The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the role and relevance that architecture has (and can have) in facilitating the spatial production of festival spaces. It aims to demonstrate that festival spaces serve as ideal locations for experimenting with spatial relationships and architecture itself – through its expression and collective appropriation -which can have transformative effects on spaces of the everyday, guided by the disruptive nature of the festival.

The intention is to construct a designbrief for a permanent festival terrain in which the dialogue between people, place, society, and time can be constantly re-imagined through its fluid architecture—offering fertile ground for discussion on architecture’s role in the facilitation of festival spaces, how they inform the design, use, andorganisation of everyday spaces, and how they stimulate collective design processes.Ultimately, this project seeks
to enact architecture as a facilitator of dialogue, a medium for questioning and reshaping spatial relationships through the lens of festival spaces.

The thesis investigates the role of architectural practice in engaging with the systemic fragility and uncertain futures of the Cadore region in the Italian Alps. Initially guided by the question of architecture’s agency in the Alpine context, the research gradually evolved into a deeper interrogation: does the territory require architectural intervention at all? Through a multi-scalar and interdisciplinary methodology, The Cadore region is framed as a complex palimpsest - where ecological, infrastructural, and symbolic forces intersect and co-produce the landscape. Architecture is not positioned as a solution, but as a medium of observation, representation, and care. Central to this approach is the reactivation of the Ex-Cementificio Marchino, a former cement factory in Castellavazzo that once played a pivotal role in transforming the Alpine landscape into a resource-extraction machine during the era of the Great Acceleration. The factory’s current state as an industrial ruin offers a critical lens through which to examine the legacies of extraction and territorial violence, while also opening spatial and conceptual opportunities to reframe architecture’s role in a post-industrial Alpine context.

The design engages with the complexities of brownfield reuse in the mountainous landscape, reinterpreting the former cement factory not as a static object, but as a dynamic form in transformation. The factory, once instrumental in supplying materials for hydroelectric infrastructures, has been reimagined as a "landscape" from which to extract meaning and material rather than mere resources. The project is realised through a phased strategy of dismantling, re-scaling and recomposition. This process serves to reduce the alien monumentality of the industrial artefact, thereby initiating a process of contextual digestion. This process involves the demolition of parts of the structure and the reappropriation of their debris. Consequently, the factory becomes the quarry. The final phase of the transformation process involves the introduction of new architectural elements, constructed using the processed remnants of the original building. These interventions are designed to support a new programme, which involves the establishment of a basecamp for landscape observation, environmental monitoring, and community engagement. The site functions as both civic infrastructure and territorial lens, and is embedded within a broader network of observation points across the Caodre region.
The reconfigured ruin, articulated along a path that connects it to a newly designed inhabited wall, now acts as a spatial and symbolic filter between the former machine and its surrounding landscape. Through this mediation process, the site's context is progressively restored, healing the scars left by past extraction regimes and reorienting it towards novel perspectives and connections with the site itself.

‘Queer’ can be both an adjective and a verb: beyond identity, it is a force in motion dismantling systems of exclusion and challenging normativity. This thesis investigates how the queering of the architectural process can transform it from a site of oppression into one of empowerment. This is applied in the context of Istanbul, where urban renewal often serves as a tool of erasure, pushing marginalized communities to the edges of the city.

Accordingly, the project proposes an architecture that listens, brings together and resists fixity. Collaboration is engrained all throughout the project; during research, knowledge is not extracted from ‘subjects’ but constructed collectively: a process that’s messy, embodied and always in flux. By breaking down traditional research and design hierarchies, it shifts authority away from the architect and toward shared authorship, embracing transdisciplinarity and intersectionality as vital conditions, centralizing care and hospitality.

This approach unfolds through shared drawings, communal dinner nights, collective dreams and finally, a 1:1 scale spatial exploration in a queer nightclub in Istanbul. A space scavenged, assembled and transformed through improvisation and shared labor. The storyline reveals key anchor points for queering the architectural process: to value process over product, to embrace temporality, to reintroduce craft - through working hands-on, playfulness and solutions beyond cognition are invited. Very much an unfinished product, this is an inquiry of gathering and holding space, an act of resistance and care - architecture seen as part of a larger celebration.

For over 5 years I have shared my home with 30 others, continuing an ongoing story since the early 1970s, when the then vacant hospital of Delft (Bethel, Bagijnhof) was squatted by a group of students. Since then, more than 270 people have passed through this community, leaving their traces in over 5500 photographs, notes, postcards, birthday banners and house meeting minutes (etc.) found in a basement archive that preserved over 50 years of stories of human presence. These fragments reveal not just a history of habitation, but the gradual making of a community. A community not formed through design, but through countless human interactions.

Our home became the inspiration for a new type of architectural research. Not about finding specific solutions or creating perfect plans, but about following fragments, being guided by stories, and learning all the hidden ways through which space accumulates meaning.
But what allows a place so (technically) unsuitable, a vacant, decrepit hospital with all its shortcomings, to function so successfully for this community?

In a building never intended for living, leaking roofs, awkward staircases, and narrow hallways turned out to be “effectively inefficient”: imperfections that unintendedly triggered social interactions. What at first glance loos like architectural obstacles instead brought people closer together, turning friction into connection. These so-called shortcomings became subtle design forces, guiding movements, encounters, and everyday rituals. It suggests that what architects are trained to “correct” or “resolve” can be the very thing that gives space its social intelligence.

Therefore this project doesn’t aim to re-design but to re-read. Here, seemingly inefficient architectural details are not interpreted as “flawed” technical junctions but as successful social ones. Through a non-linear, foldable storybook/map the building’s human and architectural “voices” unfold through scale and interconnect in all directions without a set beginning or end. This way, each fragment stands on its own, but (through folding out) always in relation to the bigger whole. Not as a fixed format or static object but, like the building itself, as a layered and living network of human stories.

Understanding space through social life expands the boundaries of what architectural education considers valuable and opens new ways of seeing, practicing, and representing architecture.

Mallorca, a major tourist destination in the Mediterranean, faces a growing crisis of water overconsumption, exacerbated by seasonal tourism, urban development, and unsustainable resource management. This graduation project investigates the island’s water scarcity through environmental, cultural, and infrastructural lenses, identifying the disconnect between consumption and natural limits. In response, the project proposes a bathhouse,a space that reconnects users with water as a precious, experiential resource, while also capturing and reusing rainwater.
During the heavy winter rains, water is collected and stored for use in the bathhouse. In the dry summer months, when water cuts are increasingly common in the village, only the communal showers remain in use, reviving a shared water system rooted in collective responsibility. The rest of the bathhouse transitions into a dry space for events and the drying of herbs. This project reintegrates a caretaker into the site and embraces the storytelling potential of water and enchanting infrastructures, allowing new narratives of care, resilience, and community to unfold.

This thesis explores the creation of an architectural "space of inspiration" aimed at revitalizing Dutch architecture and fostering novel perspectives. The research posits that a collaborative environment, facilitating knowledge sharing, experimental design, and public exhibition, can significantly influence architectural practice. The core design objective was to develop an inspiring architectural intervention that inherently integrates principles of circularity and adaptability.

The M4H district, selected for its future developments and material availability, serves as the project's site. The proposed design envisions a dynamic park landscape, featuring a central pavilion and a series of smaller, adaptable pavilions. This evolving park occupies vacant redevelopment plots, utilizing phytoremediation for soil decontamination, and gradually creating new construction ground. During this interim, architectural practices are invited to use the park as an experimentation ground, constructing small, publicly accessible pavilions from reclaimed materials. The existing Ferro factory is repurposed as a "material pavilion" for storage, manufacturing, and assembly, while the adjacent Ferro dome is transformed into flexible office and exhibition spaces for architectural firms. Concluding the design's vision, a biennial event will regularly showcase innovative projects to a global audience, fostering ongoing inspiration within the architectural community.

Europe needs to redefine the way architecture is being built, and also, more importantly, renovated. That is the case also for Poland, with a large stock of degraded housing.
This research explores the potential of bio-based materials and strategies in retrofitting Polish inter-war masonry tenement housing, focusing on circularity while addressing technical requirements, user needs and maintaining historical integrity. Through literature review, market research, cataloguing, and interviews with professionals, the study identifies key challenges in energy efficiency, moisture management, and user satisfaction, proposing bio-based materials such as wood, hemp, flax, wood fibre, straw and many others as effective solutions.
The design focuses on one of the buildings along Grochowska street in Warsaw, with an intention that it could be easily applied to other bildings of the same typology, numerous in the capital. A timber-based structure system is proposed in key interventions to the building, adding new usable space for the residents along with energy retrofitting. Custom timber joinery was developed for that purpose, dawing inspiration from japanese and polsh craftmenship.
The findings of the research emphasize the importance of navigating technical requirements with user preferences, which include affordability, comfort, and adaptability. By addressing these factors, bio-based solutions offer significant advantages in reducing environmental impact of the refurbishment action while enhancing living conditions. To bridge the gap between innovative practices and real-world application, the study also develops a guidebook and materials catalogue, providing accessible knowledge base about biobased renovation strategies to homeowners, designers, and policymakers.
This work contributes to renewable building practices by demonstrating how bio-based strategies can meet both ecological and practical demands, offering a path toward decarbonizing and futureproofing Poland’s aging housing stock.

The Dutch population is growing, and cities are becoming more dense every year. Therefore, we have to share the minimal space we have. Collaborative housing, defined as private dwellings supported by shared facilities and responsibilities, could be a favourable housing type for inhabitants to have a comfortable home within the minimal amount of space of the dense city, since sharing enables a sustainable use of this space. Currently, there is a focus on privacy in housing design. For a shift to collaborative housing design there is a need for a collective perspective on the sense of home. Therefore, the research question of this study is: how does sharing space influence the sense of home for residents in collaborative housing in the Netherlands? The hypothesis is that sharing space has a positive effect on the sense of home for residents in collaborative housing projects.
This case study analysis consists of in-depth interviews in two collaborative housing projects and spatial analysis of four collaborative housing projects in the Netherlands. Through this, the perception of home amongst residents that live in collaborative housing is studied. The case study analysis shows that specific shared spatial features positively influence the sense of home in shared housing projects. Most of these features are situated in the transitional zones between the public and private space. The sense of home in collaborative housing can only be obtained in the presence of a private space. The conclusion of this study is that residents in collaborative housing include shared features within their sense of home. This study adds to the body of knowledge of collaborative housing design. This helps to further implement collaborative housing in the Dutch housing stock. Further research should elaborate on the specific effect of shared spatial features in transitional zones in collaborative housing projects.

This thesis investigates the management and transformation of Christian architectural heritage, with a particular focus on Catholic churches. It explores the dynamics of friction and propulsion that shape this process, analyzing their implications in contemporary society and potential future trajectories. Anchored in the case study of the former Church of Santa Rita da Cascia in Campitelli, located in Rome’s Rione Sant’Angelo, the research offers context-specific reflections intended to stimulate broader discourse on the fate of disused churches across Europe.

Structured around guiding research questions, the thesis is divided into three main sections. The first examines the historical and cultural roles of Catholic churches, emphasizing their function as urban landmarks and spaces of collective identity. The second part addresses the regulatory landscape in Italy, shaped by its cultural and institutional proximity to the Vatican, and contrasts it with the more pragmatic Dutch approach to church reuse. This comparative analysis highlights the tensions between safeguarding symbolic religious value and adapting buildings to contemporary needs.

The final section synthesizes the findings to propose strategies for reimagining Catholic churches in ways that preserve their historical and architectural identity while enabling new, socially relevant functions. Through the lens of the Santa Rita da Cascia case study, the thesis proposes a critical yet constructive perspective on transforming sacred heritage into meaningful assets for modern communities.

In a world full of consumerism, climate change, and capitalism, we face a crisis in how we relate to the world around us. Indigenous values offer a new way forward. This graduation project responds to the task laid out for practitioners to include Indigenous values in the practice. It does so by turning to the values of the Sámi people, the Indigenous people of the North and explores how this can inform architecture.
Because of my unfamiliarity with Sámi practices and beliefs at the start of this project, I looked for an alternative to the Eurocentric design frameworks, which often overlook alternative narratives or oversimplify representations. To include these different stories, there was a need to embrace the unfamiliar and employ this knowledge to design a world in which many worlds fit. This led me to the overarching question: How to make space for the Other? By engaging in interdisciplinary literature analysis and design-for-values frameworks, I gathered tools to make values tangible and translate them into architecture. Through this methodology, I intended to be very attuned to Sámi values and make inexplicit steps of the design process very explicit.
These ideas are grounded in the urban context of Tromsø, Norway—a city with limited visible Sámi representation outside of its touristic identity. Through four site-specific interventions, the Fish-Leather House, the Kitchen, the Weaving House, and the Summer Workshop and its Sheds, this project is a creative collection of practical places and relations, a set of activity spaces. They are not fixed but shaped by the times and contexts in which people engage with them, allowing for a space to find community, speak the language, transfer practical knowledge and reclaim Sámi spaces. Each space embodies core Sámi values: craftsmanship, community, care, and indigenuity.
This project is a continuous exploration of how to engage with the people you are designing for and a reflexive positioning on the role of the architect. The insights gained throughout this process not only informed my design outcomes but also encouraged a deeper understanding of how values shape practices. It emphasises that how we work is just as important as the outcome.

This research explores how architectural interventions can foster urban resilience in post-disaster contexts, focusing on the Uzun Çarşı in Antakya after the 2023 Türkiye earthquake. Through fieldwork, discourse analysis, and ethnographic methods, the study examines how materiality, collective memory, and community agency drive recovery processes. Uzun Çarşı, despite severe destruction, demonstrated resilience through community-led spatial adaptation and the reactivation of everyday practices. The study proposes a community-driven reconstruction of a spice market, utilizing rubble as memory anchors and emphasizing participatory building processes. Rather than restoring a pre-disaster state, the design embraces transformation and continuity, highlighting resilience as an ongoing, dynamic process rooted in social, material, and spatial relations.

The City of London, situated in the very heart of the capital, serves as the financial centre of the United Kingdom. Informally referred to as the City or the Square Mile, it maintains a distinct identity that sets it apart from its immediate surroundings. As outsiders, our understanding of the City of London remains shrouded in mystery and myth, entwined with an image that has been, whether deliberately or inadvertently, constructed by the place itself, its character, its people and its pursuits.

The project is situated within the context of the Square Mile, building upon the City of London Corporation’s plan to enhance its public realm and become more inclusive. The work established a perspective on what an accessible layer of architecture could entail in the City. It emphasised the importance of unconventional spaces within the Square Mile, alleyways, rooftops or other, and recognising their potential value. Within this project the alleys and roofs proved essential for integrating the new proposed interventions at a chosen site, addressing issues of both inaccessibility and privateness on the horizontal and vertical plane. Passageways were transformed into entrances, while rooftops provided the largest areas of open space suitable for development. The new structures form a gradient of public spaces that mark the beginning of a new public realm.

Although the work does not extend beyond the boundaries of the City of London, it is worth asking a fundamental question; what truly defines the essence of an urban environment? There is only one City of London, yet its distinctly neoliberal character is increasingly found in other urban places around the world. In these places, what was once public space is becoming private and inaccessible. Within a time when urban living and its spatial qualities have become more of a privilege than a right, it remains up to the architect, positioned between competing social, political and economic forces, to mediate their impact on the city.

As urban space becomes increasingly tight and compressed, cemeteries have slowly withdrawn from our daily lives from the highly open public spaces in history. If cemeteries remain as they are, they may become completely inaccessible in the future, leaving people without a common memorial space. In order to cope with this possible future and status quo, I combined new technologies and urban renewal to come up with a conceptual vision of a new prototype for the cemetery.

This graduation comes from a deep interest in understanding why some buildings foster vibrant communities, while others do not. Now that interest in cohousing is rapidly growing, both from grassroots movements and top-down initiatives, grasping the factors that explain why some communities thrive has become increasingly significant. Cohousing may have many advantages from mental health, and informal care to enviromental benefits. Yet it is not simply shared spaces that create these advantages. It is the community itself. The goal of this graduation was therefore to bundle insights on how to design cohousing so that it facilitates community engagement.

A pattern language was developed with the intention of aiding both resident-led initiatives and architects. A pattern language is a network of interrelated design solutions to common problems. After a wide literature review, case studies and in practice testing, a cohousing pattern language was formulated that balances complexity and comprehensiveness. 7 base principles and 40 design patterns explain how architecture can facilitate community engagement. These patterns and principles are integrated into an 8-step framework tailored for the Dutch cohousing development context.

For the design part of this graduation project, the pattern language has been implemented to design an affordable and sustainable floating cohousing building for the Dutch delta. This architectural design addresses the housing and space crisis by exploring the floating frontier of architecture. The floating urban villa may house 5 to 20 people and with minimal adaptions can facilitate a wide range of engaged communities. Up to 7 floating villas can together form a layered cooperative housing community with a layered framework for expression.

There is simple formula or design solution for cohousing so that it facilitates community engagement. Each community, location, and project is unique and requires specific and co-designed solutions. The book may help that process as it has identified abstract principles and concrete patterns that provide valuable guidance for designing spaces that support thriving, engaged communities. These are applicable to a wide range of cohousing lifestyle visions, architectural typologies and contexts. Ultimately, it is up to architects and residents to creatively integrate constraints, principles, context, and patterns to co-create cohousing architecture that facilitates their unique, engaged community.

This research investigates the potential of architecture to shape values, lifestyles, and behaviors, particularly in the context of mass consumerism. The study begins with a chronological exploration of the history of consumer culture and retail architecture, learning how architecture has evolved to influence consumption patterns, behaviors and societal values. Through this historical lens the research identifies the potential of architecture to define constraints and shape human action, illustrating how built environments reinforced consumer behaviors over time.

Moving beyond historical analysis, the research focuses on the ethics of care and the process of responsibilization. It examines how neoliberal frameworks shift responsibility for mindful consumption onto individuals, emphasizing Personalization, Authorization, Capabilization, and Transformation. The research identifies a missing step in this process - the relational and situated awareness needed for cultivation of care. Conscientization, as a necessary step, deepens personal responsibility by embedding individuals within a broader context (nature, others and the self). This situated awareness is essential for transforming consumer behavior from an alienated process to an active and responsible participation. Through speculative method the study explores how spaces can embody the principles of responsibilization creating environments that stimulate care-oriented consumption practices.

This research concludes that architecture plays a crucial role in shaping consumer behavior. While architects cannot fully control the impact of their designs, they can establish frameworks that cultivate responsibility and care in the context of mass production and consumerism, using the process of responsibilisation grounded in care.

Based on the research, an architectural project was developed in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, which integrates a public workshop with living amenities and an urban farm.

Kathmandu is aching, its border neighborhoods stretching out, moving up to the rim of the valley. The city is soon reaching its limits for urban expansion, and perhaps it already has: most agricultural land has been replaced by urban settlements, and the city’s population keeps surging. The architecture is changing rapidly and houses are being replaced one after another, every house a bit more slender and a bit taller than before. The turnover rate is so high that Kathmandu’s streets feel like perpetual construction sites, tirelessly building and constructing and demolishing again. Open spaces are disappearing, as well as the rich cultural qualities of Nepal's urbanism from before. These changes seem to happen without a greater plan in sight, and many say the city is become worse, not better.

Perhaps these issues are just part of a city in development: a Kathmandu that is struggling with its growing pains and the inevitable effects of urban boom. But to move forward from these pains, a couple of things are crucial: experimentation with alternative ways of building, closely working together with craftspeople and inhabitants, documenting and archiving the past architectures, and telling stories about a different city: one that is not pestered by pollution, built smartly to house everyone safely, and one that can resist the earthquakes to come.
These four ideas are the starting point for the design phase: the People’s Earthquake Museum of Kathmandu. This initiative was started after 2015 by a small community in Nepal, but has sadly been discontinued due to a lack of resources. The building aims to connect tradition with modernity: vernacular techniques with the modern needs of Kathmandu’s residents. At the same time, the building, located inside the commercial block in Gongabu Bus Park, is giving space to exhibit stories about the earthquakes, architectures that have been lost, and to showcase ways of moving forward. With museum spaces, an archive and library, auditorium and workspaces, the building revolves around reflection, mitigation, and experimentation.

This thesis is divided in four chapters:
1. Stories from KTM - photographic travelogue of Kathmandu and the Nepali rural
2. The architect, the builder, the researcher- a documentary of three interviews
3. Growing Pains - a short essay connecting the findings in Nepal with existing literature
4. The People's Earthquake Museum - a design proposal that visualizes the research results

This is a story about an archive that could sit in the heart of Appingedam, Groningen, commemorating two diasporic cultures which, against all the odds, found refuge in this quiet, mediaeval city.

The first Ashkenazi Jewish population saw its birth in Appingedam, Groningen in the early 17th century. Despite centuries of difficulties the community flourished in this small rural city for centuries until it was all but eliminated in the 1940s, starting with their forceful eviction to the Dutch concentration/transit camp Westerbork. My grandmother is the last survivor of this community.

After the war, Kamp Westerbork - renamed Schattenberg - saw the arrival of a new community, the Moluccans. Intended to be a temporary stay whilst the Dutch negotiated their independence as a state from Indonesia, the years saw little progress as it became evident that this temporary stay was quickly becoming permanent. In 1960 it was proclaimed that the Moluccan community would be rehoused permanently across the province of Groningen, with the first city of permanent dwelling being Appingedam. A city which can be walked across in 25 minutes now bore witness to the birth of two significant communities within the Netherlands, centuries apart. Although there could never have been any crossover (one community terminated prior to the other starting) this is the story of how to analyse the intrinsically spiritual connections between two vastly different communities, and how a new syncretic direction for commemoration - one the focuses on the power of a multiplicity of memory rather than the privacy and exclusivity of a single collective remembrance - can be brought forward.