This research investigates the Hortillonnages of Amiens, a protected wetland landscape shaped by historical peat extraction and irrigated agriculture. Although now recognized as a natural wetland, its spatial structure and water systems are largely the result of past productive activities that continue to influence the landscape.

The study argues that the Hortillonnages should not be understood as a static preserved environment, but as a dynamic spatial system shaped by post-extraction and post-agricultural conditions. While the original productive uses have disappeared, their material and spatial effects still determine interactions between land, water, and human activity.

Through mapping and spatial analysis, the research examines how these inherited structures continue to organize contemporary patterns of use and management. The project highlights the importance of focusing on ongoing processes rather than fixed end states, and explores how architecture can engage with landscapes that persist through continuous adaptation and change. ... Read more

This thesis explores how surveillance shapes public space in Paris, using the city as both a historical and contemporary case study of centralized control. The strong centralization of political, cultural, and corporate power in France is reflected spatially in Paris itself, particularly through Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s 19th-century redesign of the city. His wide boulevards and strategic urban nodes transformed medieval Paris into a more legible and controllable environment, laying the foundation for modern forms of surveillance through architecture.

The research connects these historical forms of control to contemporary surveillance systems. While earlier models of power relied on physical visibility and spatial order, modern surveillance extends far beyond the public sphere into personal digital life. Drawing on theories by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, the thesis argues that society has shifted from disciplinary systems based on observation to control systems based on data, information flows, and networked infrastructures. Today, individuals are monitored through digital traces such as browsing behavior, location data, social networks, and biometric information, creating systems of control that are both invisible and deeply embedded in daily life.

In Paris, this condition is reinforced by security measures such as bag checks, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and anti-terror policies like Vigipirate, which have normalized a culture of constant monitoring. Surveillance is not equally distributed, however; the Parisian banlieues reveal significant inequalities in how control and security are applied across urban space.

The thesis examines the fragility created by this surveillance environment, both physically and psychologically. It argues that constant observation fosters fear, self-regulation, and reduced individual autonomy. Ultimately, the research investigates how architecture and design can challenge or resist surveillance-driven urban control and create spaces that restore sovereignty, openness, and freedom in the public realm. ... Read more

For this project Zonneberg cave network is viewed as a living system. One that is shaped pressure, by salt migration and time. The thesis is an exploration of the collaboration of architecture; with the geological and atmospheric forces within the Zonneberg sub-terranean quarries; through a series of interventions that stabilize, cultivate and harvest the caves evolving environmental conditions. ... Read more

Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara, is presented as a technologically
advanced, environmentally resilient, and socially inclusive solution to
Jakarta’s structural crises. While official narratives frame the relocation as
a rational response to flooding, land subsidence, congestion, and uneven
development, this thesis argues that data functions not merely as a planning
tool but as a mechanism of governance that renders land, ecology, and
populations legible to the state.

Rather than being built on empty land, Nusantara is constructed through the
production of emptiness itself. Data regimes abstract ecological complexity,
Indigenous occupation, and political conflict into measurable categories that
can be optimized and governed. Geological surveys, environmental metrics,
zoning classifications, and smart-city systems transform uncertainty into
administrative certainty, enabling territorial intervention while obscuring its
social and ecological consequences.

Drawing on political ecology, smart-city theory, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, and systems thinking, the thesis demonstrates how
contemporary digital infrastructures reproduce colonial logics of abstraction
and extraction. Through environmental mapping, subsurface modelling,
and computational planning, data actively constructs territorial legitimacy,
making the city governable before it is materially or socially inhabited.
The thesis also examines the fragility of this data-driven legitimacy. Through
sentiment analysis and discursive mapping, it identifies growing tensions
between state narratives, public perception, and media representation,
raising the possibility that Nusantara’s infrastructural systems may be
completed before meaningful occupation occurs.

In response, the project proposes an alternative architectural framework
that designs for uncertainty, under-occupation, and infrastructural afterlife.
Rather than treating failure as an anomaly, it positions occupancy collapse
as a legitimate design condition. Ultimately, the thesis argues that urbanism
cannot rely solely on prediction and technocratic optimization; architecture
must remain capable of adapting when projected futures fail to materialize ... Read more

The Wadden Sea is a highly dynamic intertidal wetland landscape, never fully stable and always temporary. But centuries of human activity have rigidized it, leaving the area unable to adapt to changing conditions. For the landscape to find new breath, people need to hand over control and embrace the uncertainty and temporality that the landscape longs for. This report proposes architecture as a spatial facilitator for such a cultural shift, offering a place where knowledge, attachment, governance and lived experience meet and effective stewardship is born. The project introduces the Waddenfolk as the latent community whose embodied knowledge and storytelling traditions form the cultural foundation for ecological care. It asks how architecture can give form to a nomadic assembly that teaches temporality and activates the Waddenfolk to find community and stewardship in their lived knowledge of the fragile, ever-changing landscape. Through design-based research, the project develops a three-part architectural system: the Shed, a fixed structure lifted off the ground to signal fragility; the Bubble, an inflatable nomadic building that travels between islands; and the Path, an ecological and artistic connector. Together they form the ritual site for the Waddenfolk Assembly, a seasonal event that gathers communities, awakens myths, and negotiates action toward the protection and restoration of the Wadden Sea. The project demonstrates that architecture can be an attuned, mobile, and ritualistic event-maker that transforms control into empathy and community into stewardship. ... Read more

In the fascia trasformata of southern Sicily, intensive greenhouse agriculture has expanded across the coastal plain in a process this thesis terms plastification. Its fragility is layered: depleted groundwater, a territory saturated with plastic waste, a volatile same-day market, and an exploitative seasonal labour regime. The project asks how an architecture of logistics might ease these pressures while keeping intact the agricultural flow on which the region depends.

The work unfolds in two phases. An analytical phase reads the territory through six mapping themes and locates logistics, the movement, storage, and exchange of produce, as the point at which its fragility concentrates and at which architecture can meaningfully act. A synthetic phase develops this finding into a corridor-wide network of rail-connected agricultural terminals with long-term storage, designed in depth at a single terminal in Licata.

The terminal turns storage into a buffer against market volatility, absorbs the quality verification that currently invites fraud, and reuses the territory's discarded greenhouse film as its facade. Sited where road and rail meet, it gives the new logistical backbone a presence along the highway. In doing so, the project argues that an architecture grounded in a systemic understanding of its territory can soften the very conditions that make it fragile. ... Read more

Halldór Laxness (2002) once wrote that the land ceases to be earthly where it meets the sky, as though Iceland itself resists the category of ground entirely. On the Reykjanes Peninsula, that resistance has become literal. Since 2021, a renewed volcanic cycle has pulled geological time into the rhythm of daily life. Roads buried under fresh lava are reconstructed within days. The town of Grindavík has been repeatedly evacuated, its streets fenced and silent, its future unresolved. Lava moves through inhabited territory, and the question of what architecture might do within that condition remains quietly open. There is something in this that Laxness understood long before the eruptions began: that Iceland’s land was never a backdrop. It was always the protagonist. Architecture has largely approached it otherwise, treating volcanic matter as something to be deflected, the ground as something to be stilled. Yet lava is the very material that shaped Icelandic construction for centuries, and it continues to form and reform the landscape around the structures raised at its edges. It seems worth asking what might be possible if that process was engaged rather than resisted. This thesis begins from that question. Not with conclusions, but with speculation. Lava, in its movement from molten flow to cooled aggregate, passes through states that carry spatial, structural, and textural qualities unlike anything quarried or manufactured. What architectural language might emerge from following that transformation closely? What kinds of spaces, surfaces, and structures could arise if the process itself was allowed to participate in the making? ... Read more

A project about the loss of Georgia's bathing culture in the shift from East to West. Resulting in a new typology for a underground bathhouse in the mountain region near Tbilisi; using stone and metal. ... Read more

Towards New Feeding Grounds investigates the peri-urban countryside of Chongqing as a contested frontier shaped by megacity expansion, infrastructural transformation, and emerging forms of automated production. Situated within territories destabilized by large-scale water, energy, and digital infrastructures, the project responds to landscapes suspended between agricultural memory and urban speculation.

The proposal introduces a hybrid food infrastructure that combines an automated greenhouse core with open, ground-based agricultural fields, markets, and communal spaces. Through this dual system, the project negotiates between efficiency and collectivity, automation and manual labour, positioning food production as a civic and spatial practice rather than a sealed industrial process.

By weaving territorial research, technological systems, and architectural form, the project proposes a new techno-agrarian typology that redefines agriculture as visible, accessible, and infrastructural within the megacity. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on urbanization, food sovereignty, and the future relationship between city, countryside, and automation.
... Read more

This essay examines political-geographical liminality as a theoretical concept and its influence on the built environment. I will argue that liminality is strongly context-dependent and dynamic, highlighting how border regions often oscillate between ideological paradigms. The main research question of this essay will be: ‘How do liminality and oscillation between ideological paradigms influence the built environment?’ The essay will show that the effect of liminality takes form in a constant reshaping of a country's narrative. To fit the imagined identity, the built environment can become subject to alteration, as architecture and urban design can serve as physical manifestations of political agendas, cultural ideologies and historical memory. Shifts in geopolitical power and identity aspirations frequently leave their mark on cities, reshaping landscapes to align with dominant narratives and rejecting elements that contradict them. By exploring the connection between the large geopolitical scale and the smaller urban scale, the essay underscores how global and regional dynamics are inscribed into the local environment.

The concept of liminality, stemming from anthropological studies of rites of passage by Arnold van Gennep and later reinterpreted by Victor Turner captures the essence of ‘in-betweenness’ and will be explained more in-depth in the first chapter, Defining Liminality. The concept is characterised by ambiguity and has been interpreted in multiple ways, in the realm of political-geographical liminality, there is more consensus about what the concept entails and will, therefore, define the rest of this essay. The concept of liminality is very much spatially-bound and therefore chapter two, On the Periphery, will be about marginal spaces. Political-geographical liminality not only describes an in-between state but also underscores the tension between forces that shape identity, autonomy and spatial development, in chapter three, Trauma and the Built Environment, the attention will be drawn to the effect of liminality of a city’s built environment. ... Read more

Integrating shipyards with the surrounding context and unveiling the strong relation between this historic industry and Istanbul. As mentioned in the problematization section, the industry shapes leftover spaces which are not currently used. The project will aim to utilize these spaces in the shipyards by creating a series of interventions without interfering with the industry’s processes while trying to invite people outside of this context. The result will be a number of different structures, varying in uses and functions, referred to as magnets. The organization of the structures and their program will be carefully structured. Each point will have a carefully selected purpose, acting both as an individual mechanism but also as an integral part of the holistic experience of the route that is created from linking all the different points. The route will transition from land to water to carefully frame and portray all the different perspectives the shipyard can be viewed from.

The purpose of those structures is going to address the technical aspect of the yards (architecture as a machine) where the ships become a source of materials that can be treated with different strategies to result to a variety of potential outcomes. Repurposing part of them while hosting new program or even fully disassembling them to create a material library for the construction of the new built fabric. The project will act as a demonstration of the endless possibilities of reusing and recycling parts and materials from retired ships.

The programmatic use of the interventions will aim to frame the shipyard, so that the visitor can understand the complex operations of the industry. Multiple viewing points are integrated to allow this to happen but also resting areas and temporary housing accommodations allow the visitor to slowly approach the complex spatial conditions that are present on site.
1. Reception and Changing rooms
2. Temporary Houses
3. Resting Space / Cafe
4. Observatory
... Read more

'Transitional territories: architecture of (post)-extraction in the Ağaçlı coal fields, Istanbul' revolves around the interaction between soil, extraction and architecture. The project addresses the ephemerality of extractive landscapes, imagining new ways of relating to the earth. Seeing soil not as a static being, but as a dynamic vehicle of becoming, a medium constantly in transition.
Throughout the history of Istanbul, the city has used different forms of energy supply for heating and electricity. The Ağaçli coal fields have been extracted for coal to supply the energy to Istanbul during a large part of the twentieth century. Although the rate and volume of extraction have since then reduced, the landscape is still a a testimony to the changing grounds. The history
of extraction still remains clearly visible in the topography, which is formed by different types of extraction sites. The project considers architectural modes of extraction, changing the logic to incorporate and legitimate the soil in a way that constructs new spatial relations and forms. The project questions the standard reclamation narrative by positioning itself on the frontiers of cultivated and wild land, between past and present.
... Read more

Filtering and differentiation at borders shape the composition and multiplicity of living labor, as well as the formation of often exploitative labor regimes. The relation between migration and the garments and textile Industry in the area of Istanbul, the center of textile and garments production and simultaneously a destination and hub for migration is exemplary of this condition. Transnational economic, labor and migration policies are reflected in the spatial manifestation of the textile and garments sector in the area of Istanbul. This leads to a heterogeneity of practices in the organization of the production system with main suppliers, subcontractors, retailers, home based worker’s networks and logistics, creating dense industry clusters extending deep into residential areas converting them into assembly lines, turning neighborhoods into machines. While technology is advancing rapidly labor conditions have remained problematic and outdated production models account for overproduction and waste.
Architecture can address these socio political and economic issues and these in turn shape architecture therefore it is worth it to make an experiment and let the systems networks and methods of garment production contaminate architecture: How is architecture transformed by using and reshuffling networks and production processes of the garment industry? What does a hybridization of these production processes and systems uncover about them? Which parameters can be manipulated for architecture to act as an agent in improving labor conditions and production processes?
This context sets the frame for discussing issues such as transitions in labor and production models, genericness, mass customization, flexibility, high-tech versus low-tech sparking a debate on how we fabricate architecture.
... Read more

The vast area that has become available with the closure of Atatürk Havalimanı has turned into a void in the metropolis. Although it is deeply ingrained in the fabric of the city and its infrastructure, the area is completely closed off and inaccessible to the public. This raises the question: How can architecture transform enclosed urban areas and engender their transformation into public space?

Especially in Istanbul, where the number of enclosed areas has steadily increased, it is relevant to research how architecture can address enclosure. Specifically, the areas abandoned due to the departure and closure of an airport need to be considered because they are deeply integrated into the fabric of the city and its infrastructure. The transformation of the former Atatürk Havalimanı will explore the relationships between the city, the void, and its exclusionary perimeter.

The project aims to establish an approach to the transformation of existing infrastructure. It encompasses various disciplines within the faculty and, therefore, serves as an interesting exercise in transferability. With the practice of architecture becoming an increasingly interdisciplinary field, these types of projects offer valuable insights into the boundaries of the field and how methods traditionally associated with architecture can be applied on larger and smaller scales. The fence-like structure is based on design principles derived from my urban analysis, theoretical research, and the local conditions. Therefore, the design is specific to its site, but the methods discovered throughout the process and the conceptual approach are transferable. For instance, the research and subsequent design consider the thresholds between different identities as spaces with a certain depth. This approach can be valuable in enhancing spaces and reflecting on the spatial conditions that shape them. ... Read more

This graduation addresses the need to improve living conditions in informal settlements, while also preserving the cultural and social identity of the communities living there. The question of how to improve the living conditions in these settlements while also respecting the cultural and social identity of the residents is a complex one. It requires a holistic approach that takes into account not only physical infrastructure and services, but also the social, economic, and cultural context of the community.
Addressing this research question could have a significant impact on the lives of people living in informal settlements, by improving their living conditions and promoting sustainable development. It could also serve as a model for addressing similar challenges in other cities and countries. Furthermore, it also requires a delicate balance between the preservation of cultural heritage and the need for modernization and improvement of living conditions. ... Read more

The focus of this thesis is on the phenomenon of the informal settlement and its
informal economy. The location of the graduation project called Tarlabası is an informal settlement in the middle of the city centre of Istanbul. The neighbourhood has been a shelter for the poor, refugees and minorities for generations. The district functions as its own hidden and self-regulating world.
This has created an informal economy that is inextricably linked to the rest of Istanbul, such as the waste/recycling industry. It cannot exist without the informal branch of waste pickers, who are responsible for 80% of recycling in Turkey. The unique district of Tarlabası is seen as bad and criminal by
the authoritarian neoliberal city planners. Therefore, the neighbourhood has already been hit by gentrification processes, ignoring the unique characteristics and social roots of this neighbourhood. Urban renewal or gentrification or however you want to name it, is seen as a necessary tool to erase certain parts of social and physical identities created in the last 50 years via programs of demolition and resettlement. Residents are evicted or given unfair compensation to leave their homes or workplaces. As a result, the gentrification processes result in a displacement of the poor, driving them away from the city centre and their informal work. In 2009, at least one million residents in Istanbul were under threat of forced eviction due to the Urban Transformation Project. The unique characteristics, such as creativity, flexibility, intrinsic value and self-regulation are ignored by the top-down view of modernization, leading to generic neighbourhoods without economic flexibility and with social segregation, but also resulting in a further decline of informal settlements. This thesis aims to take a critical look at the current neoliberalist modernization processes of
urban areas around the world through the case of Istanbul. Urban informality is receiving more and more attention in the literature, but there is still a lot of uncertainty about how we can deal with this phenomenon in urban design and architecture. ... Read more

This research explores mapping as a critical tool to investigate the geopolitical complexity of the Marmara Basin region. The area around the Sea of Marmara is approached as a layered and strategic space where East and West Turkey are interconnected through infrastructure, trade flows, and political agendas. Due to the historical role of Istanbul and ongoing geopolitical tensions, including the Montreux Convention, the region is understood as a transit space where territory and infrastructure are closely intertwined.

The study focuses on three main themes: territory, infrastructure, and mapping. Cartography is not treated merely as a representational tool, but as a critical and formative medium that actively reveals and shapes territorial relations and complexities. ... Read more

The Earth has been used as a shelter in ancient times as one of humankind’s first inhabitation methods, as these natural cavities are known for their safety and climate stability. Today, beneath the modern cities, under the buildings and streets, a complex network of spaces, pipes, tunnels, and pillars hold the cities together while keeping them alive. While our modern cities above the ground keep evolving, the underground cities become more complex and denser. Unfortunately, the underground spaces belonging to the first and second world wars, like bunkers and air-raid shelters, are mostly neglected and forgotten from further development, which excludes the underground cities and spaces in particular out of the perception and thus the memory of the inhabitants. This paper will first create a general understanding of perception and create an individual memory in the underground spaces. Then it will investigate the collective memory as a fundamental part of the underground structures. Finally, a theoretical framework will be developed and discussed to establish a new collective memory by creating a counter-memory through spatial architectural experience. ... Read more