This thesis responds to the brief of the miscarried 2021 competition for a new architecture and archive center for the VAi (Vlaams Architectuurinstituut). Instead of placing the archive in an existing century old church in Berchem, as proposed in the competition, this project reuses existing infrastructures - both built and institutional. Now, the project is situated in deSingel, an international art campus located on the fringes of Antwerp, where the current offices and exhibition spaces of the VAi are situated.

The project proposes a “strategic reuse and densification” of DeSingel to clarify and intensify its spatial logic through two phases (phase 1: densification and phase 2: strategic reuse).

First, a new 5,500 m² volume is added at the southeast edge of the site, adjacent to the terraces. It houses the main archive depot along public-facing programs such as a new restaurant, a reading room, office spaces and a seminar room for the different publics of deSingel. The second phase consists of a series of smaller interventions that repair the existing circulation loops and enhance the continuity and legibility of the West-East axis. This renewed axis connects the new archive in the East to the West by distributing the functions of the VAi along that line. Accordingly, a new entrance is created on the western side. Further along the promenade toward the East, exhibition spaces are reintroduced in the southern corridors, leading to the newly added volume, which redefines the end of this promenade architecturale by transforming a former dead end into a new interior crossroad.

The project offers a dual benefit: it addresses circulation issues while defining a previously underused area. At the same time, it engages with the existing context by reusing elements of the deSingel program (Black Hall, Offices, Library, Exhibition Corridor).
In this way, the project becomes a dialogue between the new and the old.

Between modernity and the present stakes.

In the interiors, the materiality reinforces this conversation. The existing exposed aggregate concrete walls, designed by modernist architect Léon Stynen, are layered with a new rammed earth core for the depot storage. Both materials convey a sense of mass, but in the context of an archive, rammed earth offers additional benefits over concrete: providing thermal mass and natural humidity control.

This graduation project proposes a building design as a solution for the relocation of the Flanders Architecture institute. The institute collects, stores and shares the archives of Flemish architects and have a mission to be pro-active in their interactions with the public. The VAi has been wanting to relocate their entire institute to art campus DeSingel, located on the edge of Antwerp’s city center. In this new building, they want to house both their public and private functions; a storage depot, processing ateliers, public spaces and offices. This design reconsiders the dichotomy of public and private the VAi deals with in their policy and architecture. Concepts like nature-inclusive design, sustainability, identity and representation are key in the proposed design, which comprises the addition of a new building wing to the existing volume of DeSingel. Furthermore, a landscape design including a large pond -a restoration of DeSingel’s original pond, is proposed.

The graduation project of the studio "Interiors Buildings Cities 24/25" resembles a potential extension of the Art Campus DeSingel, located in Antwerp, Belgium accommodating the VAi. The design proposal represents an innovative and creative manner to identify the notion of archiving and displaying. Repairing the dialog between Léon Stynen and Stéphane Beel is thus one of the main strategies in order to re-establish a new connection between archive materials from the VAi and the city of Antwerp. By bringing people in, archives are brought on a display to the public and the urban corner of DeSingel is activated.

i designed a 180m-long bridge building and a compact, integrated archive volume. academically, i explored a space type that extends public interiors into landscape and infrastructure. it requires imagination across city and spatial detail scales.
socially, i created a visionary infrastructure. as an extension of the original spatial spine, it reconnects parcels separated by roads and opens up new axial possibilities.
its translucent volume expresses an open archiving attitude. its position avoids altering the front of deSingel, respecting collective memory. at the same time, it confronts car-dominant infrastructures and expresses urban spatial justice.

The Flanders Institute of Architects (VAi) collection in Antwerp has outgrown its current building in the city’s historical center, which no longer meets the needs of the collection, staff, or public visibility. VAi is exploring the possibility of relocating and uniting with its counterpart, the VAi office, at deSingel—a modernist cultural campus designed by Leon Stynen and expanded by Stephan Beel. Currently home to multiple institutions, including the Royal Conservatorium and deSingel Art Campus, this fragmented site on the city’s outskirts offers an opportunity to reimagine its state.

The design proposal aims to reorganize, adapt, and extend deSingel, enhancing the performance of this cultural campus, respecting its architectural qualities, and integrating a 4,000m² architectural archive with its affiliated programs.

The project juxtaposes the site's conditions with the vision for a contemporary archive. It was about finding alignment between the two and balancing the necessary compromises. The design borrows features from the existing building while also giving qualities back. It is about asserting a clear identity for the VAi and fostering integration within deSingel’s existing ensemble.

The VAi (Flanders Architecture institute) is in urgent need of a new archival building in Antwerp, Belgium. This project is about designing that very building, and explores how an archive can become more public and take on a stronger role in the city.

This year, the Interiors Buildings Cities graduation studio focused on relocating the VAi (Flemish Architecture Institute) archive from the city centre of Antwerp to the DeSingel campus, aiming to bring together its activities within a unified setting. Situated at the city’s edge, DeSingel was originally conceived by Léon Stynen as a cultural hub embedded in the landscape, with raised terraces, open courtyards, and carefully composed views. Over time, however, later additions, particularly Beel’s 2010 extension, fragmented the spatial clarity and weakened the building’s relationship to its surroundings.

This project seeks to restore that coherence. A new architectural wall is introduced along the southern façade, drawing on the historical logic of the Brialmont Ramparts. It acts as a threshold shielding the campus from the highway and forming a quiet, inward-facing courtyard. The archive is housed within this structure, making it a central and visible part of the design.

Circulation is reconnected and a series of gardens help rebuild the link between architecture and landscape. The terraces, once neglected and exposed, are reimagined as contemplative spaces with framed views.

Together, these interventions create a unified and welcoming campus where architecture, landscape, and the VAi’s mission come together to strengthen its presence and encourage greater public engagement.

This year the Interiors Buildings Cities graduation studio focused on a proposal of an architecture archive for the Flanders Architecture Institute (VAi) set in the context of the Cultural Campus of De Singel in Antwerp.

Following up on the intetions and brief of a failed competition for the VAi's new archive. The project aims to rethink possibilities of the institution's development through the scope of their current situation and position as part of De Singel Cultural Campus. Aiming to reuse and transform the existing spaces of the complex to accomodate growing needs of the institution. Creating an environment which would align with values and position of the institution itself. Negotiating the use of shared spaces in light of its public responsibilities and proposing new built volume based on study and reinterpretation of material culture as found on site.

The aim is to create an archive that serves not as mere repository of knowledge, but engages in its production. Through inter-institutional collaboration remaining receptive of ongoing cultural discourse.

This project presents a response to the pressing issue of women's safety in public spaces, particularly in Latin American cities. Women worldwide are disproportionately affected by safety issues and fear in urban environments. I explore ways in which public spaces can enhance perceptions of safety and freedom instead. Based on extensive four months of fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews with thirty women and a survey, I identify common themes in women's experiences and propose planning and design strategies for enhancing the perception of safety. These guidelines encompass six categories: temporality and sustainability, inclusive functional programs, equal access to localized and high-quality infrastructure, planning trajectories and areas of influence, supporting existing networks of care, and creating spaces for organizing and collective action.

In response to these findings, I introduce a design concept for pavilions dedicated to women, strategically integrated within the network of the UVA (Units for the Articulation of Life) in Medellín, Colombia. Through the project, I emphasize the creation of a community of mutual care among residents, exploring how bonds can form both during construction and utilization of space. These pavilions are envisioned as transformative places, where women are encouraged to actively participate in construction, subsequent management, and adaptation of the building to evolving needs. The project is tailored for community construction, ensuring local ownership and long-term sustainability.

The selection of bamboo as the primary building material comes from the appreciation of its environmental sustainability benefits but also its transformative potential to empower women in construction. Being lightweight, safe, and easy to work with, it is suitable to facilitate active participation of women in the construction process. To maximize bamboo’s sustainability benefits, I complement it with a choice of biobased materials for the roof, and I propose concepts for demountable foundations and joints to ensure the circularity of the design.

This project contributes to the broader debate on urban safety and social inclusion. Through addressing both social and environmental aspects of sustainability, it enhances women's safety while fostering a more equitable and resilient urban environment.

Humankind has always made art. Through its appeal to the human senses, it has helped to shape the ways in which we perceive the world around us and, in its varied forms, offers a means beyond language through which we have become able to articulate our relationships with one another. Throughout the ages art and architecture were facilitators of societies’ development and transformation, of which the peak was embodied by the 19th century palaces of culture: public museums and galleries. Later, as modernity rapidly adapted the world to human needs and subsumed sublime nature within its own image, art became means of resistance. Expanding out of the studio and the gallery it moved outside, to portray and critique the relentless industrialisation against its own backdrop. Artists co-opted and adapted redundant structures left behind by the contemporary city’s rampant process of change.

The competition brief for the development of the M HKA, the contemporary art museum in Antwerp embodies many of the larger issues that arise from the forementioned shift. It emerged out of the activities of the ICC (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum), which was founded in the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960s, and had a long history of making place for itself in which an adaptation of an actual palace and an old disused office building were considered, until it finally settled in an old grain warehouse to become a full-fledged museum in 1982. The next step in its development, which is planned to move the museum into a new, purposely build location asks therefore to be consciously understood and developed. It is to be placed near the current building, as an urban figure in focus of undergoing conversion of a monumental former dock into a linear public park.

The proposal turns challenges of the competition brief: an existing building on site, the scale of the programme and limited budget into factors that generate quality. Efficiency is used to shape identity, linking to the legacy of Antwerp as a harbour city. It is a building that does not mimic the expression, but follows the logic of efficient structures for the industry. A museum that accommodates existing structure, the art, the general public, gallery visitors, and the neighbours. It creates environments, provides striking curatorial settings and versatile workspaces and does so with minimal means while fulfilling strives of the competition brief and reducing the carbon footprint. It welcomes the legacy of the M HKA as a pioneering institution that always appropriated spaces, exposes the back office to the visitors to contrast them with pristine gallery interiors, and becomes an icon by establishing its own league instead of trying to fit in. Yet it fits within the city.

This year's Interiors Buildings Cities graduation studio focused on reimagining the contemporary art museum typology through the lens of M HKA in Antwerp. The process of designing a new museum building, guided by principles of anti-monumentality and a dedication to public engagement, led to a site-specific intervention revolving around the excavation of the former Zuiderdokken area. This intervention not only influenced the architectural expression, but also resonated with M HKA's anti-institutional identity.

The act of excavation serves to shape the architectural character of the museum and the park's topography, as the excavated soil is repurposed for rammed earth construction. The idea of excavation extends beyond the physical act of digging, it also encompasses the exploration of negative spaces and interstitial areas within the design. These spaces are intentionally integrated to create opportunities for art encounters, social interaction and various levels of public engagement throughout the museum experience.

In summary, the design proposal is a new building for the contemporary art museum the M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerpen), which in the future will be the Flemish oriented contemporary art museum VMHK (Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art). The project location is the existing court of appeal on the Zuiderdokken in Antwerp. The existing building will be demolished because of spatial and technical requirements and will make room in my proposal for a new museum: The building arises from the park, which the building faces. A landscape slopes up to the building's public ‘forum’ space. It is a raised level, where one can look over the flood defenses onto the river, while the art handling truck enters the building underneath. This artificial landscape, which forms the base of the building, consists entirely of recycled concrete, with various repurposed aggregate materials. Above the forum space rises a large volume, a biobased box, with all the 'silent program' of the museum. The careful placement of circulation cores allows for large art spaces.

This year‘s graduation studio of Interiors Building Cities focuses on the redevelopment of the M HKA (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen) in Belgium. In the context of an industrial metropolis like Antwerp, museums have evolved from spaces of representation and power structures to spaces for critique. Artists have repurposed disused structures in the city, including those left behind by the contemporary city, giving rise to new forms of art and the formation of art collectives and institutions since the 1960s. These spaces now serve as platforms for the public to engage with and learn about contemporary art and its significance in our society. They showcase a diverse range of mediums, from paintings and sculptures to photography, video, installations, and performance art. Additionally, educational programs and events are offered to enhance visitors‘ understanding of the art and the creative processes behind it.

With the redevelopment and relocation project, M HKA aims to establish a Flemish museum of contemporary art on a new site in the southern part of Antwerp. While the client‘s brief emphasizes the need for static sequences of spaces and programs, it fails to address the potential for unpredictable changes and user demands. Public institutions must bring flexibility to the forefront of architectural design, particularly when dealing with so-called obsolete buildings. This perspective is evident in the new site‘s design, where the planned demolition of a former court building is the only justification given in the brief. In my graduation design, I critique this decision by proposing to retain most of the existing structure, using it as the foundation for new towers on the site.

The new design for the Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art (VMHK) endeavoured to provide a contemporary interpretation of the nineteenth and twentieth century warehouse architecture, translated into a contemporary art museum. The 'Warehouse for Art' symbolizes its role as a repository for the museum’s knowledge and art, while at the same time identifying with the genius loci of the former port identity found along the Scheldt river and its surrounding brick buildings.

This industrial character is neutral, but not as aseptic as a characterless white cube and does not lose itself in architectural caprices. Moreover, the design its flexibility makes the building adaptable for its upcoming function as a museum and the ones after, thus making it future-proof.

Simultaneously, the design questions the conventional notion of a contemporary museum, aiming to transcend its exclusive institutional character and function as a public building instead. Within this pursuit of an 'anti-museum', the warehouse exemplifies a departure from the typical museum typology. Instead it represents a typology that contemporary art museums have discovered in industrial heritage and can fit into newly constructed buildings of the twenty-first century as well.

As the institution of art has developed, systematic biases have survived because they are embedded into institutional practices. The art world remains discriminatory and the art commodified, not able to provide its full public value. While contemporary artists have tried to remove themselves and their work from the gallery, they remain unsuccessful without a new form of exhibition.

M HKA, a contemporary art museum in Antwerp, Belgium with roots in anarchitecture and the anti-museum, is moving to a new site, and with that comes the opportunity to address the art world and many points of tension within it. The institution wants to participate on an international level but keep its Flemish roots and identity. The site of their future location is also part of a larger urban transformation and the site of another building that is possible to redevelop.

When designing for M HKA, it will be important to keep these points of tension in mind. The museum appears to currently be balancing many of these dilemmas already. How will this new structure enrich the surrounding environment without gentrifying the area and further marginalizing minority communities? M HKA has the opportunity to address these issues and lay a new foundation for how a contemporary museum should operate. If done successfully, the architecture of this space could very well replace the current standard of the white cube.

The Tate Modern in London occupies a central place in the art world and in the evolving discourse of what a contemporary art museum should be and how art should be displayed. Due to its size and complexity, grasping the labyrinthine building was a daunting task. In its urban context, the Tate effect draws millions of visitors spurring development in the disadvantaged Southwark borough where it resides.2 While inside there are many ideas, processes, and programs packed into this building. Beyond the art, it also functions as a shopping mall and an electricity substation.3 Unsurprisingly, the Tate Modern was referenced in many of the readings, podcasts, and discussions in class.

M HKA museum of co-existence. This graduation project rethinks the open museum through co-existing. A public institution in today’s day and age should not only be used by regular museum visitors. According to me the institution also serves a role in the city and neighbourhood it sits in. Especially in Antwerp, a multicultural city with people from very diverse backgrounds, I envision my museum as an important place for gathering and encounter for these diverse people in the city: non-museum visitors with encounter as a first way of mutual acceptance and co-existing.This theme of “co-existing” is furthermore expanded with co-existing between humans and non-humans. My project is about creating a truly open museum: not only for humans but also for non-humans, as there is a necessity to do this. Cities are becoming more and more densified by buildings, and this means that the city’s ecosystems get disturbed with less space for insects, birds, bats and plants. Extensive research into the urban ecosystems in nature have led to strategies to invite a new, wider audience to the museum: animals and plants.
I’m creating a dialogue between park and buildings. By inviting nature, into and around the building, spaces become bio pleasant and comfortable. Two of these spaces are the Urban Living Room and Winter Garden. By doing this and using plants inside for a healthy atmosphere, I’m also able to invite non-museum visitors to the museum. Just like a living organism, the museum is flexible in its use and adapts to the changing conditions (summer/winter and day/night). During the design, the cycles of nature were a key inspiration.
The projects aims to set an example with regards to the nature inclusive design strategy and the topic of co-existing (between humans & between humans and non-humans) as these topics are two relevant and important topics which are applicable to many densified and multicultural cities in the world.

MHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp), is a museum established in the 1970's. Given spatial and characteristic requirements, it is seeking for an expansion and reestablishment in the wide art scene in Antwerp. The MHKA has deep roots in the city itself, including public inclusivity and how people have been experiencing art in various ways. From open public events, to temporary exhibitions, the museum centralizes itself around this ideology and wills to expand this to a greater scale. The new museum, VMHK, is a result of this will. From facilitating isolated art galleries to open forums on different levels, the museum is a place to gather, discuss, experiment and experience. With adaptable spaces that host a variety of public activities; the establishment seeks to act as a ground for inter & intra dialogues for the people, for the art and for the city. It becomes an unfiltered, common ground that embodies the institution's stance and character towards art & people.

The Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) is an institution strongly rooted in the existing fabric and socio-political framework of Antwerp South. The museum is located on the outskirts of the city, which has undergone consistent urban development and urban planning as the city grew into one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in Europe. In this development, the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art gradually sought to evolve with society and make way for a larger institutional purpose that pushed the museum agenda towards a more formal and generic interpretation of art spaces and how they are interpreted in light of the current zeitgeist.

In my final project, I revisit the meaning of art presentation in relation to cultural building by reconnecting with MKHA’s historic approach of capturing the essence of conserving and presenting contemporary art, an identity and genesis of an institution that has curated its growing collection between less conventional building layout and architectural fabric.

My design proposal is based on the sustainable idea and design language of reusing existing building tissue, specifically the former courthouse building which is assigned for the new developments of the M HKA or at the time entitled: Vlaams Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst (VMHK). A building typology that exists of two prefabricated office towers that are connected by a low-rise structural addition and entrance.

Here, the practice of preserving and exhibiting art in an anti-museum condition becomes relevant again through the presence of existing structure and building layout, which, in resemblance to the former MHKA building, reinforces this familiar identity in which exhibiting art bears the title ‘symbiosis between’ anti-museum condition and institutional purpose.