This thesis proposes an alternative to demolition as the default response to obsolete or neglected industrial buildings, focusing on the Haraldsgade area in Copenhagen. Residents, small businesses, and diverse communities have organically shaped the area and its buildings, much like nature shaping a landscape. This transformation has allowed clusters of buildings to age, grow extensions, change façades, and become canvases. However, a lack of maintenance and unsystematic alterations have made these buildings ineligible for heritage protection, leaving them vulnerable under current development plans, which now pose a threat to the area’s identity.

The project is rooted in the belief that instead of focusing on destruction, erasure, or redefinition, we might embrace reflection and cultivation, allowing for growth and creativity grounded in acceptance and reinterpretation. It explores how new functions can be integrated through adaptation and activation, embedding interventions in the existing context. Five principles were established to illustrate how neglected industrial heritage can become a framework for human and non-human life and development: Accept the Ruin, Maintain Continuity, Embrace a Fragment, Create a Binder, and Materialize Context.

As a result, a mixed-use public building was designed, combining knowledge and craft to strengthen bonds both among residents and with their environment. The library unites people around shared ideas, while the public workshop brings them together through making, encouraging reuse, fostering creativity, and allowing residents of the Haraldsgade area to add a personal touch to the building’s façade and bring reused furniture pieces into their homes.

By valuing the fragment, the patina, and the local resource loop, the project reframes neglected architecture as fertile ground for both continuity and change. This approach resists the globalizing forces of architectural uniformity, instead rooting development in the specificities of place, memory, and material. The result is a framework for urban transformation that acknowledges the inevitability of change while cultivating the cultural and ecological potential already present, allowing the block to grow, adapt, and tell its story far into the future.

As cities grow denser and faster, so do the quiet pressures on our mental well-being. Haralds Haven is a hybrid public building that reimagines how architecture can contribute to emotional balance in daily urban life. Located in Haralds Quarter, Copenhagen, the project addresses rising levels of stress, loneliness, and overstimulation by offering a sequence of sensory-rich, inclusive, and restorative spaces.

The design weaves together six experiential themes - Green, Blue, Sensory, Active, Inclusive, and Playable - into a layered spatial network. From tranquil gardens and water elements to interactive zones and quiet corners, the building encourages movement, connection, and calm. It blends functions like community kitchens, creative studios, wellness spaces, and a central inner garden under a glass atrium, forming a place where people can pause, breathe, and simply be.

This is not a space for treatment, but one for support, a gentle framework that invites resilience through design. By translating psychological insights into spatial experiences, the project positions architecture as a quiet ally in the background of everyday life.
Because architecture cannot heal.
But it can help.

KØKKEN+, addresses the urgent need for a “Common Ground” in Haraldsgade-kvarteret, Copenhagen, by proposing a public building that acts as a social condenser. The aim is to bridge generational, cultural, and social divides in a neighborhood challenged by limited green spaces, scarce community facilities, and social fragmentation. By leveraging the universal act of communal cooking and dining, the project positions the kitchen as a catalyst for intergenerational dialogue, social inclusion, and urban resilience.

The kitchen table is a timeless symbol of family and community which becomes, at the scale of the public realm, a crucible for dialogue and negotiation. Here, opposing viewpoints can converge, wisdom meets innovation, and shared meals foster understanding. By transforming cooking and dining into shared public experiences, the project aims to create a platform for intergenerational exchange, turning the act of preparing and enjoying food into a catalyst for social cohesion and cultural appreciation. In this way, the simple act of dining is reimagined as a cornerstone of community building in Haraldsgade-kvarteret.

Køkken+ exemplifies sustainable urban food systems through its innovative closed-loop approach that integrates food production, consumption, and waste management within a single building. The facility features integrated greenery that supplies fresh herbs and edible plants directly to its public kitchen, while on-site composting machines convert food waste into nutrient-rich compost that fertilizes the gardens, creating a circular system that reduces waste and CO2 emissions. Beyond environmental benefits, Køkken+ promotes healthy living by emphasizing plant-based, organic food choices that align with Copenhagen's public food service strategy. The building makes sustainable processes visible to users as educational and cultural tools that foster ecological awareness and encourage community adoption of sustainable behaviors.

Identifying a need for increased social interactions in the neighborhood of Ydre-Nørrebro in Copenhagen, this design project aims to densify social interactions through the architectural design of a Public Condenser. This typology - a public building with a focus on hybridity, multiplicity, sustainability, healthiness and resilience - in its program facilitates the need of residents to extend the range of their domestic environment, to feel at home in public space. The keyword here is 'domestication'. Being able to domesticate a public space, temporarily inhabiting it, allows users to consider a greater part of the city their home. By creating an atlas of functions that respond to the needs of the site area's residents, a diverse and inclusive building program is determined. This functional atlas is spatially structured in a way that encourages unexpected encounters, and juxtaposes intimate interior spaces with open-plan flexible spaces.
The building design through its inside-out approach reimagines the techno-optimistic high-tech architecture of the 1980s from a more sustainable and social perspective. A display of building functions and movement projects and promotes the building's publicity and creates an understanding in how it functions, socially and technically. Building services are presented as active 'organs' - in this project called 'plug-ins' - that support the interior spaces. The plug-ins facilitate rational movement on the outside of the building by a lateral gallery and elevators to move vertically in the building. Additionally, they facilitate in the climate system of the interior spaces. By acting as a heat buffer, a energy generator and an air extractor, the plugins take up an active role in the passive strategies of the interior climate system.

Haraldsgade-kvarteret in Copenhagen, shaped by its industrial past, transitioned from fields to a thriving industrial hub in the late 1800s. Industrial decline in the mid-1900s led to residential developments, replacing most industrial structures while some remain and contribute to the neighbourhood’s identity. Urban redevelopment often prioritizes new construction, erasing historical narratives and triggering gentrification. With Legacy Lab, the goal is to reuse both tangible and intangible elements of industrial heritage to create a hybrid public condenser that contributes to preserving neighbourhood identity in an area undergoing urban redevelopment.

Norrebro is officially classified as a disadvantaged area in Copenhagen, inhabitants within low-income groups suffer from issues related to health inequality. These low-income groups lack access to public health facilities and healthy food systems. The design of this public condenser focusses on solving the issues related to health inequality. The design of this public condenser will act as a catalyst for stimulating healthy lifestyles and improving physical well-being for low-income groups living in Norrebro.

Im this project a research is conducted on how different relgions can be combined in a single building in order to improve the livability of the neighborhood and provoking altruism. This research results in a proposal for a public condenser in the haraldsgade district in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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 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.

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

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 turmoil history of Berlin is a history of clashes between ideologies. This created a divided city not only from an architectural point of view but also from a socio-political background. The initial fieldwork research in Friedrichshain (and in Berlin as a whole) has shown diverse people with different and sometimes extremely opposing ideologies congregating in the same public space. The ideological background presented by the inhabitance is the result of the combination of share beliefs regarding religious, cultural, and societal self-identification. This difference plays a crucial role in the formation of each individual’s worldview, which forms their ideologies. The various social groups observed in the analyzed area show almost no interaction, with each group discussing their ideology and social problems internally. This leads to polarization in the local society.

Gentrification is a controversial process where lower-income neighborhoods are transformed into affluent areas through the arrival of higher-income residents and development efforts. Friedrichshain in Berlin serves as a prominent example of this phenomenon. Since the 1990s, the neighborhood has attracted artists and young professionals, causing property values to rise and making it difficult for long-time residents to stay. Gentrification has resulted in the displacement of low-income residents, a shift in the neighborhood's demographics, and a change in its cultural landscape. The real estate market's development has played a significant role in driving up property values and rents, further exacerbating the situation. In response to these effects, a Public Condenser is being designed as a social catalyst, aiming to mitigate the impacts of gentrification by providing a space for diverse individuals to share knowledge and creativity. The project's goal is to foster innovation and progress, following the theme of "Boundless architecture," and potentially serve as a prototype for similar neighborhoods in need.

This project takes place in Friedrichshain, Berlin, Germany and presents the design of a Public Condenser along the Straße der Pariser Kommune named ’Bau(m) Berlin’. The project is part of the Public Building Graduation Studio and looks into the topic of designing a ’new urban lounge and commons’ through the process of Research by Design.

Through field research and urban analysis, three issues came to the forth in the Friedrichshain area; A disconnection between residents, a missing framework for social (re-)integration and low quality green space. These issues consequently led to choosing the project site along the Straße der Pariser Kommune and forming the following research question:

”What if there could be an architecture that pushes interaction so that the social gap between people could be bridged whilst functioning as
a platform that helps people to (re-) enter society?”

In order to tackle the pre-described issues, the project takes the notion of ’building’ and dissects it into ’Building the Future Commons’, ’Building Connections’ and ’Building Things’. Together they describe and result into the project Bau(m). The ’m’ in Bau(m) entails the notion and concept of Multiplicity, e.i. the idea that a thing, in this case a public building, can be used in multiple ways, for various programmatic functions, throughout time. For me, this meant seeing architecture as a framework that allows for adaptable use of a building.

Consequently, the building is designed as a pavilion within the park stretching along the Straße der Pariser Kommune and has one big roof supported by a grid structure column repetition made from timber. The columns are bended so that together, they form an arch-shaped pattern. By seeing the building as part of the park, the park is equally redesigned into a park of higher quality with an urban route that stretches through the building and connects the Ostbahnhof train station with the Karl-Marx-Allee further North.

The main function of the building is a workshop space for various crafts, amongst which furniture making, as it uses the method of making as a way of bringing people together and getting those in need back on into society. This workshop space stretches into the basement and thus forms the substructure of an urban square that exists in front of the building.

This design is a graduation project of the public buildings studio called "Music Marvel". It deals with designing a public space within an area, Binckhorst, that is switching from an industrial to a residential district. The increase in density has consequences on the existing buildings resulting in demolition and thus a loss of identity. According to Aldo Rossi the evolution of a building is the user experience. But what happens with the demolished parts of the evolving process? Could they be re-used and relocated while transferring part of its former identity? This project explores the re-using of parts of the hidden beautiful concrete structures found in the former auto halls in Binckhorst. These parts are relocated to a new area near the only green space in Binckhorst, the cemetery zone. This area feels isolated and the design aims to open up this park. The new music venue aims to make this public space more accessible. And by giving the historic artifacts space in the new music venues, they will contribute in the musical experience of visitors. Each venue will have demolished pieces of the auto hall organized in a different way to create a different experience for each venue.

My project starts from the city Berlin. After visiting the site in Friedrichshain, I found that people who lived there were not satisfied with the food-eating space nearby throughout my interviews. They said that even though there were some restaurants, the community was lack of diverse food space, and they were willing to go to the West Berlin for food. To check if they were right, I made a food mapping of the community. I found that there are a few restaurants and supermarkets there, but not too many. And there was just one flexible exterior street market nearby, so basically they were right. Based on this, designing a food-eating space for the community came into my mind.
To follow up on the locals’ idea, I went to the west of Berlin and found many diverse food-related activities. There are not just many restaurants in the West, but also many street markets, and an interesting Prinzessinnengarten where people can farm, make and cook inside. At the time, based on the topic of our project “Public Condenser”, I think if I condense many kinds of food-related activities(farming, making, shopping, and eating) into one building, it will provide more opportunities for people to encounter, which also suits my understanding towards the word “Common”, where people can make something together, and participate into activities constantly. Then food could be a good medium to connect people in Berlin from different backgrounds. Furthermore, facing the trend that eating become more private and people do not want to go out for food and feel lonely, a food condenser can take people out and solve these issues very well. From the food mapping, I consider the REWE supermarket as the best location to build. Because it sits in the street full of restaurants, they can work well together economically. And the site is also near the Warschauer Straße station, so it is accessible for the locals and outsiders. Finally, the original supermarket will be turned down, and a better new flexible market space will show up in the new building.
After making sure of my topic about food, I divided the program into four parts, from farming, making, and shopping to eating. In the farming part, people can grow some vegetables, ingredients, and some plants in the balcony, rooftop garden, or indoor area. In the making part, people can cook the food they pick up from the farming part in the shared kitchen, chefs can learn cooking from the culinary school, and chefs can explore their recipes in the food laboratory, citizens can see the food exhibition, they can also order the food in the kitchen that is already cooked by the chefs. In the shopping part, people can shop, eat, and socialize in a flexible market space, including a long indoor market, some eating space, and relaxed space. They can also listen to lectures about food culture in the hall. In the eating part, people can enjoy a big food square. They can also order in two big round-shaped food bars, and find food in some open restaurants. To condense these multiple food-related spaces in one building, I worked out a prototype, I call it “Vertical Food Forest”, which will be situated at a specific site and create various food experiences as an interesting and complicated system.

Restaurants and bars in concert halls, snacks and drinks in jazz clubs or festivals, BGM in cafés and restaurants... Although the scale and method may be different, the fact that music and food coexist in our everyday lives remains the same. This raises the main research question: “What is the relationship between the music-and-food experience offered by a music venue and the identity that this experience creates?” With hearing and taste as the key senses, the sensory experience of music venues will be explored. To answer the question, historical review and case study will be used as research methods. The historical review focusing on banquet culture will reveal the long relationship between music and food and its importance. Furthermore, the research will investigate, through case study, how music, food, and architecture interact in music venues with different city, connection, culture contexts.

The study site, Binckhorst, is evolving from an industrial area into an urban mixed-use residential-work area. The railroad, highway and body of water surrounding Binckhorst act as borders, turning the area into an isolated island of The Hague and an unpopular destination for cyclists or pedestrians. The main reason people go there is for work. Outside of work, the area offers limited options to the general public. The end goal of this study is to propose a music venue with food in Binckhorst. Music and food together will make visitors’ experience more special and memorable, and provide them with an abundance of sensory experience, making it a reason for people to visit and revisit.

The project ‘Bincks’ Music Factory’ is part of the graduation studio Public Building, a studio in which Multiplicity is researched as a characteristic of a Music Marvel.

The ‘new’ Music Marvel as I designed it has the Binckhorst location in The Hague as its given parameter. This former industrial area has been absorbed by the city in response to the transformations of economic, cultural and socio-political dynamics, and will be transformed into an urban living and working area in the future.

The question that immediately came up was how can a music marvel be embedded in Binckhorst and what are the characteristics of my music marvel? Nowadays, music is tangible for everyone and can no longer be ignored in our lives. However, today’s music buildings cannot keep pace with the demanding condition, the multiplicity, and the ever-changing character. Architecture for music has largely been transformed into an inanimate spatial form, characterised by its pursuit of timelessness and limited to the perception of music. The architectural design of music spaces in our time is guided and often controlled, by the science of acoustics. The understanding of perception is often incomplete. The spatial requirements and design parameters of a Music Marvel must be questioned in order to meet the demanded versatility of today’s music buildings.

To fulfil this demand for multiplicity, my Music Marvel is focused on facilitating a variety of music genres. Based on a personal fascination, I focus on various subcultures as a target group with the idea of offering them a place for interactions and incubation - a cultural factory where diverse components or subcultures come together to form a larger whole and refute the sense of social hierarchy. An autonomous place to stimulate (local) subcultures and thus profile its own place.