This master thesis aims to raise a discussion about the new Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. The competition brief for the redevelopment of the M HKA, published by the Flemish Community in 2019, is taken as a key reference point. The brief proposes a move into a new, purpose-built museum on the site of a courthouse building that will be demolished, two blocks down from the current site, as an urban focal point for the newly built monumental linear public park in Antwerp South. Within this urban plan, the existing museum would most likely be demolished to make room for a new housing development.

However, the political and financial motivations behind the move to the new location, which is, according to the brief, based on the site’s iconic potential, can be questioned. Especially since M HKA’s anti-institutional history is intrinsically connected to the existing museum. During the 1980s, a 19th-century grain warehouse was squatted by a group of Belgian artists as an alternative gallery space and was converted to a museum to accommodate M HKA in 1987. Instead of building a new museum on the proposed site, this project proposes a museum building that continues to grow from the existing museum and extends its industrial character. The existing museum is placed in relation to both the large industrial structures, documented by the Bechers, and the cathedral, which can all be characterized as large structures that exist out of different parts that have developed over time and are able to accommodate different alterations by either adding or removing parts. The construction of the proposal is spread out over different building phases so that the museum can be kept open during the construction. The proposed museum of contemporary art is not a static institution but an anti-monument that is able to respond to changing societal, political, financial, or institutional changes, in which the possibility of incompletion becomes part of the building.

M HKA institution has its roots in the avant-garde, bottom-up initiatives of artists who were escaping the rigidness of institutions and sought for alternative spaces to practice art. There is a fundamental contradiction between what M HKA’s history is and what future it wants. Therefore, I decided to take over the building that exists on the plot to create the last act of appropriation and embody the spirit of the institution by this decision.

As the existing court building could not meet the requirements of the brief and it doesn’t represent any significant architectural values, I treat it as a scenography and a tool to organize a museum rather than a relic. As a result, the massing of the museum wraps and “consumes” the existing structure.

The building is a mediator between two urban qualities - the park and the riverbank promenade. Vast urban space opens for visitors as well as pedestrians who do not intend to visit the institution.

Occasionally, the exhibition part and back office blend together, so the visitor can experience a transparent museum, where boundaries are softened. What is more, exhibitions can happen in corridors or former office rooms as well as in the basement, which compliments vast spaces in the new part of the project and allows for multiple exhibitions to happen simultaneously.

The facade represents the idea of wrapping and hiding, being mostly a solid, hanging element during inactive moments, but it also has the capacity to represent what happens inside the building if needed. Different treatments of metal panels and meshes allow for various levels of transparency and reveal the insides of the institution as well as treating the building as a billboard.

Delivery of biomolecules using pulsed electric fields or electrotransfer has applications such as biomedical engineering, bioprocess engineering and genomic engineering. When a cell is placed in an electric field, the induced transmembrane voltage catalyzes the formation of pores on the cell membrane. This enables the delivery of otherwise cell membrane-impermeable molecules to the cells. Despite the broad significance, a complete biophysical understanding of electrotransfer at a subcellular level and a translation of electroporation as a high-throughput and high-efficiency technique is still lacking. In this dissertation: (i) we unravel how actin networks regulate the cell membrane electropermeability, (ii) we reveal the intracellular biophysical transport mechanisms of electrotransferred DNA cargo, (iii) we present a localized electroporation device where cells are trapped in regions of high electric fields by the flow.

A crucial challenge during the initial stages of bioprocess development is that tools used to screen microorganisms and optimize cultivation conditions do not represent the environment imposed at industrial scale. Inside an industrial-scale bioreactor, microorganisms are often cultivated under fed-batch conditions, where nutrients are supplied during the culture. Additionally, microorganisms continuously keep crossing zones with low and high concentrations of substrate and dissolved oxygen. However, during initial bioprocess development, growth and productivity of microorganisms are evaluated under batch conditions due to the difficulty of dynamically controlling nutrient and dissolved oxygen concentrations in screening equipment such as micotiter plates. This inconsistency in cultivation conditions often leads to selection of strains that fail to perform at industrial scale. The difficulty in continuously supplying minute amounts of nutrients to microorganisms in microtiter plates and imposing dynamic dissolved oxygen levels throughout the cultivation experiment necessitates an alternative approach. Microfluidic technology holds the potential to address this inconsistency with fidelity by offering high-throughput experimentation and excellent control over the culture microenvironment. The central theme of this Ph.D. project is the design and development of droplet-based microfluidic technology, that enable studying microorganisms under such dynamically controlled cultivation conditions. As such, the outcomes from this Ph.D. project form a foundation step towards narrowing the gap between screening and industrial-scale use, with an eye to keeping the technology sufficiently simple to be adopted by the biotechnology and bioengineering community.

Thin liquid films are fluid structures with perpendicular length scale, typically of the O(< 10 μm), being much smaller than the lateral length scale, typically of the O(> 1 mm). From foams and emulsions to tear films on eyes, they widely occur in industrial processes and natural phenomena. Depending on the wetting energies between its different interfaces, it is susceptible to developing an instability which can lead to its subsequent rupture. It is a great example of how dynamics at microscopic scale influence large scale physical behaviour, with instabilities at micron scale influencing a foam collapse or the blinking action of an eye. The subject of this thesis focuses on non-planar thin liquid films that are found, for instance, in between two foam bubbles or in partial wetting systems in microfluidic channels. The dynamics of such non-planar films is governed by two thinning mechanisms. The first mechanism involves drainage due to curvature differences, and results in a localized depression, commonly referred to as a dimple, at the connection between the planar and curved regions. The second thinning mechanism involves growth of a fluctuation originated instability arising from the competition between a stabilizing surface tension and destabilizing van der Waals forces. For this second thinning mechanism to manifest, the film’s lateral length (radius) needs to be large enough to accommodate unstable waves to fit within the film. We study thin film dynamics, by performing numerical simulations that incorporate all these crucial physical processes in the thin film equation...

Electroporation is a popular technique to permeabilize the membrane for different purposes such as medical treatments, food processing and biomass processing. In this thesis, we use the bottom-up approach to unravel the role of specific cellular components in the electroporation of cellular membranes. We have studied the role of the gel-phase domains in the membrane and the contribution of the actin-cortex during electroporation. In order to do so, we have prepared binary-phase vesicles, containing fluid- and gelphase lipids, and actin-cortex encapsulated vesicles. Consequently, the electroporation mechanisms of these two samples provide systematic insight in the electroporation mechanism of a single cell.

Nanoparticles have properties of interest in biology, physics, ecology, geology, chemistry, medicine, aerospace, food science, and engineering among many other fields, due to their intrinsic properties arising from their large surface area to volume ratio and small scale. Most nanoparticle applications require particle’s surface adaptations, for which numerous methods have been developed. For this purpose, the characteristics of fluidization that make it an attractive processing technique are the large gas-solid contact area, no solvent, potential scalability, and suitability for continuous processing. Nanoparticles are not fluidized individually, but rather as clusters, which formdue to the relatively large interparticle forces. As a result, fluidization dynamics is strongly linked to nanoparticle agglomeration.