Resilience Rooted in Traces
Cultivating life from neglected past
S. Paias (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
Antonio Cantero – Mentor (TU Delft - Public Building and Housing Design)
S. Lee – Mentor (TU Delft - Public Building and Housing Design)
G.Y. Warries – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
M.J. van Dorst – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Urban Studies)
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Abstract
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.