Living Archives
Effective inefficiencies that turn space into story
L.C. Walter (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
J. Gosseye – Mentor (TU Delft - Situated Architecture)
Leeke Reinders – Mentor (TU Delft - Situated Architecture)
R.R. van den Ban – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
RJ Nottrot – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Education and Student Affairs)
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Abstract
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.