Building Inertia
Holding Water for Living
M. Gress (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
Mo Smit – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
Paddy Tomesen – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Climate change is intensifying hydrological extremes in the Netherlands, where flooding and drought increasingly occur in close succession. In cities such as Eindhoven, water systems are primarily designed to rapidly discharge excess water, contributing to water scarcity and the spatial invisibility of water in daily urban life. At the same time, growing housing demand raises questions about how living environments can engage more constructively with water systems.
This graduation project explores how architecture can contribute to these challenges by redefining the relationship between housing, landscape, and water infrastructure. Introducing the concept of inertia, the project investigates how architectural and landscape systems can slow down, buffer, store, purify, and reuse water over time, transforming hydrological processes into inhabitable spatial conditions. Using Eindhoven as a case study, the project combines research-by-design across landscape, urban, and building scales. The resulting proposal introduces an adaptive housing landscape alongside the canal, integrating wetlands, recreational water bodies, ecological purification systems, and collective housing into one interconnected framework.