying the neighbourhood’s characteristics, an architectural intervention is proposed with the intent to improve its heat resilience in both a physical and social dimension.

It minimizes dependence on air conditioning by applying passive cooling strategies: patios, thermal mass and adaptive sun shading. Simultaneously, it strengthens the neighbourhood's (existing) social infrastructure by making the patios shared spaces, and using the neighbourhood's typical amenities as ‘gateways’ to these cooler spaces. Despite the building’s required thermal performance, openness is maintained as much as possible by designing balconies as both shading elements and social facilitators. The project demonstrates how passive climate design and an aligned social infrastructure create a redefined heat resilience: one that is common. ... Read more

Held by the Mountains is an investigation of the responsibility architecture can take in fragile mountain territories. Starting with the premise that architecture can operate as a commoner of relationships between human, non-human life, and institutional actors in Alpine territories. The project is set within Sierra Norte de Madrid, recognizing that architecture does not simply solve complex environmental fragilities, but can take responsibility for performance within it. Performance in this project is evaluated in the context of a thousand-year horizon, mapping phases and potentials in a post-human future. This thesis investigates inhabitation as a mechanism for common knowledge and refuge as a commoner by re-imagining relationships between human and non-human participants to inform practices, morphologies, tectonics and construction logic. Positioning architecture as a reparative practice, a shared infrastructure through which environmental dependency becomes measured, experienced, and held over time. ... Read more

PART 1 – INTRODUCTION: Starting from a personal fascination with street art and the rebellious spirit of para-architecture, this part introduces Lavapiés as a neighbourhood where gentrification is slowly tipping the balance against the community. From this tension emerges the central objective: to explore how para-architecture can add weight to the community side of that balance. PART 2 – APPROACH: Drawing on Michel Serres' theory of the parasite, a framework is developed that traces how squatting practices move from parasitic to symbiotic, and eventually risk becoming fossilised by the very gentrification they set out to resist. This framework then becomes the analytical lens through which Lavapiés and its okupas are understood. PART 3 – PRECEDENTS: A series of reference projects from self-managed community gardens to parasitic blister structures are examined for what they reveal about temporality, self-management, and unconventional spatial activation. Together they form an incomplete but instructive catalogue that will directly inform the design agenda. PART 4 – DESIGN AGENDA: A week of fieldwork in Madrid reveals the striking contrast between touristified main streets and quieter, more intimate side streets, ultimately pointing towards a specific cluster of vacant plots as the project site. Six design positions crystallise from this research, outlining the spatial, programmatic and social principles for the cultural space. PART 5 – DESIGN PROGRESS: Through a chronological series of sketches, models and diagrams, the design evolves from a bridge weaving through rooftops to three distinct architectural acts, each with a clearer identity and purpose. This iterative process of research by design is what ultimately produces and justifies the final design agenda. PART 6 – FINAL PRODUCT: The cultural space is realised in three acts: a parasitic guerrilla gardening shed, a symbiotic collective space for community associations, and a flexible performance patio that leaves a fossilic imprint on the neighbourhood. Together they form a temporary, self-managed, and community-driven counter to gentrification in Lavapiés. PART 7 – IN RETROSPECT: Looking back, the three acts are evaluated against the design agenda, with the gardening shed and performance patio standing out as the most convincingly unconventional. The part closes by addressing the uncomfortable question of whether any intervention at all risks accelerating gentrification, and why doing nothing is ultimately not the answer either. ... Read more

This paper investigates how historical models of communal architecture—such as the Corralas and Corrales de Comedias—can inform contemporary approaches to urban regeneration through a spatial understanding grounded in social interaction and transformation. Drawing on the theories of Henri Lefebvre, Richard Sennett, Rafael Moneo, Aldo Rossi, Jan Gehl, Jane Jacobs, and Kevin Lynch, the research explores how architecture operates as a living, performative framework shaped by everyday use, memory, and collective presence. These insights converge in the case of La Galera in Alcalá de Henares, a disused women’s prison marked by complex historical layers. Here, the project embraces the transformative potential of adaptive reuse—not by replicating historical forms, but by translating their spatial intelligence into contemporary design strategies. Ultimately, the work positions communal space as a platform for social negotiation and urban continuity—where memory and use shape new architectural possibilities. ... Read more

Beyond the Black Box proposes a radical transformation of how citizens interact with digital infrastructure and cultural archives through architectural intervention at Madrid's Plaza de Colón. This project addresses a critical democratic crisis where massive digital systems—data centers consuming 613 MW of power and 665 million liters of water annually, alongside cultural archives increasingly training AI systems—remain invisible and inaccessible to the citizens they serve.

The project confronts three interconnected "black boxes" that undermine democratic participation in the digital age: Infrastructure Invisibility through data centers hidden 8-12 kilometers from Madrid's center; Archive Digitalization that transforms physical collections into abstract digital processes without public engagement; and Digital Literacy Gaps caused by the absence of civic spaces where citizens can understand and participate in algorithmic systems.

Located at Plaza de Colón—a site that has evolved from Royal Mint to National Library to public plaza—the intervention creates a new civic typology employing a cloud-fog-edge computing framework that reveals resource flows while integrating technical functions with public programs. Three programmatic axes converge at a central data center: the Digital Infrastructure Axis features transparent server rooms that transform technical systems into educational features; the Digital Archive Axis connects to Spain's National Library through visible digitization labs; and the Digital Literacy Axis provides hands-on workshops and AI-integrated study spaces.

This hybrid architecture materializes the shift from static containers to dynamic circuits in memory practices, establishing a new civic institution where cultural heritage is continuously activated through technological engagement and democratic participation. The project demonstrates that architecture can transform traditionally separate systems—hidden data centers and digitizing archives—into integrated civic platforms that serve both knowledge preservation and democratic resilience, creating spaces where citizens become active participants in their digital future rather than passive consumers. ... Read more

How to build a paradise on Earth?

This question forms the foundation of a thesis that explores the urgent need for refuge—both from climatic extremes and from the sensory overstimulation that defines life in contemporary cities. Situated in Madrid—one of the cities most affected by the urban heat island effect worldwide—the project investigates the concept of refuge as a spatial, ecological, and cultural condition within the urban fabric.
Focusing on the Casa de Campo—Madrid’s historic royal retreat—the thesis re-examines the intertwined relationship between nature and culture. Drawing on Madrid’s origins, founded on and shaped by water, the project reinterprets the city’s current, lost connection to this essential element. By embracing low-tech strategies and taking maximum advantage of natural conditions, the intervention activates water and the diverse life forms it sustains, making its temporality and microclimatic effects both physically and sensorially perceptible.
Engaging with symbolic, historical, and technological precedents, the thesis envisions a site that redefines refuge—not only as shelter, but as a space for balancing human and non-human forms of regeneration, thereby aiming to reconnect people with their natural environment. Through an interdisciplinary, body-centric approach, the project explores how design can enter this balancing act in order to construct a contemporary form of paradise.
... Read more

Contemporary cities typically employ a linear metabolic model which relies on peripheral areas to support their growth and operation, often externalising waste and degradation to economically and ecologically vulnerable areas. Posing the hypothetical question, ‘What if the existing metabolic processes of extraction, production and disposal in Madrid’s periphery could be rethought, and a socially, economically and ecologically productive process could be instated for peripheral communities?’, this paper constructs a theoretical framework with which to understand systems of waste and inequality embedded in the city’s growth and operation, and analyses the historical patterns of growth which proliferated them. Following this understanding, contemporary problematic symptoms emerging from these patterns are identified, and a set of good practices is compiled which may effectively address them. This project takes a critical stance on the tabula rasa form of urban redevelopment commonly employed in Madrid and posits that an alternative model of urban development should be estalished, one which embraces plurality and uses existing built fabric and social, ecological and economic processes as a starting point ... Read more

In the post-extraction landscapes of the Rheinisches Braunkohlerevier, the relationship between water and matter no longer follows natural rhythms—it is charged, reactive, and unfolding. Here, contamination is not a singular event but a condition that accumulates, binds, weathers, and seeps across geological and temporal scales. Conventional restoration frameworks respond with binary visions of compensation and separation. This thesis takes a different approach—remaining within the unsettled terrain, it traces the transformations already in motion.

Water, long drained to make space for mining, returns to a stratigraphy fractured and unsettled by decades of extraction. It moves through disrupted sediments, activating chemical reactions that carry heavy metals and acidity through soil, into groundwater, and toward the surface. Matter does not passively receive these flows; it absorbs, resists, and transforms them. This interaction forms the foundation of the thesis: a material practice rooted in territorial specificity, where design engages the dialogue between dissolution and deposition, contamination and gradual reconfiguration.

By reworking site-bound matter, the project proposes infrastructural prototypes that respond to their environment not through resistance, but through participation. Each intervention is situated, embedded in cycles of absorption, stasis, and release. Rather than proposing resolution, the thesis offers a framework for ongoing negotiation—where design operates within, rather than above, the entangled realities of water and matter. ... Read more

This thesis investigates ambiguity as a productive architectural condition, particularly through the lens of terrain vagues: urban spaces defined by contradiction, indeterminacy, and temporal fluctuation. Based on critical philosophical frameworks, the research examines how ambiguity, often regarded as a lack of clarity, can instead become a catalyst for more sustainable spatial practices. The study begins by tracing the inherent qualities of terrain vagues and identifying their potentials. It then moves toward a design-oriented investigation, exploring how empirical analysis can abstract these qualities into operative tools. Ultimately, the paper proposes a framework for integrating ambiguity into the design process—not as an aesthetic byproduct but as a deliberate mode of engagement that challenges conventional binaries and embraces multiplicity, adaptability, and ecological sensitivity in architecture. ... Read more

This research paper aims to explore performative dissident practices within the context of Madrid, focusing on how architectural practice can gain insights from these practices to inform the design of interventions or conditions that foster empowerment, particularly for vulnerable communities. The intention is not to provide a socio-political critique, but rather to advocate for the significance of these urban battlegrounds as pedagogical instances that can enrich architectural discourse. Therefore the research seeks to answer the following question:
How can architectural practices, focused on contested urban environments, draw from the dissident practices manifested in the built environment and thus foster resilience for the vulnerable communities?

In the rising action of the research, the paper first constructs a methodological and theoretical tapestry, developing a lens through which to conduct a site analysis. This is done by employing architectural analytical drawings, as well as narration and experimental writing, to highlight the more latent, experiential aspects of dissident practices. The climax of the research applies this lens to three squares within Madrid’s most vulnerable neighborhood, Embajadores/Lavapiés. In the falling action, the research delves deeper into the site of choice and its significance for the project and expands on the conceptual framework that can be applied towards a design of conditions. ... Read more

The foodscape of a city is a complex set of systems and actors that is directly linked with the city through the acts of producing, processing and consuming food. These acts shape not only the surrounding hinterland but also the environment, infrastructure and social make-up of a city. The relationship between the city and this hinterland has almost completely disappeared over the last century. This has negatively impacted the way food is valued which has caused negative consequences such as environmental degradation, disappearance of relationships and knowledge, and a worsening of both human and animal welfare.

The focus of this project is to reestablish this lost relationship through an architectural project that reintroduces historic conditions and practices and combines them with contemporary flows and actors to form a program that fits the 21st century. This will result in a pilot project which will demonstrate how architecture can have a central role in reestablishing the relationship between consumer and the food they consume, and thus the creation of a sustainable foodscape, resulting in healthier and happier cities.
... Read more

Current waste management practices pose a significant threat to humans, animals and our environment, contributing greatly to environmental pollution. Furthermore, the speed and the way we consume and dispose of things is changing rapidly, leaving us with little time to react to this global issue; particularly in urban centres, seeing that the cities have become the centre of flows and exchanges. This thesis investigates how architecture can enhance these networks in order to enable necessary economic, environmental and social transformations. It challenges the linear production-consumption-waste model driven by capitalism and explores the potential for creating resilient, self-sustainable cities through circular network flows.
Focusing on Madrid, the project proposes the reintroduction of urban manufacturing within the city to establish sustainable (textile) material flows. By ‘weaving’ this new program into the city's existing urban and material fabric, and reclaiming the former industrial site, the project envisions a space dedicated to textile innovation. With the intention of extending to other industries in the future, fostering cross-industry synergies and potentially acting as a catalyst for broader sustainable practices.
Architecture has a potential to serve as a catalyst of the change, by embodying the principles of sustainable production, rethinking the flows of material and embracing the interconnectedness of systems, communities and environment. Considering the industrial history and context of the site, the project reimagines the underutilized area as an innovation hub, contributing to a more resilient urban future.
... Read more

The research hypothesis is that extensive layering and apparent modifications in the San Isidro area along Manzanares, dictated by the necessity of expansion, have changed the site’s everydayness. As a result, patterns of continuities and discontinuities began to take over the area, which needs to be addressed in the contemporary context and life of the city. This calls for an architectural intervention which aims, beyond the project itself, to the seamless transition of current and future everyday rituals. Due to urban stratification, there is an accumulation of multiple functions, atmospheres, daily rituals and routines over the greater area of San Isidro. In particular, the San Isidro, San Justo and Santa Maria cemeteries, alongside the park, festivities, and infrastructural networks, pose a convoluted environment where the different functions compete for prevalence. Simultaneously, their borders blur, putting the contemporary rituals in danger instead of promoting their evolution/development along the urban context. Furthermore, the city’s current and future development plans treat the areas mentioned above as sites of additions; it is not interested in preserving or developing existing characters; rather, it imposes new ones. Instead of trying to solve or alleviate the complex current state, it adds more layers to the existing ones. The graduation projects need to act as a reflection and critique of the current situation. ... Read more

Soil extraction results in different material qualities. Some products, like coal, are affiliated with industry and pollution. Others, such as marble, equal to perpetual wealth and aesthetic. In the region of West Macedonia, in the North of Greece, those qualities coexist in the form of mines and quarries, creating a material network. With starting point the difference between marble and coal, the research investigates extraction practices as a multilevel topic, an ever-growing field where artificial and natural landscape blends. In the possibility of extraction sites closure, questions emerges in regards for the impact in city, environment and humanity sites towards a future transition. Those sites wound create a new archaeology, signs of an era of Anthropocene and a wounded nature.

Hence research circulates around three themes. First it examines the Hinterlands as a system of operations carrying industrial production, following by the sites of extraction and the narratives around them, in pursuit of the spirit of place. The third aspect is a cognitive examination of the human position into those practices. A placement of human through craft proposes a rethinking of materiality and nature as active agents. This affiliation with non-human entities underlines a transition of culture into a caring state, creating an ecosystem sympathy. Goal is to find answers about the recovery of post-mining territories, the revival of this inert anthropogenic environment.
... Read more

The institutionalization of the architectural practice has caused a linear life cycle that relies on the efficiency of mass standardized products, not only exacerbating ecological effects but also breeding mediocrity in architecture. An epistemic break from the creative and tangible process of craftsmanship, which has been marginalized as practice of the past. The aforementioned restrictive qualities of the practice have spurred the emergence of new counter ideologies in repair and reuse, which embrace the heterogeneity inherent in wear. The context of Madrid provides an opportunity to explore the idea of crafting wear, beginning with empowering an network of traditional crafters and extending to overlooked actors in material aging, enriching discourse and exchange of material knowledge towards a more mature attitude in hybrid design. The transformative impact of embracing wear in the urban fabric can cultivate a communal sensitivity towards architectural expression of material aging. In adopting a hybrid expression of wear, from the craftsman to the public, interweaving various knowledge domains carving a niche in the practice of architecture, that develops into a thriving network of skilled crafters in material wear. ... Read more