The project focuses on the urban renewal of an abandoned postindustrial complex in Hoboken, southern Antwerp.
The meticulous process of observing a given site, understanding its identity and documenting findings through various media was inspired by referential artistic endeavors of the past and proves viable today in a time where spatial obsolescence including its potentials is at the forefront of architectural thinking.
Thus a new approach to sustainable use of existing spatial situations was worked out and applied in a final architectural design project assembling a new downtown in an area currently neglected.

This research investigates the personal experiences, memories, and desires of individuals who live or lived transient lives, shaped by the forces of globalization and relocation. With a focus on capturing the poetic and narrative aspects of place and movement, this study aims to deepen understanding of how individuals remember their previous architectural expiriences and identify the elements that help them form attachments to spaces in a constantly changing world. The study is linked to a later application in the design phase of a mixed-use building complex in Antwerp. Employing a method of portraying the memories of people who live or have lived in Antwerp through architectural drawings, this research will visualize and document personal stories, offering a new approach to the emotional and experiential dimensions of transience. By exploring these narratives, the study aims to broaden understanding of human relationships with place, memory, and identity in times of transience. Findings are expected to highlight recurring themes of forced relocation, adaptation, and the search for stability, offering valuable insights into the ways people navigate and emotionally anchor themselves within transient environments.

For over 5 years I have shared my home with 30 others, continuing an ongoing story since the early 1970s, when the then vacant hospital of Delft (Bethel, Bagijnhof) was squatted by a group of students. Since then, more than 270 people have passed through this community, leaving their traces in over 5500 photographs, notes, postcards, birthday banners and house meeting minutes (etc.) found in a basement archive that preserved over 50 years of stories of human presence. These fragments reveal not just a history of habitation, but the gradual making of a community. A community not formed through design, but through countless human interactions.

Our home became the inspiration for a new type of architectural research. Not about finding specific solutions or creating perfect plans, but about following fragments, being guided by stories, and learning all the hidden ways through which space accumulates meaning.
But what allows a place so (technically) unsuitable, a vacant, decrepit hospital with all its shortcomings, to function so successfully for this community?

In a building never intended for living, leaking roofs, awkward staircases, and narrow hallways turned out to be “effectively inefficient”: imperfections that unintendedly triggered social interactions. What at first glance loos like architectural obstacles instead brought people closer together, turning friction into connection. These so-called shortcomings became subtle design forces, guiding movements, encounters, and everyday rituals. It suggests that what architects are trained to “correct” or “resolve” can be the very thing that gives space its social intelligence.

Therefore this project doesn’t aim to re-design but to re-read. Here, seemingly inefficient architectural details are not interpreted as “flawed” technical junctions but as successful social ones. Through a non-linear, foldable storybook/map the building’s human and architectural “voices” unfold through scale and interconnect in all directions without a set beginning or end. This way, each fragment stands on its own, but (through folding out) always in relation to the bigger whole. Not as a fixed format or static object but, like the building itself, as a layered and living network of human stories.

Understanding space through social life expands the boundaries of what architectural education considers valuable and opens new ways of seeing, practicing, and representing architecture.

The neighbourhoods of Hoboken and Kiel, located in the south of Antwerp, form a complex urban patchwork; an assemblage of industrial remnants, modernist social housing projects, fragmented polderscapes, and winding residential streets lined with family-owned shops and row houses. This spatial collage is both eclectic and uneven, reflecting layers of historical investment, socio-economic shifts, and cultural overlays. Within this context lies the Blikfabriek, a former can factory turned cultural enclave, now inhabited by artists and alternative collectives. It is a heterotopic space, where exhibition halls transform into party venues, flea markets, and community festivals overnight, and where studios and shared fabrication spaces enable creative production and collaboration.

However, this apparent openness is not equally experienced by all. Through direct observation and informal dialogue, it became evident that the immediate neighbours of the Blikfabriek, largely families of Moroccan and Turkish descent, seldom accessed the factory’s social spaces. Their presence was limited to two peripheral zones: a homework class and a food cabin positioned along the site’s edge. Despite its claims of inclusivity, the Blikfabriek remained, for many, a closed circuit.

In collaboration with residents and social workers, and through immersive urban fieldwork including observational mapping, ethnographic interviews, and narrative workshops with youth aged 13 to 24, the research surfaced a nuanced cartography of social space in these neighbourhoods. This exclusion was felt most acutely by the youth—especially racialised youth—who were often positioned as threats within the public domain. Subject to hyper-surveillance and routine police interventions, their presence was read as risky, transient, or out-of-place. This raised a fundamental question: what spatial qualities make a place feel safe, comfortable, or claimable?

Can risk and belonging be traced, not only sociologically, but architecturally—through thresholds, boundaries, adjacencies, and affordances?

Emerging from this research was a shared desire among local youth: not just for a place to go, but for a space they could own, adapt, and make their own. Not a programmatic fix, but a spatial offering. The youth center unfolds slowly. The architectural response reframes the notion of safety—not through enclosure or control, but through layered spatial conditions that support informal use, retreat, and collective visibility. Spaces are layered, not labeled. Functions blur. Light filters through existing skylights, tracing patterns of occupation and change across walls touched by graffiti and memory.

Surveillance is inverted, youth are no longer the watched, but the watchers. The architecture offers them vantage points, agency, and ambiguity. Cultural and emotional resonance threads through material and color. A bathhouse, redolent of shared heritage, sits quietly to the side, its warmth radiating outward, literal and symbolic. Tapestries, screens, and patterns drawn from the language of home soften the industrial frame. Appropriation is not only allowed, it is encouraged: hooks for hammocks, walls for football nets, spaces that shift with the seasons, the users, and the moment. Risk is no longer about being exposed, but about being visible on one’s own terms.

In this reimagined youth center, architecture makes room, literally and symbolically, for becoming. A space that dares to trust the messiness of occupation, and the poetry of shared, negotiated futures.

This graduation project is an exploration into the notion of play in architecture through the design of a neighbourhood healthcare centre. Set within a former aluminium foundry in Hoboken, Antwerp, the project proposes a series of public spheres, both indoors and outdoors, where moments of play are thoughtfully integrated into the spatial experience.

Gathering: street scenes and urban clues explores the intersection of architecture, theatre, and everyday life at the Blikfabriek site and its surroundings in Antwerp. Using scenographic methods—script, set, and performance—it investigates how informal appropriations of public space can guide a circular, community-based transformation of post-industrial heritage. Through fieldwork, curated events, and staged encounters, the project gathers spatial, social, and material clues to develop a design approach rooted in process, participation, and reuse. Architecture becomes both a stage and a tool—engaged, adaptive, and grounded in the rhythms of collective urban life.

This year’s Urban Architecture studio focused on the Lageweg area in Hoboken, a district located to the south of Antwerp’s city centre. Central to this area is the Can Factory, a former industrial complex. Since 2019, the Can Factory has served as a creative hub, housing a diverse community of artists and supporting various cultural activities and initiatives. However, this function is only temporary as the site will be redeveloped in the near future. The focus of this year’s graduation studio was thus to envision an urban district that incorporates, rather than displaces, these emerging creative industries. To make the already present low town last as a downtown.

The research focus of Moving Bodies is to explore the choreography of daily life, examining how bodies move within their surroundings. It investigates the relationship between body and space through three distinct perspectives: at home, at work, and at leisure. These three aspects form the foundation of the research as well as the design project.

The design project consists out of a mix of functions that combines purpose-designed creative workspaces, residential spaces and a public swimming pool, as Antwerp has a shortage of swimming facilities. This combination directly addresses the scarcity of artist workspaces and swimming facilities in Antwerp while balancing the needs of the existing creative community with those of the wider neighbourhood.

This research catalogue follows the logic of movement, of temporary attachment, of getting
lost and learning from it. It drifts—through places, people, fragments, images, ideas. Just like
the nomadic movement it studies.
"All the customary activities of thenomad lead to wandering and movement. This is the antithesis and negation of stationariness, which produces civilization."

“Traces of transition” explores the architectural and social potential of an overlooked and banal industrial structure in Hoboken, Antwerp, once a rim-painting factory, now a decaying shell. Confronted with its imminent demolition, the research repositions the building not as obsolete, but as an organism, an active agent with a ongoing story. Through explorations into transformation, temporality, and user agency, the project challenges and critiques the dominant narrative of demolition and sterile replacement that characterises much of today’s urban development.
Drawing from the traces left behind, the story of the former rim painting factory was pieced together into a short 4 act film. The building is reimagined into a cultural and residential centre for the local youth, a demographic greatly marginalised in Hoboken. Inspired by the concept of “Low Road Buildings” as defined by Stewart Brand, as we all the local Blikfabriek cultural centre, the project celebrates adaptability, imperfection, and freedom of use. The building is viewed as evolving and unfinished, rather than a static monument waiting for its death.
Through narrative, scenography, videography, photography, mapping and physical modelling, the thesis constructs a living archive of the building’s past, present, and speculative futures, ultimately advocating for an architecture that learns, adapts, and resists erasure.

Home Beyond Walls explores how architecture can foster belonging in rapidly changing urban environments. Focusing on Hoboken, Antwerp, the project combines ethnographic research, storytelling, and participatory design to reveal how personal narratives shape space. Through adaptive reuse of former factory buildings into cooperative housing and a community library, the design supports flexibility, care, and ecological continuity. Grounded in lived experience, the project offers a transferable approach to creating meaningful, inclusive urban spaces.

Brussels, a city built on a wet marshland, has a rich history of landscape design and engineering. Earth was removed and resettled to create higher ground while parks and avenues were built to patch the gaps among different infrastructures. Thus the network of green spaces and parks in Brussels has become an important topic of its modern and contemporary urban development. Recently, there is a massive abandoned trainyard around the north-east suburbs of Brussels, waiting to be urbanised and transformed into a new neighbourhood. This situation was chosen to be the brief of the graduation studio of the urban architecture studio 2023 at TU Delft.

Within the expanding and mutating city of Brussels, there exists a derelict piece of land, a friche that is contested by humans in the midst of a pressing housing shortage. The friche once operated as a marshalling yard but discontinued its operations in 1994. Owing to a lack of human appropriation and a lapse in policy making, this yard began to rewild itself, becoming a safe haven for non-human inhabitants. Development authorities found themselves at odds with locals and ecologists who advocated for the emergent landscape to be left to its own devices, eventually leaving the friche in a state of limbo and uncertainty.

And with this passage of time, a heterotopia was born.

The heterotopia is a counter space in the city, removed from traditional time and place, that demands a rite of passage and that, which begets several places at once.

As an ode to this last, heterotopic green in Brussels, this project becomes a balancing act and mediator between the friche and the city : a border of collective housing, an “alt"(ernate) house/community space and a bathhouse that would be nestled and hidden within these borders.

The bathhouse intends to serve as a vessel for the purification of the being (human and non
human) as one transitions from the surrounding city into the haven of the heterotopic friche,
purged from the weights of regular life and time. The “bathhouse of enchantments” is therefore, a physical and metaphorical place where not only people but also other migratory guests of the friche come to rest their weary minds and bodies. It is not only a spiritual vessel of wellness, but also performs a social function of synergizing communities and rekindling an intimate relationship with the nature of the friche that is so far missing.
In addition to this, the proposal also becomes a water collection and management system for the east side of the friche, where it can initiate and facilitate the growth of a constructed wetland as a habitat and resting place for the growing species of migratory birds, bees, dragonflies and others.
The design unravels in layers and tales - from the urban-ness of the housing, to the transitory nature of the collective alt-house and finally, to the heterotopia of the bathhouse and its temporal gardens. It narrates the complete journey of moving through the city, into a sublime and magical realm. Time becomes the essence of the project, where the bathhouse and alt-house shape shift, appear and disappear with a play of time on three scales - daily, seasonal and longue durée.

The proposed intervention perhaps serves as a precedent - a newfound narrative of brownfield and post-industrial plot development, which are so often the “last greens” in town. Peeling and delayering, dissecting and revealing the “as found”, it embraces the need for the heterotopia and its virtues in the city, which would otherwise be obscured in the tenacious and expanding urban realm.

As part of the Urban Architecture Graduation Studio, this project explores the transition and its sequences when moving from inner-city Brussels to urban greenery, focusing on Josaphat Friche—"the last green in town." In response, Le Nouveau Blue was designed. Using water as both a thematic and spatial medium, an old warehouse was transformed into a spa and Olympic pool, embodying the interplay and transition between contrasting elements: urban & natural, dry & wet, warm & cold, and old & new. The adaptive reuse approach preserves the existing concrete structure while integrating new structural elements, creating a dynamic architectural dialogue. The design and research balance preservation and innovation, ultimately connecting the neighborhood’s new development to its biodiverse landscape.

This graduation projects aims to raise a discussion around the urgency of restoring connection between humans and nature, especially in our current day cities. Dealing with a post-industrial site in Brussels that turned into an accidental nature reserve, it tries to mediate between the need for housing and the importance of nature in cities. It proposes a program of nature education, where education becomes a missing link between the city and the landscape, adopting the landscape as a botanical garden of sorts. In a spatial sense, it tries to form a connection between the city and the landscape through a sequence of different defined garden spaces, transitioning from an urban architectural language into a more rural expression.

This research and design proposal explores the tension between regulated and “wild” states in urban spaces, highlighting how the hyper-controlled nature of contemporary cities, particularly in Western Europe, diminishes the agency and participation of urban dwellers. Modern urban environments often prioritize efficiency and order, leaving little room for spontaneity or contest, and resulting in spaces that are disconnected from the inherent needs and desires of their users. Architects frequently design spaces to meet specific, pre-determined requirements, further reinforcing this lack of user influence and ownership. This disconnect contributes to a broader societal condition where individuals feel repressed and detached from their urban surroundings. By examining the potential for increased user agency and spontaneous interaction within urban spaces, the research advocates for a shift in design approaches to foster community, inclusivity, and a sense of belonging. The author reflects on personal experiences of urban alienation and draws inspiration from the site of La Friche, and surrounding Brussels to propose strategies for raising awareness about the importance of inclusive, diverse, urban design in contemporary Western cities.

The site of this year’s Urban Architecture graduation studio was the Friche Josaphat. This is a terrain vague of 24 hectares in the northeast of Brussels, in the neighbourhood of Schaerbeek. In the 1920’s a marshalling yard was built on the site, however when marshalling yards were not needed anymore in the 1990s, it closed. It was cleaned and covered with sand and is now overgrown with vegetation. The program I proposed is located on the northwestern border of the Friche where it is bordered by a stretch of trees, behind which lays a long row of houses.
At one point this row of buildings leaves a gap which opens up the border of the Friche. Because of this gap and the big unused space, this site has the potential for a sequence of spaces connecting the neighbourhood and the Friche with a small public square and a front square.
The motion of the sequence and the sequence of spaces sparked my interest early this year. Therefore the research that I did throughout the year focused on understanding sequences, not only in architecture, but also in other art disciplines. To understand what makes existing urban spaces with sequences work well and liveable, I explored the sequence of spaces of four sites that illustrate a sequence. These are often spaces that have evolved over time and have gradually developed into comfortable spaces to be in.
Furthermore, I researched art disciplines that use sequences such as music, dance, film and animation. In these disciplines anticipation and suspense are often created to evoke a certain feeling in the spectator. Through this research, I wanted to explore how this could be translated into architecture. This resulted in the choreography of a new sequence of spaces made of the features that I found in the different sites I analysed, as well as the findings into the creation of anticipation and suspense in other art disciplines.
This choreography ultimately resulted in the composition of a sequence of spaces in my design, which consists of a connecting street, a small public square, a front square, an entrance with a sightline, a garden on the hill and the Friche.

As Brussels is struggling with a housing crisis and many eviction problems, I chose a program that provides home and purpose for homeless people and brings the community together through gardening and farming activities. By choreographing this sequence of spaces and creating anticipation and suspense, people in need of a home and others from the neighbourhood can be attracted to the site and brought together. In that way, an intimate, human-scale, and safe space can offer comfort to diverse groups of people.

The studio theme of ‘Last Green in Town’ encouraged us to engage with La Friche Josaphat, an urban wasteland that has grown into a greenfield in the middle of the city. The lack of human engagement has allowed biodiversity to naturally take over the wasteland, creating a wilderness, unknown to the city beyond its borders. Around the Friche, nature exists mostly in conventional forms (parks, gardens, sports fields etc.) which are products of narrow utilitarian approaches, with few exceptions of human-nature synergies. These make it evident that different perceptions of urban nature have produced diverse urban cultures of nature, few of which validate the interdependence of nature and humans while most treat nature as a distinct entity needing a functional purpose.
The thesis roots itself firmly in the ‘as found’ conditions and delves into site-specific research, in an attempt to understand the evolution of the existing urban culture of nature over time. Using this research, the thesis attempts to develop a project that validates the past, sensitively deals with the present 'as found' conditions and situates itself within the site for a symbiotic evolution of humans and nature in the future. The programs evolve from the site, responding to the urban conditions and mediating between the urban and the wild. The community centre brings the urban closer to the wild friche, while the research and education centre undertakes the task of creating and imparting knowledge of the biodiversity within the friche to the people beyond the borders. The programs work in tandem to create a flow of energies between the friche and the city, while carefully allowing sensitive accidental and incidental micro engagements between humans and nature.