Villages are nestled between a mountain and a river that runs through the valley. Agriculture occupies the land within the urban landscape, while fish farming takes place in the rivers. In one village belonging to the Ayu indigenous tribe, at the foot of the mountain, houses are marked by cracks in concrete walls and dents in their metal roof sheets. Conveyor belts run through backyards from the grey, dusty land carved into the hillside to the industrial plant. Trucks drive along the road beside a baseball field filled with children.

For the past 50 years, fear has consumed the daily lives of the Ayu tribe of the Truku people in Hualien, Taiwan. Notifications of explosion schedules displayed on LED screens in the town centre prepare residents for the vibrations, noise, and dusty air to come. Will another rock fall into the village today? Fear is multiplied as earthquakes and typhoons approach the region. Will there be another landslide or rockfall? From 700 metres to 150 metres, the mine is getting lower and closer. When will it stop? ... Read more

This research investigates the intersection of urban density, poverty, and institutional frameworks, examining how these forces challenge an individual’s sense of belonging and social participation. Using the life of writer Jean Genet in Paris as a primary case study, the project explores the phenomenon of living and surviving with only basic needs met. Genet’s transgressive existence, characterized by vagabondage, criminal activity, and frequent incarcerations in facilities such as La Santé, serves as a lens to map the behaviors of the homeless and the impoverished as they navigate state regulations and institutional structures.

The research methodology employs iterative modeling to translate Genet’s experiences into an architectural language. The design process progresses from site-specific exploration to the translation of personal experience into spatial form. Ultimately, the final design addresses fundamental human needs, specifically shelter and sanitation, through the theoretical framework of the Michel Foucaul’s heterotopia.
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This research is an attempt to understand the formation-deformation patterns of the forest landscape in Manavgat, Turkey, under an intensifying fire regime, and an experiment of a “vegetal proposal” that is shaped by flames. Despite being excluded from forest care and inhabiting the fragile thresholds inside the forest, a decentralized rural counter-practice of villagers that reclaims the forest and adopts its flows is imagined as the extension of current standardized land management activities and ownership.

The “Land Ledger”, situated in one of the burned villages in the 2021 wildfire, positions itself as a dynamic “becoming” by retaining the moments of different fire encounter scenarios as spatial conditions to embrace and appreciate. This approach focuses on the diverse fire timescales of design components, interconnected yet divisible, similar to the “augmented” patches of the forest landscape that contain numerous fractures having unique eco-histories. Recording these cyclical stories of resurgence and destruction, the proposal weaves the (re)organization of the rural art of making together without proximity or a strict frame, this time for inhabiting the ignition zone responsibly.
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This project investigates Halabja as a fragile borderscape in which memory, violence, ecology, and territorial control remain deeply entangled. Rather than approaching Halabja only through the chemical attack of 16 March 1988, the research situates this event within a longer spatial history of Kurdish fragmentation, state violence, environmental damage, and border enforcement. Through critical mapping, the project examines how power operates through regulations, infrastructures, movement, ground conditions, surface traces, and spatial events. The landscape is therefore not treated as a neutral background to history, but as an active archive in which violence continues to be materially and socially present.
The research focuses on Ababayle, a damaged and partly abandoned village near Halabja, where the remains of former houses appear as scattered stones in the landscape. These traces form the basis for an architectural intervention that works through cutting, excavation, and inhabitation. Instead of reconstructing the ruins or imposing a conventional monument, the project carves into the existing terrain, creating a labyrinthine route and an underground memorial square. Memory is approached through bodily experience.
The project questions whether remembrance can remain meaningful if it is only symbolic or contemplative. For this reason, the memorial is conceived as a lived spatial condition rather than a fixed object. Acts such as gardening, weaving, gathering, maintaining, and re-digging become central to the project. These practices connect ecological repair, cultural memory, collective presence, and care for the land. Healing is therefore not presented as a final resolution, but as an ongoing and incomplete relation between people, landscape, and memory.
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This thesis proposes an architectural and programmatic alternative to the socioeconomic decline and material decay of traditional settlements in Zagori, Greece. While the region experiences high seasonal tourism, its permanent population is shrinking, trapping the villages in a cycle of economic mono-culture and "spatial museification" that freezes historic homes into empty backdrops. Drawing on Souzana Antonakaki’s concept of architectural care, this project argues that historic buildings lose their soul when deprived of daily inhabitancy. Rather than treating these structures as untouchable monuments, the design "refuses the terms of survival" by transforming decaying private assets into a shared public infrastructure managed by a cooperative.
The project tests this theory in the village of Dilofo through a precise, aggressive subtractive slice carved through a tight cluster of three ruined houses right next to the central square. Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s Anarchitecture and Kengo Kuma’s structural lightness, this intervention removes the interior party walls to merge the separate footprints into a single, continuous public void open to the sky. Programmatically unassigned, the porous rooms adapt fluidly to the changing seasons, shifting from an active food hub and communal kitchen during the summer panegyri festival to a quiet, contemplative sanctuary on regular days. Finally, the project enforces material circularity by cataloging the stone extracted from the structural cuts into a village registry to repair communal alleys and dry-stone walls throughout the region.
In conclusion, the thesis demonstrates that strategic architectural subtraction can successfully re-commonalize vacant private space, transforming a site of ongoing structural failure into a living, adaptive, and truly cooperative community landscape. ... Read more

This design research investigates how architecture can become an active agency for re-aligning with the Self, the Other, and more-than-human beings within an extractive landscape. Situated in Cínovec / Zinnwald, a Czech-German border village marked by a history of mining and future lithium extraction, the project challenges the exploitative logic that treats the earth as a passive resource for human progress.

Rather than treating extraction as a purely technical problem, this project addresses it as a spatial, material, and psychological phenomenon. It argues that ecological transformation requires a fundamental shift in perception: living from an ego-centered state of control toward a heart-centered mode of living grounded in reciprocity and care.

The design transforms existing mining remnants into a contemplative route and dedicates an above-ground rock formation as a space for reflection, overnight stays, and reconnection. Subterranean tunnels, deep darkness and preexisting geological structures are reinterpreted as architectural elements that guide visitors through moments of vulnerability and reconnection, both in solitude and in shared moments. Utilizing the conceptual frameworks of cave & nest and site & non-site, the architecture follows the intrinsic logic of the landscape to establish a deep, reciprocal relationship with the physical context. Ultimately, the project proposes a different way of inhabiting extractive landscapes, one where architecture serves as an agency for reflection, grounding, and renewed kinship with the more-than-human world. ... Read more

“No outside trash” is the sign one stumbles upon every week when trying to dispose of rubbish in front of an old red-brick house in Hwagok, South Korea. Piles of large white plastic bags with torn corners—exposing used tissues, plastic bottles, and broken glass—scatter helplessly whenever summer storms and winds assault the alley. Crookedly drawn parking lines that intrude into the road, randomly tangled electric cables and air-conditioner pipes, and slanted utility poles wrapped in warning signs and advertisements together constitute the typical alley of a 1970s–80s red-brick housing block in a dense neighborhood of Seoul.

Any alley in Seoul with these characteristics used to be an outdoor hall of events. This old neighborhood once brimmed with children playing with deflated soccer balls and je-gi (a traditional toy). Mothers used to drag plastic chairs out through their gates to chat and trim spinach for dinner. More recently, surveillance cameras hang over the once cheerful alley, which is now blanketed by the disturbing noise of motorcycle deliveries, plastic bottles rattling in the wind, and old men watching online videos out loud while smoking in front of their doors. The once public identity that alleys portrayed has shifted in a few decades to an utterly empty space existing solely as a passage.

Where there used to be outdoor mats for drying red pepper and pedestals for weekend farms is now covered with concrete. Air-conditioner boxes and cables dangle above, while the front entrance is blocked by a small narrow door that only a child could pass through. In front of this door is where residents place their bags of rubbish. This door is typically mirrored by a wall erected in the alley between two buildings, effectively closing off the narrow space. Do these walls and doors reflect a change in social understanding? Ironically, in many cases, “in front of my door” means the main entrance to one’s space, but in terms of waste disposal, it refers specifically to this door.

Waste management in the national capital region of South Korea is in great peril, as the sole landfill—long the dumping ground for trash produced by 45% of the nation’s population—has decided it will no longer accept waste from outside Incheon. Although the landfill is located in Incheon, more than 80% of the total waste it receives has been delivered from its nearby neighbors: Seoul and Gyeonggi Province. Seoul’s lack of publicly owned incinerators exacerbates the issue, as disposed waste would have no appropriate destination.

In contrast to large apartment towers that collect massive amounts of rubbish and store it in secluded zones, old neighborhoods lack the space to store waste and instead push whatever they produce into the streets. Waste collection in apartment complexes is highly efficient—residents separate and dispose of trash in basement facilities, and large collection trucks gather it once a week with minimal hassle. However, old neighborhoods are being entirely replaced by this new typology, wiping out historic plot patterns and erasing cultural memory. How else can we solve the waste management issue? Is total redevelopment the only strategy for improving neighborhood livability? The current use of low-rise multifunctional blocks appears to contain hints of how decades of adaptation have led to a new typology. ... Read more

The thesis investigates how environmental governance operates through the very practices it seeks to regulate. Grounded in the paradox of extractive preservation, it argues that preservation does not simply protect ecological systems but simultaneously extracts livelihoods, access, and situated forms of knowledge. Focusing on the Danube Delta as a critical zone, the project examines how zoning regimes, permit systems, and remote modes of control reorganize relations between communities and their environment. Within the condition of the natural reserve, it asks what it means to live under continuous preservation and how governance might be rearticulated for those who inhabit and negotiate its limits. In this context, diplomacy is reframed not as an external institutional protocol, but as a situated spatial practice emerging from the tensions between regulation and lived experience.

Informed by Giorgio Agamben’s concept of profanation, the project is structured as a trilogy of inquiry across territorial scales, the wider territory, the village and lake system, and the city. Across these interconnected conditions, it traces how ecological processes, governance frameworks, and everyday practices are deeply entangled, revealing environmental governance as an extractive mechanism that translates lived knowledge into remote systems of control.

At its core, the project seeks to make the local practice of fishing operative in subverting the hegemonic technopolitical mechanisms through which the Delta is understood, negotiated, and managed. In response, it proposes a series of infrastructural “acupunctures” that render local agency legible within the territorial system. Through a simultaneous process of formalisation and informalisation, fishing practices are re-inscribed into governance through the construction of a fishing dock and the adaptive reuse of a former fish canning factory, while environmental data is relocated into the commons of the Delta, opening monitoring processes to collective participation and situated knowledge production.

The project is liminal methaphorically existing at the threshold between needed action and an anticipated vision, but also physically situated between systems of power. Working simultaneously through territory, community and material, the interventions do not merely represent the citizen, the village or the institution. Instead, they position these actors on a shared and horizontal plane, displacing top-down forms of control in favour of governance emerging from below. The highly sophisticated and the deeply analogue, the abstract and the material, are brought into proximity not as opposites, but as coexisting forms of inhabitation and knowledge production. Through this profanation of established hierarchies, the project reclaims agency for those rendered outsiders within their own land.
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Biyo iyo Baad (Water and Pasture) investigates what happens when a people whose identity is rooted in movement are asked to settle. Situated in the context of Somaliland's accelerating urbanisation, the project explores the transition from the ephemeral architecture of the pastoral nomad to the permanence of the city. As climate change disrupts seasonal migration patterns and diminishes pastoral livelihoods, many families find themselves inhabiting an intermediary condition; neither fully nomadic nor fully urban.
Rather than approaching architecture as a solution, the project understands it as an intervention into a moment of social and ecological transformation. The question at its core is not how to house the nomad, but how the rituals, memories, and forms of knowledge embedded within nomadic life might survive settlement. To what extent can ephemerality be maintained within a static dwelling? Can architecture continue to act as a site of community cohesion, female agency, and collective labour once movement has ceased?
Drawing from the building culture of the Aqal, the traditional Somali nomadic hut, the project investigates song, ritual, and construction as forms of architectural notation. Somali work songs were translated into spatial rules that informed the organisation of the project, transforming rhythm, repetition, and exchange into a language of form. Through this process, architecture became a means of representing journey rather than merely accommodating it.
Located on the edge of Hargeisa, where urban expansion meets the pastoral landscape, the proposal reimagines the communal watering hole as both infrastructure and social condenser. Housing, water collection, and productive spaces are organised around rituals of gathering and making. Constructed from locally available eucalyptus poles, earthen materials, and woven systems, the architecture remains lightweight, adaptable, and participatory.
The project proposes a typology that is neither fully permanent nor fully temporary. Instead, it exists in the space between, honouring a culture whose understanding of home has always been inseparable from the journey itself.
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Architecture of Accumulation is a manifestation of the infrastructure of global capitalism, an attempt to find a form for the mass of objects and operations required to sustain global trade and logistics. Architecture of Accumulation materializes in Panama, a key point of international logistics. Architecture of Accumulation sublimates and crystalizes the unresolved tension between global operations and local landscapes. Architecture of Accumulation reimagines the organization of the industrial landscape by imposing a vertical density instead of horizontal expansion. It goes beyond the scale of traditional architectural gesture and becomes the territory itself. Architecture of Accumulation is an exploration of programmatic complexity and density. Architecture of Accumulation is adjusted to the scale of a container rather than a human body. Spaces for homo sapiens are carefully designated and limited. Architecture of Accumulation is a mass of symbiotic and conflicting fragments. Architecture of Accumulation remains in a state of unfinishedness. By the time the last beam is produced, the first one will already rust. The structure, like a modern-day Ship of Theseus, remains in constant change. Architecture of Accumulation resists simple categorization. It is technocratic to the most radical extent, where paradoxically it transcends mere practicality and becomes and architectural landmark. Architecture of Accumulation illuminates the condition of contemporary infrastructure, and utilitarian landscapes, which evoke a feeling of sublime, almost forgotten within the architectural field.
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The Office for Digital Oblivion is a project that aims to re-ground discourse on information technologies and the realm of the digital through engagement with its immediate material conditions and operations. It has grown to become a full-fledged hybrid, blurring boundaries of what we consider natural or cultural, ecological or anthropocentric. It aims to to challenge perceived banalities around information infrastructures, tracing systems through scales, aiming to spatialise and thus problematise operational complexities which due to their scale remain largely illegible. With that, it puts forward new approaches to conceive of infrastructural systems, transgressing purely technocratic dogmas and new ways of thinking, worlding and becoming-together in the Anthropocene. ... Read more

Our endless pursuit of precision in measures both geographical and temporal has destroyed the ability to get lost, to be curious of what is beyond the horizon, to sight monsters and live to tell the tale! Modern society is not without its own mythos however: By making real the coordinate grid, the project generates modern monsters, and a sense of wonder for the drunken variousness, incorrigible plurality, and sudden beauty of the world that cannot be measured. This paper as an experiment on the form of the essay itself seeks to circumnavigate its own content. Always regarding the dangers of the measure and precision from the outskirts, without risking collision by claiming to execute such precision itself. In its structure, pages of the essay may fall into place like leaves of a tree in autumn, to be read as it has been written: fragmentary, leaping from one page to the next, getting lost in its content, in order to find one’s self again. The project that has emerged from this research positions 97 follies in the Pacific Ocean of Panama in order to subvert and question the measure, and embrace the unfathomable nature of the surface. ... Read more

Local conditions along the New Silk Road are often largely impacted by the global ones operating in their area—one of such being the Republic of Panama, ever since the build of the Panama Canal. The canal offered a shortcut and connected the World over water, but paradoxically introduced divisions in other directions, it divided continents, the country, and ecosystems, ... This project explores the dual and opposing nature of connecting elements. The dichotomy in the meaning they hold is ascribed to the ever-changing factors, narratives, directions, and perspectives towards them, while the elements themselves persist as the only constant, as a reference. Despite being perceived as linear, once approached carefully, thresholds become spaces, spaces consisting of all the areas they divide. Cinta Costera 3 viaduct surrounds the two impoverished neighborhoods and the old core of Panama City: Casco Viejo, while offering connection to the residential and work areas for the wealthy. This connecting element simultaneously divides Casco Viejo from the wealthy areas and from the ocean. A seemingly linear border, a threshold to pass in order to reach the open ocean. The design aim is to dissolve the city into a beach. The intertidal landscape between the city and the threshold becomes a beach and becomes the end-goal itself. The city is reaching out to pass the threshold and achieve freedom=bathing. In this attempt, it encounters zones, thresholds, connections, and divisions, and experiences the revealed sensations of bathing, and spending time in and around water, and by the time the threshold is traversed, the aim was already experienced within. ... Read more

This graduation project explores the often-overlooked ecological damage caused by large man-made landscapes. It focuses on creating architecture that critiques, analyzes, and suggests new norms for evolving environments and ecologies. The project blends scientific knowledge with architectural design, using data from environmental science disciplines to make the space an educational tool.
Living Archive aims to break the isolation of Barro Colorado Island. It is an extended space, accessible to more visitors, enhancing the knowledge of a local unique ecology. It introduces a third mediating scale that addresses both small (micro) and large (macro) environmental aspects. The design features spaces that reveal ecological conditions and promote direct sensory experiences.
Inspired by scientific methods and Donna Haraway’s "Situated Knowledge," the project uses architecture as a tool to study Gatun Lake and Barro Colorado Island. Through various experiments and iterations, the project developed into a response driven by curiosity and site-specific needs.
The final structure, a "living archive," marks the space with unique floral features in each room and enhances natural processes like rainwater collection and sun path movement. It includes a series of rooms accessible by boats, creating a new connection between scientists and local inhabitants. This shared space fosters dialogue and a deeper understanding of the environment.
In summary, this project offers a new architectural approach to addressing ecological trauma, integrating scientific collaboration, and creating a dynamic and inclusive environment.
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Monsoon folio situates itself within a vast planetary system as I follow the interactions of the char dwellers with the monsoonal cycles in the Assamese borderlands of India. While in modern writings of cities, the domains of the social and natural have been understood in isolation, cities as human-made and separate from nature, I try to foreground urban developments as a more-than-human assemblage. Far from an urban backdrop, monsoon takes root and ruptures socio-spatial arrangements. ... Read more

Starting from a port, Marseille was born as the result of improvisation and spontaneous architectures rather than urban planning. Same things happened in the architecture scale. architects are not the only doers of architecture. Long after the building has been made the non-architects continuously do architecture. When non-architects occupy space, they start to ‘do-it-themselves’. In most cases, they do this in an already occupied territory, where the activity of doing architecture has been classified and claimed by architects - the rules have already been established. But there are also some space occupations that are out of the rules, such as squatting, vendors, graffiti, protest. They, like “pet architecture”, do not necessarily create appealing spaces, and some are even illegal, but they can highlight people’s demands and show people’s bottom-up determination to shape the city.

When people do the practice, they mainly based on their own current needs and what material they have instead of considering the building or city as a whole. These practices are spontaneous, unplanned makeshift and ad hoc. They can be seen as improvisational practice. Seen architecture as paintings, in these cases, their improvisational activities are more like a collage rather than fully considered composition. But as Jencks explains, it involves using an available system in a new way to solve a problem quickly and efficiently. By doing so, it offers a way for everyone to shape and discuss the city they live in. And for the public, there should be nothing preventing them, in an agonistic and participatory manner, from devising and debating forms of their shelter and space for daily life. The improvisational practice has itself taken inspiration: Another world is possible. ... Read more

Mashhad has been geopolitically an important city in the region and a trade and connection hub to Central and East Asian countries. It is also the second-largest Muslim pilgrimage city after Mecca. It is a global city for which religion shaped the identity and influenced the spatial configuration of the city.

Religion, politics and economics are the main forces which run the city and have not only affected the growth and development of the whole city but are involved in the shift toward a large-scale infrastructure, which has become a dominant idea of city planning during the last few centuries.

Overlapping the flows and its agencies reveals that district six is the logistic hub and the entrance to the city, it encounters both scales regional and local, therefore it is the site of intervention.

Mapping the different flows, spaces and everyday life reveals that the big infrastructure is informed, and has strong connectivity with its surrounding region however it creates discontinuous relationships on the local scale, the local scale is neglected. moreover, its main spaces are economic driving, and the marginal settlement, are result of this spaces.
People are vulnerable society, they have access only to groundwater due to technical problems associated with expansion of the system in marginal areas, groundwater is highly contaminated.

The project aims to bridge not only physically but also socially culturally and environmentally. It is located within the infrastructure node (Ghadir square) transferring its space into Hybrid spaces which have multifunctional use, inhabiting the infrastructure space and transforming its spaces into places. Its atmosphere encounters both natural and urban, regional and local.
The main emphasis is on the water, driving from the research, the project is an assemblage of different function water filtration system, metro, market, educational centre, parking and communal spaces, each function with its own individual character has its border and territorial scale but all are connected to the central park and water tank.

Creating neighbourhood identities based on their distinctive interrelationship with water.


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As a major transit city on the Mediterranean, Marseille’s urban history and landscape are largely defined by the continuous flows of matter and energy over time. Amongst these interwoven flows, the waste flow is one of the striking focal points. This is not only because the city of Marseille has historically struggled to escape its "dirty" reputation, but also because of its urban landscape today, which has been constantly reshaped by waste as a result of various natural and social events. In this project, the site of research is further targeted at the area near the estuary of the Huveaune River where waste and water flows densely intersect in the city. The idea of infrastructure as an intertwined system will facilitate alternative imaginations of Marseille's waste recycling facilities in order to re-project their social and ecological impact. ... Read more