Venice is a city structured by separation. From its earliest lagoon settlements to its contemporary management of mass tourism, physical and institutional divisions have defined who moves where, who belongs, and who does not. While often unfair and discriminatory, some of Venice’s most interesting economic, political, and cultural aspects are directly linked to such groupings.

This thesis argues that the problem is not separation itself, but the quality of its current separations, which eliminate contact without replacing it with anything meaningful.

The project proposes a music hub at Campo di Marte, a post-industrial site on the western edge of the island, as an architectural response to this condition.

Through a programme of layered uses—outdoor performance space, nightclub, auditorium, workshop, and reintegration housing—and a structural strategy that embraces rather than erases industrial ruins, the project argues for encounter as an urgent spatial practice.

In a city at risk of performing its own image, this project offers a proposal for staying alive.
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This thesis explores the relationship between belonging and alienation in Athens, arguing that alienation does not always result from a lack of belonging, but can also emerge from forms of belonging that become inward-looking and exclusionary. In such cases, belonging shifts from openness to protection, limiting engagement with others and reinforcing social withdrawal.

The research focuses on Kypseli, one of the densest neighborhoods in Athens, where many interwar buildings remain vacant or underused due to fragmented ownership, inheritance disputes, bureaucratic delays, emotional attachment, and speculative pressure. These suspended properties are understood as urban “black holes”: spaces disconnected from their surroundings, trapped between private ownership and public need.

The thesis examines how architecture can help renegotiate the relationship between these buildings and their environment. Rather than treating the issue purely as a housing shortage or legal problem, it proposes that architecture can create conditions for care, repair, ecological restoration, and new forms of inhabitation. The aim is to shift these properties from reactive withdrawal toward active belonging.

Using one house in Kypseli as a case study, the research investigates how small-scale architectural interventions and “micro-architectures” can gently reopen suspended buildings to exterior relations. The project asks how architecture can introduce enabling constraints that encourage new forms of care, use, and value beyond market exchange, while avoiding forceful appropriation. Ultimately, the thesis positions architecture as a tool for transforming suspended urban spaces into places of renewed connection and collective belonging. ... Read more

Contemporary cities increasingly organize themselves into separate worlds, each social group remaining within its own familiar bubble, confined by homophilic tendencies that filter out difference and prevent encounter. In Valparaíso, Chile, this condition is made spatially explicit through topography. The vertical distance between El Plan, the flat lower city, and the Cerros, the steep hillside neighbourhoods, is not simply a matter of elevation but of accumulated disadvantage. Altitude correlates directly with reduced access to education, mobility, and civic resources. The city's hills are territories of unequal citizenship.
Yet Valparaíso cannot be understood through fragmentation alone. Alongside structural inequalities, the city contains extraordinary cultures of informal adaptation, collective production, and cultural resilience. It already contains collective capacity. What it lacks are shared spatial frameworks through which that capacity can intersect more equitably across social difference.
This thesis investigates to what extent architecture can act as a mediator between formal institutions and informal practices to produce a co-productive commons in Valparaíso's vertically stratified fabric.
The architectural proposal is located on Cerro Cordillera, a strategic urban hinge between Plaza Sotomayor and Plaza Echaurren, adjacent to Ascensor Cordillera and the metropolitan train terminal. The intervention transforms an existing bottleneck into a vertically distributed civic framework of six interconnected terraces, housing arts and crafts workshops, educational spaces, a community kitchen, productive cultivation terraces, and an informal market.
Seven spatial principles guide the design: palimpsest, porosity, port orientation, proximity,, prolonged movement, material rootedness, and framework over object. Materials including existing stone and brick, locally sourced radiata pine, textile roofing, and adobillo vernacular earthen infill ground the intervention in regional building traditions and collective construction processes.
Through co-production, the conditions for commons emerge. Shared infrastructures of making, food, and education create the metabolisms through which homophilic bubbles can be opened, weak ties can form, and collective entanglement becomes spatially possible.
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Contemporary semi-public spaces – spaces that present themselves as public whilst operating under private logics of investment, regulation, and access – increasingly engineer the body as a consumer. This project examines how the apparatus of control operates spatially in one such space: the Beurstraverse, or Koopgoot, in Rotterdam. Drawing on Michel Foucault's disciplinary society, Gilles Deleuze's control society, ByungChul Han's transparency society, and Roberto Esposito's concept of immunisation, the research develops a theoretical framework through which the spatial techniques of control – surveillance, access regulation, monofunctionality, and the production of a hierarchy of legitimate presence – are identified and analysed. A comparative case study of the Beurstraverse, the Lijnbaan, and the Hoogstraat reveals the Koopgoot as an exaggerated instance of neoliberal urban planning: a space that is itself a deviation from the norms of its context. In response, the project proposes an architectural intervention structured around three spatial strategies: to wander (a park and communal garden replacing the retail surface), to bypass (an elevated walkway offering alternative routes beyond the surveillance apparatus and commercial schedule), and to collide (vertical transitions and furnitures that stage encounters between different bodies, speeds, and intentions). The design does not oppose the existing apparatus; it introduces new instruments alongside it, operating under a different logic of non-profitable productivity. The project argues for designing for deviation – not the production of an alternative, but the production of conditions in which alternatives can emerge.

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This research explores the hauntings of colonization in San Nicolas, Aruba, through a hauntological approach. Once thriving through the oil refinery and now rebranded as the “Sunrise City,” San Nicolas is caught in a temporal disjunction where past, present, and future are entangled. As the refinery will be dismantled—another colonial act of erasure—Aruba attempts to move forward through forgetting rather than confronting what persists.
Situated within an ethico-onto-epistemological framework, this research proposes response-ability as a way of engaging with these hauntings. Rather than erasing the past, it calls for acknowledging and working with the specters—reclaiming marginalized and forgotten (future) memories. In doing so, it aims to understand how hauntology can foster response-ability towards the ongoing injustices of colonization. How do fucus (specters) haunt the material and immaterial flows of disturbed sites? What affects do they produce? How can we reveal and revalue these fucus haunting disturbed sites to produce new modes of ethopoietic co-habitation? How can architecture ground itself into the assemblage of a San Nicolas yet-to-come?
The echoes of the fucus are followed through archival maps, images, and fieldwork photography, observations, and embodied attention. The researcher moves as both witness and participant, attuned to what the site reveals and what it conceals.
Central to this research are the fucus: active, affective forces that haunt both the material and immaterial conditions of the city. They are not metaphors, but expressions of unresolved colonial violence, repressed memories, and unrealized futures that continue to shape the present. These hauntings are explored through the refinery wall as a medium of encounter, approached through three lenses: matter, perception, and limits.
The refinery wall becomes a medium: a site to conjure and encounter the fucus. The wall is explored through three lenses. First, the wall as matter: what shifting materiality, its forces, its memory does. Second, the wall as perception: how it is seen, felt, experienced. Third, the wall as limits: what is erased and how they haunt. Each lens amplifies spectral, temporal, and ethical forces. They produce clues toward response-ability — toward architectures that acknowledge, regenerate, and transform. As witness and participant, the researcher becomes attentive to what the wall reveals, and to what it hides.
Through this encounter, the site informs design logics grounded in the material, social, and affective assemblage of San Nicolas, contributing to an architectural practice attuned to the yet-to-come. ... Read more

This work is a call for attunement and sensibilization. There cannot be attunement and an enhanced sensibility without an investment of time, energy, and attention. As a response against scientifization, binary distinctions and taxonomies of othering that dominate and reinforce colonial impositions, this research insists on an engagement with complexity, disorder and contamination, understanding space and time as active relational fields that are non-homogenous but dependant on a point of view and a problematic field, and thereby challenging binary dialectics that rely on simple yes or no answers, taxonomies and an essential objectiveness.
Design is a field of operations that concern themselves with the manipulation of limits and constraints. To understand the limit as the manner of relating is to understand it as a methodology. How to relate organism and environment is the gist of technology and design; then the question of the limit becomes, by definition, the question of the method. Rather than a typological approach, this research adopts a topological one, challenging stable typologies such as the prison, the dwelling, the hospital and the laboratory through their iterative modulations across time.
A methodology is not preexisting to the research nor this research output; instead, I allowed myself to switch methodologies, and I encouraged contamination, engaging in a process of complexity that I now understand as not only responding to my motivating concerns but also as an approach to design. I sought to embed myself in complexity as much as possible, taking the experiment as the technique and unpacking these device-machines of measurement to question them as the method for the understanding of our world.
The design project develops as a genealogical design exercise, asking myself what could have happened instead of what did, recognising virtual memory as affectual and multivergencies as compossible and worlding. Set within the Argentinian context, conditions of extreme scarcity are understood not as lack but as productive, collectivising and creative forces, welcoming contingent ideas and problem-creative solutions.
A contaminated methodology, in research and design, is thus not a metaphor but an actual letting go of the obsession with procedure and control to allow the difference to creep in, and, with it, allow new and fascinating encounters.
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Becoming Marble traces the shifting life of Pentelic marble across geological, architectural, political, and epistemic terrains. Rather than treating marble as a stable classical medium, the dissertation develops a genealogy of its successive stabilisations and disturbances, from object to surface to particle, showing how material processes and conceptual formations continually remake one another. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, alongside postcolonial critique and new materialist thought, the study articulates a Mediterranean materialism grounded in the Attic landscape. The first part, Classical Object, examines how Pentelic marble was consolidated as an aesthetic and political substance through architectural whiteness, neoclassical historiography, and colonial knowledge regimes, obscuring labour, exclusions, and racialised imaginaries. The second part, Modern Surface, turns to the twentieth century, where marble operates as an interface within modernist abstraction and global power structures, organising visibility, legitimacy, and institutional authority while revealing the fractures of modern universality. The third part, Material Particle, shifts scale to fragments, dust, and dispersed residues. Through archival research, quarry ethnographies, and material encounters at Mount Pentelicus, it foregrounds matter’s own tendencies and agencies, challenging subject–object logics and linear material memory. Across these movements, the dissertation argues that Pentelic marble does not simply link antiquity and modernity but actively participates in their continual reconfiguration. By moving from the monumental to the particulate, Becoming Marble proposes a rethinking of architectural materiality attentive to entanglement, heterogeneity, and genealogies without fixed origins. ... Read more

The premise of this thesis is not to prescribe what architecture should do, but to explore how it might be thought and experienced. This inquiry focuses on an often overlooked minor art: the rural architecture of the Po Valley, materialized in the cascine – entities that, beyond their dwelling function, preserve the historical memory of a territory.

The concept of assemblage (agencement) developed by Deleuze and Guattari proves remarkably effective in analysing these heterogeneous structures. Far from being a theoretical imposition, this contemporary approach dialogues surprisingly with classical architectural treatises, which already described how different parts should relate to form a coherent body. These two strands of thought, although separated by centuries, converge in a vision of architecture as a system of relationships rather than a static object.

The multiplicities of events that animated the cascine find in Deleuzian thought a revelatory interpretive key, while their spatial organization recalls ancient architectural principles. In these deeply functional principles, a symbiotic relationship with the territory manifests itself, perfectly mirroring the notion of assemblage: not a simple aggregation of parts, but a continuous process of relationships between heterogeneous elements that maintain their identity while forming a coherent whole.

This perspective invites us to reconsider all architecture: are we not all bodies that maintain constant relationships? Every entity is composite, made of elements different in nature and quality that do not simply merge, but coexist in productive tension. What defines these bodies is not a presumed intrinsic unity but the relationships they establish with other bodies, places, and environments. Against the classical ideal of the one, contemporary philosophies propose a complex structure that does not presuppose an a priori unity, but recognizes and values the constitutive multiplicity of every phenomenon.

The thesis will methodically explore the various concepts that compose this vision of architecture as assemblage, tracing their meanings and interconnections. This is not merely a terminological exposition, but an investigation that, in illustrating these concepts, makes them operative – because understanding architecture means, ultimately, entering into a relationship with it. ... Read more

Drawing on the concept of the ritornello, understood as a recurring yet shifting refrain, the design introduces physically ambiguous elements, called indeterminate objects, that intentionally resist fixed functions. These elements are crafted to invite spontaneous, improvised uses by people, reflecting the everyday, flexible ways Neapolitans inhabit and transform spaces. Rather than imposing a single architectural vision, the interventions adapt to the unique character of each existing building, reinterpreting structures through carefully detailed design moves such as tailored plans, sections, and material choices. The result is architecture conceived not as a finished object but as an open framework, ready to be re-coded and re-appropriated, echoing the improvisational spirit of Neapolitan urban life. ... Read more

This thesis explores the role of public architecture in the post-war reconstruction of Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world, which has suffered great destruction during the war in Syria. The research focuses on how to preserve Aleppo’s urban identity, which is a combination of architecture, spatial organization, materiality, and cultural memory, while addressing the social, economic, and political challenges that the post-war city is facing.

Through a combination of literature review, spatial analysis, and other used methods, the thesis first identifies the elements that define the city, such as the courtyard typology, souks, limestone material, and craftsmanship traditions. It then looks into how the war impacted the city. And it tries to identify what role public architecture can play in preserving Aleppo’s cultural memory and supporting community recovery during times of political instability. The research ends with a design proposal titled Bayt al Madina (“House of the City”), situated on the former place of the Grand Serail, directly south of the Citadel. Once with an authoritive function, the site is reimagined as a hub dedicated to learning, craftsmanship, and community gathering. By translating research insights into design, the project demonstrates how public spaces can serve not only as physical interventions but as tools for cultural and historical continuity, social healing, and urban revitalization. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

1.7 Earths currently, 3 in the next decade.
That is the worth of resources that we are using yearly, and the estimated doubling of it, by the end of the following decade. Two-thirds out of all those extracted resources end up as waste.
It’s kind of ironic and paradoxical that we go to all that trouble to obtain these valuable resources and materials, design them, form them to become something, just to become nothing, worthless, waste, by a simple toss into the garbage bin.
But one can be wasteful only in abundance - this abundance, however, breeds a carelessness towards consumption, accumulation, and ultimately, destruction.
This is an exploratory (design) thesis that delves into how to reevaluate waste conceptualization, and what would be needed for a collective to do so. How to create a space where the Ethos of Care and Repair becomes (one of) the method(s) of this reconceptualization, and rethinking relationship with waste.
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The proposal incites the collectivisation of maintenance and organisation of the electricity grid in Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam Zuid.

In times of unproductive polarisation along a ‚Political Spectrum’ and the proliferation of a reactive subjectivity that lacks contextual attunement, the citizen appears to become incrementally more a consumer of politics rather than a productive participant in the organisation of our togetherness.

As the progressive automation of our lives intensifies the general proletarianisation of the citizen, the capacity to productively participate in politics turns quite literally forgotten and invites for determinate governmentality to continue its recursion.

Drawing from Schizoanalysis, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, and care ethics, the research focuses on the exploration of libidinal, political, and energetic engagement with the formulation of individual and collective desires, beliefs, futures, and values through our environments.

Questioning the degree and value of the automations that surround us in our daily lives, the project aims to integrate the subject with (locally to globally) outsourced problems that it has progressively been alienated from and turn the paranoid architecture of electricity into a convivial tool that allows for the experience of collectivity, work as leisure, and political participation on a daily basis.

Through the necessity that is electricity as a collective (political) problem individuals can learn about parts-to-whole relations and dependencies. Via participatory spatial production, immediate material engagement, and the making sense-able of day-to-day automations, the project turns the inaccessible and intangible local electricity grid and transformer station of Afrikaanderwijk into a didactic environment to learn to care and to problematise desire as well as the coming together of individual and collective. It is a plea for an architectural process rather than product that is assisting in the emergence of literate, active subjects that can productively inform local and global collective efforts and challenges via a politics of transindividuation. ... Read more

This thesis explores ways of architectural production that do not conform to typical representational techniques. It begins with analysing how image production has shaped contemporary architectural labour and explores the networks it is entangled in. This resulted in an online performative repository: https://pkirilov9.github.io/renderillas-and-oraxontans/. The "design" part of this thesis has been approached as a way of figuring out how I want to define myself as a future practitioner. In that sense, it is an exploration of modes of performative production and archiving. I did not focus on end products or final results, instead, I wanted to show that I am capable of doing, of figuring things out on the ground, thinking on my feet, immersed in my environment, rather than detached from it. ... Read more

Contrary to human tendency to hypostasise and stabilise as a means of navigating the chaotic forces of this world, it is reconfiguration through perpetual destabilisation that allows one to grow, transform and venture into novelty. The process of defamiliarisation, by which one detaches from a state of familiarity and comfort, extending outwardly to embrace flux, is both liminal and complex. Liminal in that it entails the perpetual crossing of a limit and complex in the ways that this crossing is actualised. Could this relationship be of spatial concern?

The research brought forward, navigates productive rule-bending, humour and maintaining a playfully speculative stance towards architecture, that stretches beyond typological barriers; beyond that which is familiar. It is the result of a strong desire to experiment with unconventional ways of thinking and doing architecture. The proposed playground in Exarcheia, in the centre of Athens, explores urban friction as quality and rises to protest the sterilization of the modern city and the often homogenised, comfortable and safety-obsessed urban environments that surround us… ... Read more

The relationship between sex work and the city centre of Amsterdam ‘the Wallen’ area, also known as the ‘Red Light District’, already dates back towards 1350 (Majoor 2020, 46). While sex work in most cities happens on the periphery, in Amsterdam it traditionally exist in the heart of the city center. Despite the historical connection between sex workers and the district, they now fear being displaced by the municipality to towards the outskirts of the city into the Erotic Center. Several years ago I became resident of the Wallen area and while living above the sex working spaces I have become familiar with the ways how sex work is part of everyday life. While observing the interactions between sex workers and clients below my window the complexity of the relationship between the profession and the urban structure of Amsterdam fascinated me. It also revealed why spatial interventions in the area should be treated with delicacy. Since I believe sex workers to be essential care givers, who contribute to the diversity and safety of this neighborhood, the intention for this research is to examine how they could remain part of it in the future and to counter the plans that will lead to the gentrification of this neighborhood.
To the plans of the municipality the sex workers out of the area have reacted with the message: “don’t save us, save our windows”, a note that is revealing how the area is dealing with a material and social problem at once. This message is also very relatable to this research, since I will be approaching it through the window. The architectural element of the window has an high symbolic value and reveals a lot about societal norms and values. Therefore, to explain a wide range of developments that took place over the last two centuries, this research begins with examanining historical photographs that display the windows of sex workers and are carefully analyzed through hand drawings. These studies will be supported by theoretical resources which elaborate on prevailing societal norms and values that concerned sexuality.
What this research will illustrate is how sex work is often concerned with moral questions, like the issue of (female) body determination. As a result, sex work became a familiar topic within histocial feminist debates, having either a liberative or oppressive effect on the profession. Since the goal for this research is to imagine the future of sex work spaces in the Wallen area, it will navigate through these debates in order to take a position in the contemporary feminist debate myself. Hoping to find a appropriate design approach which will challenge the strategy of the municipality. ... Read more

Architecture as a discipline is deeply involved in a constant material entanglement with a large number of entities. Yet across the discipline, nature-culture, subject- object distinctions are still being forcefully being held up, with the consequence of invasion of many territories, inhabited by other species and the destruction of their environments. In order to overcome such damaging differentiations, it is necessary to reconsider tour concepts of ontological hierarchies and their outcomes in architecture. This may allow us to create new affective environments, considerate of the constant set of relations that we find ourselves entangled in. ... Read more

The project strives to imagine a district of commoning in Warsaw, where the common praxis is to be fueled by capturing the desires of visiting subjects. It is followed by an investigation of the relations of space and desire, finally culminating in the design of a cinema, which is to be a centrepiece of the desiring district. ... Read more