This project explores how architecture can counter xenophobia by fostering inclusive, everyday interactions in diverse urban settings. Located in Bispebjerg, a multicultural yet often marginalized district in Copenhagen, the design proposes a food-centered public building that supports immigrant-led start-ups and informal exchange through small-scale food stalls and shared spaces. Reinterpreting the traditional Mjødhall (Mead hall) as a contemporary public device, the project uses food as a universal medium to promote visibility, participation, and cross-cultural dialogue in the public realm.

This public condenser in Copenhagen will serve as a catalyst for social connection, playing a crucial role in collectively addressing depression. It investigates the relationship between public buildings and public mental health, grounded in the five pillars of the graduation studio: multiplicity, hybridity, resilience, healthiness, and sustainability. Within the Master track, the project explores architecture as spatial and physical settings that intervene in the psychological and behavioral context, contributing to a broader interdisciplinary approach. For the Master programme, it demonstrates the potential of the built environment to address pressing societal issues.

To develop a design strategy that addresses the abstract concept of subjective recognition, the research incorporated a social-science theory of placemaking and place attachment from the field of environmental psychology. This theory helped bridge the gap between spatial settings and mental states. It informed the design of coexistence of functions that create meaningful memory, guiding the definition of space in terms of atmosphere as motivation, eventness as catalyst, and multiplicity as variation.

The design iterations informed the research process toward a greater focus on urban integration. The idea of "de-fragmentation" recalling the familiarity of the urban image emerged, leading the research toward an exploration of the local urban fabric, demolition, and regeneration, while also integrating the concepts of circularity and urban renovation. By materializing the nostalgic emotion into the reuse of architectural elements embedded with community memories, and coexisting with various social activities among different social groups, this public condenser will (re-) construct an emotional bond between the public and community.

This project explores the role of architecture in mitigating polarization in our societies. The growing fragmentation of society into hostile groups that see each other as opponents on all major issues concerning the future, brings up concerns about the functioning of our societies. While solutions are often sought in politics, the social sciences, or social media design, in architecture the conversation has barely started. Yet, I believe our discipline has a crucial role to play. Beyond people, architecture co-shapes the foundation of society and, through its tangible presence, determines how we live for the next thirty-plus years. If we aim to build a society that is resilient to polarization, we must ensure that its foundation is designed to withstand it.

This project consists of both a prototype of what a “Depolarizer” is, and a design for a public building in Bispebjerg, Copenhagen, which is based on the principles of this prototype.
The Depolarizer prototype is built on the concept of shielding people off from polarizing factors, while at the same time strengthening social cohesion within the community. In architectural terms, this means creating space for debate in the “grey middle” through forums, reducing global and local polarizing influences (such as the distance between government and citizen, thus creating space for decentralized governance), celebrating diversity and difference through exhibitions, and bringing people together through apolitical activities such as sports, food, makerspaces, and community gardens. Crucially, it must also ensure that these interactions are experienced positively by designing spaces that foster interaction and connection while minimizing potential disturbances caused by its openness. In spatial terms, this translates into a building that allows for transparency, expresses what happens inside, and offers flexibility and freedom for shared use and adaptation. The design is structured within a rigid grid, but emphasizes on organization and a human scale to facilitate the first encounters between people.

The public condenser in Bispebjerg is based on these principles but has been adapted to fit the specific characteristics of the location. The building aims to connect different separated groups of people and areas, at both the neighborhood as city scale. The building is easily accessible through its placement at the intersection of two important routes and opens up the area by redeveloping the border between the closed off NEXT vocational education school and the surrounding multicultural residential neighborhood. The public condenser serves both groups by extending and opening up the school’s existing apolitical program (crafting, making), to the neighborhood. This new makerspace, allowing the two communities to meet and work together, combined with two forums, exhibition spaces, and the presence of government services, encourages dialogue , and mutual understanding.

This project proposes a Public Condenser—a hybrid building that transforms neighborhood waste into architectural and social value. Located in Bispebjerg, the design integrates waste collection, workshops, urban farming, and public programs in collaboration with a local vocational school. Built with reused materials and modular systems, the building is adaptable and rooted in circular design principles. It functions as both infrastructure and a social catalyst, bringing together community members through shared resources and activities. The project explores how architecture can support a more circular and connected urban neighborhood.

“Architectural care” is a public building oriented towards the mental wellbeing in Copenhagen. The project stems from the observation and analysis of the new balance between the state, market and society in Denmark, which results in social divisions within the city formerly used as an example of one of the happiest places in the world.

In Bispebjerg, Copenhagen, the NEXT vocational school sits at the heart of a district marked by strong traditions of craftsmanship, but also by socio-economic challenges and a lack of structured opportunities for its youth. As part of an ongoing urban renewal plan, efforts are being made to open up the school’s closed campus to the surrounding community, a move that reflects a broader shift in how educational institutions are expected to engage with society.  

 Community in the Making responds to this moment of transformation by reimagining an existing, introverted campus building as a public condenser: a hybrid space where vocational knowledge is made accessible to the wider community. The building provides a platform for students and local craftspeople to host workshops, exhibitions, events, and informal learning activities centred around craft.   

The project addresses the wider challenges of declining vocational enrolment and the evolving role of educational institutions, seeking to move beyond the traditional model of schools as isolated gatekeepers of knowledge, and envisions a future where learning is more accessible, communal, and integrated into urban life.   

Architecturally, the design emphasizes flexibility, hybridity, and user agency, allowing the space to shift between school-related activities during school hours and community-facing programs after hours, on weekends, and during holidays. By building a community around craft, the project promotes vocational pathways, supports youth engagement, and contributes to the reconstruction of Bispebjerg’s identity as a place of creativity and craft.

In the last two decades, Copenhagen and its city authorities have been experiencing problems with pluvial flooding, negative biases to migrants and water service disruption. These problem statements are touching three different levels: environmental, cultural and health. For the Public Building graduation studio, the assignment is to design a Public Condenser. The site is located in Nordvest, a district 5–8 km Northwest from Copenhagen’s city center. Focusing on Nordvest, all three environmental, cultural and health problems are extremely applicable. However, these problems all share a unique relation with water. Architecture can tackle these three problems on environmental, cultural and health levels through water as common theme. Thus, this research examines how a public condenser can celebrate cultural variety through water and at the same time provide a water infrastructure for the neighborhood in Nordvest, Copenhagen.

This project addresses the intersection of rising urbanization and the increasing prevalence of common mental disorders (CMDs), particularly anxiety, in high-income countries. Urban living has been shown to heighten the risk of anxiety by 20% compared to rural environments, due to factors such as noise, pollution, density, lack of green space, and social stressors like inequality and discrimination. Focusing on the concept of “urban anxiety,” the project examines how spatial and social characteristics of cities impact psychological well-being.

To counter these effects, the research proposes a design approach called eco-minded design, rooted in biophilia and structured around five spatial principles: prospect, refuge, biomimicry, sensory variability, and biodiversity. These principles guide the creation of eco-minded landscapes—public buildings fused with natural urban elements that promote calm, connection, and resilience.

The Copenhagen district of Nordvest serves as a case study, where high anxiety levels correlate with poor environmental and social conditions. Emaljehaven park is identified as a key intervention site. By integrating an eco-minded public building, the park can become both an inviting urban destination and a sanctuary from city stressors.

The project offers actionable strategies for mental health-conscious urban planning, with insights relevant to architects, policymakers, and public health professionals.

House of Crafts - A public living room orientated around creativity and social interaction in Norvest, Bispebjerg, Copenhage, Denmark. Masters thesis submission for the Public Building studio

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.

The dense city center of Den Haag is a place of constant redevelopments and a need for more multiplicity. The area is populated with inaccessible governmental buildings with fortress-like designs. The proposal reuses the existing National Library and National Archives while connecting to Leiden University Tower. It captures the flow of the city and directs the public inside.

The proposal aims to create and celebrate diversity. By inviting the general public inside the vertical campus, the university gains the new meaning of a marker in a city, a stage. Campus becomes a place for cultural exchange, public gatherings, and extra stage for minorities. Students benefit from improved creativity, innovation, civic engagement, and many others.

The design follows the Space Catalogue to ensure spatial diversity. Different floors, and moments inside them, provide unique experiences and new ways of learning. Various types of stages give students opportunities for social interactions, ranging from intimate to grand atmospheres.

The Vertical Campus as an Interface not only looks at how a campus can be created on a small footprint by introducing verticality, but more importantly how it can function as an interface by offering spaces for interaction between students and industry, public and private, individual and collective. While the different parts of the program are connected by a public backbone, a collective circulation space as a continuous element throughout the Vertical Campus, the learning environments themselves have become hybrid by introducing non-acadamic elements. Furthermore, these environments differ in which ways they encourage interaction by varying their architectural characteristics, which all together results in numerous surprising combinations.

The Cultural City Hub is a social condenser, that blends cultural and educational programs, but also multiple paths of life. In Dutch society, we see that over a quarter of the population relates to a different country, where one parent, both parents or themselves are born abroad.Therefore, we can conclude that ‘Culture’ means ‘Cultures’. When looking at education, the Dutch education system does not represent this multiplicity of cultures, therefore creating an imbalance within the system and society. The Cultural City Hub combines cultures and education into a Vertical Campus, creating the campus for the future.

The assignment of this graduation project was to design “The Vertical Campus: A Public Hub of the Future in The Hague”, a mixed-used building that contains public, university and (governmental) office spaces of about 30.000 m2.

My problem statement addressed the issues of well-being and mental health of students in higher education and how urban densification can be designed vertically with a mixed-use building program. This led me to the architectural concept of Biophilic Design and how nature can promote evidence-based wellbeing and academic performance.

Thus, my design proposal is called “Campus of Wellbeing: The Biophilic Knowledge Hub”. Hereby, I propose a design that is situated on the edge of the park (‘Koekamp’) in front of the Central Station of The Hague. It’s a fragmented structure, a green hybrid, that merges architecture and nature, and aims to dissolve the “Green Border” between city fabric and forest. This urban concept is accompanied by the design of the ‘Biophilic Space Catalogue’. In this catalogue, I’m presenting the conclusions from my literature research that resulted into the design of different architectural spaces dedicated to various user groups, ranging from public to students or nature.

On a technical level, I was looking into how materiality and a passive climate concept can support my approach of designing healthier spaces and how a large-scale building can contribute to a better urban climate despite densification. Besides that, with this project I was also experimenting with the structure to reach my design objective of having a low impact on the ground floor because of the project's sensitive environment being located in a park including various plant and animal species.

This project explores the concept of an urban approach to campus design. where the campus is integrated into the urban life of a city, as opposed to traditional Anglo-Saxon learning style (Weber, 2018), where students learn in an isolated machine, often located in the outskirts of a city, to gain knowledge and then enter the real world.

With this project the campus is introduced in the dense city centre of The Hague. At this location there is no site left to build. This brings the challenge of expansion while dealing with existing resources. Verticality might be the obvious answer, yet verticality brings its own new problems of vertical isolation, vertical travel times and only a small contact area (the plinth) with the public realm. The risk of a mono-functional monolithic approach to building, overrepresented in the location area, has to be avoided in order to create a campus that is truly interacting with city life and the public realm.

The form of learning is also getting rethought with this project. The design explores learning as a way of enhancing creativity, freedom, intuition and multiplicity as opposed to the more traditional platonic approach of the one, the analogues, the similar and the negative as mentioned by Deleuze (1994).

The Vertical Campus in The Hague redefines the synergy between educational institutions and urban environments amid increasing urbanization and scarcity of (public) space. By transitioning from a traditional horizontal sprawling campus to a vertical framework, this concept addresses the challenges and opportunities of this transformation. This project strives to expand the city’s public space “vertically” to create a place where The Hague can escape from all the hustle and tension. Central to this concept is the “Vertical Town Square,” which provides the basis to weave the education campus into the urban fabric, aiming to reduce the anonymity in the densely built-up high-rise areas and create a place to stay in the city.

The Vertical Town Square transcends conventional educational atmosphere by creating a dynamic and inclusive environment that supports both formal and informal space for development and interaction. The focus of this concept is not on the interaction of different cultures, but on encouraging interactions that occur unconsciously to create a social and interactive context. The squares are unprogrammed places where spontaneity and informal encounters can flourish, while preserving and enhancing the intrinsic value of existing public spaces. This integration serves as inspiration for the multiple town squares, each with its own unique spatial design features, which enrich the academic and social domains by facilitating collaborative and experiential learning.

In higher education, "teaching" often refers to lecturing. Teaching at universities involves more than just lecturing, it involves creating conditions conducive to learning that involve relational, personal and emotionally challenging activities. This environment transcends traditional static classrooms and provides a dynamic and interactive environment for both formal and informal learning. Contemporary society often ignores the fundamental role of universities and rarely questions their importance or function. It is essential to see universities as institutions that shape a culture of lifelong learning within the community. This approach enriches the community but also responds to changing spatial dynamics. This creates a space where educational and social interactions can coexist, supporting lifelong learning and active participation in the community.

The building's various town squares are integrated into the urban landscape, allowing the Vertical Campus to promote inclusivity and accessibility while keeping education a public good. The campus provides environments that offer both extroverted and introverted functions, such as squares for meeting, creativity and relaxation that allow for unexpected encounters, serendipity and innovation. This diverse building supports exchange and diversity of development and promotes a living space that accommodates disorder and dissonance. Individuals can only participate in and contribute to changing our time if they are given the opportunity to shape it themselves. The campus will provide a platform for this.

With the advent of hybrid education since the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for campuses and educational buildings has undergone a transformation. The introduction of hybrid education has led to classrooms being more readily vacated than before, as students now have the option to attend classes remotely from home. To address this increase in vacancy, educational buildings that center around hybrid education should incorporate hybrid programming. This is where the significance of hybrid architecture for educational buildings becomes evident, also in case of the Vertical Campus that will be designed for a new green area near The Hague Central Station. This problem statement forms the following research question: How can hybrid architecture and hybrid education be connected through a building designed with hybrid building technologies located in a new green area near The Hague Central Station? The objective is to design an educational building suited for hybrid education using hybrid building technologies and hybrid design solutions for the programming whilst being located in a new green area near The Hague Central Station

The Commuversity serves a dual purpose as both a public space and a campus, blending
seamlessly into the urban fabric of The Hague. My graduation design aims to create a
vertical campus for the 21st century, serving as a vessel for a learning community to form
while extending the city's horizontal public space