This project deals with the architecture of order. It is at its core an exploration of how design is used to provide a powerful and coherent image of the state through the representation of the most fundamental and controversial of institutions: police.
The police station is interpreted here as the center of a system of state representation, the place where civilians, officers, detainees and solicitors converge, positioning n at the intersection of state order and architectural order.
The project focuses on the Garda Siochana, the sole police force in the Republic of Ireland. In the context of the Project Ireland 2040 the Irish government plans to increase the Garda presence over the country, focusing specifically on rural areas. The plan includes the refurbishment, expansion and construction of more than 30 Garda stations. A policeman, in this rural context, is a common fixture, a part of the local landscape, the butt of a popular joke. Not a semi-divine representation of the state, nor a troubled urban detective, a policeman is here part of the local society together with the postman, the butcher, the pub owner. It is this specific condition that allows for a reconsideration of police architecture not as one defined by the idea of control, or even intimidation, but one characterized fundamentally by reassurance.
This reality opens the possibility for rethinking the role of police on the Irish territory, proposing an architectural language embedded in the rural irish context, consisting of an encounter between the classical order and elements of the local vernacular.
This critical reconsideration projected outwards by the facade of the police station and the moments of exchange it enacts, and inwards, through the design of interrelating spaces that underpin the practice of policing.
“The police are the public and the public are the police” is stated in the Peelian principles, the founding document of Irish police. It is the adherence to this principle that leads to a design for police that is not based on grandiose architectural gestures, but on a careful reconsideration of the relationship between the vernacular and the classic, the relatable and the impressive, the public and the policeman.

From 1993 to 2007, Ireland experienced a period of remarkable economic growth, during the so-called Celtic Tiger era, followed by a severe housing and financial crisis, leaving over 2500 unfinished estates scattered around the island. The so-called ghost estates , became the ruins of crisis, reminders and remainders of former years overdevelopment. This thesis investigates the value of the neglected ghost estates. Their typical layout and structure, the way they occupy the landscape, the materials and their age define the new role and character they will inherit. The intention was to convert the derelict Ghost Estates into vital machines for communality. Architecture by its use, adapts to the users, and as it belongs and originates to the society, therefore should evolve corresponding to future needs. The chosen example is a cluster of 10 unfinished structures, that lie close to the twin towns of Ballybofey and Stranorlar and to the forthcoming Atlantic Corridor. Their position leads to the creation of a new subcenter, proposing a new landscape and a more densified future to this area. The proposed function is the one of the Market, a use and a public space that dates back in Irish history, evaluating the former way cities were structured and operate. Assuming that a ruin exists “between the not-yet and the no-longer”, the appropriation of the ghost estates breaks this condition, creating a new future, a function and an architectural language that has to correspond, to interfere and evolve the existing reality.

From 1993 to 2007, Ireland experienced a period of remarkable economic growth, during the so-called Celtic Tiger era, followed by a severe housing and financial crisis, leaving over 2500 unfinished estates scattered around the island. The so-called ghost estates , became the ruins of crisis, reminders and remainders of former years overdevelopment. This thesis investigates the value of the neglected ghost estates. Their typical layout and structure, the way they occupy the landscape, the materials and their age define the new role and character they will inherit. The intention was to convert the derelict Ghost Estates into vital machines for communality. Architecture by its use, adapts to the users, and as it belongs and originates to the society, therefore should evolve corresponding to future needs. The chosen example is a cluster of 10 unfinished structures, that lie close to the twin towns of Ballybofey and Stranorlar and to the forthcoming Atlantic Corridor. Their position leads to the creation of a new subcenter, proposing a new landscape and a more densified future to this area. The proposed function is the one of the Market, a use and a public space that dates back in Irish history, evaluating the former way cities were structured and operate. Assuming that a ruin exists “between the not-yet and the no-longer”, the appropriation of the ghost estates breaks this condition, creating a new future, a function and an architectural language that has to correspond, to interfere and evolve the existing reality.

The Irish border, runs for 499 km separating the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland. Since its implementation in 1912, the border fluctuated in its permeability and meaning, for there it witnessed great periods of instability, quietness, denial and insignificance. When the “Good Friday agreement was signed” the common ground of the EU helped blur the choice between a united island of Ireland and a united kingdom. Today, the Irish border, is just another Irish landscape that is only relevant because of its location, and that seamless transition, is once again to be debated in the aftermath of Brexit.
Given the glacial pace of the Brexit negotiations, the issue of the Irish border might not be resolved by 2020, in fact it might not be resolved by 2040.
Borders are never resolved, they change…
Hence, instead of designing a border, the project designs borders. In this moment of uncertainty, what is/are the future(s) of the Irish border? Like all borders, the Irish border was designed, drawn like a sharp line on the map, splitting the spaces hindering its precise cut through the territory. But how come we don’t design borders in relation to what is actually happening on the ground? Can we think of the borderwall as a device? An infrastructure? A place? A passage? A landscape? A home?
The focus on a specific aspect each time, and the resulting exaggerated visions, guides the discourse into an intended direction. From trade, to issues of identity, memory, war and immigration, the border wall is designed through different lenses.
In this uniquely contested site in Ireland, this speculation not only raises questions about the design and presence of the borders themselves, but also provide a framework in which to investigate pressing matters for architects: issues of politics, agency, compliance, resistance, longevity, materiality and symbolism.
In the spirit of Perec and Queneau, the project is a collection of different borders: infrastructural, public, domestic, hard, soft, optimistic, pessimistic, past, present and future.

The project explores the idea of exhibiting animals both in literal terms – the zoo for instance as a space for the display and containment of animals – and as a metaphorical construct for architecture’s relationship with nature, with enclosures and with artefacts. The Bestiary is proposed as a new way of exhibiting animals and as a new program to reappropriate “Big Houses” in Ireland and their adjacent demesnes. Sited in Hazelwood Forest which located just over 3 kilometers outside the town of Sligo in northwest Ireland, the project A Donegal Bestiary has a 28-hectare demesne and an 18th-century Palladian style country house. The Hazelwood House was destroyed during the Irish revolutionary period in the early 20th century and have been abandoned until now. By bringing the idea of the Bestiary – a compendium of beasts generating moral lessons for the observer – the project stands as a new model for the contemporary zoo. The Donegal Bestiary involves a process of integration of the animal into the found Irish landscape, allowing each party to influence the development of the other, far from the outdated idea of animal exhibitionism. It as well gathers within its territory a wide selection of local species that are naturally inhabited in the Irish landscape. The Big House, where the project is sited, was a house for the outsiders and once a colonial stage, it is reconstructed as the reversal of a universal reality, where the animals become the protagonists and the human become the observer, the outsider. The Donegal Bestiary is therefore an opportunity that can be utilized and manipulated with the adequate scientific and spatial practices, to generate targeted outcomes: reintroduction of extinct species, educational purposes, ecological integration and landscape recovery of the abandoned estates. In this sense, the project stands for 5 propositions: it is Bestiary not Zoo, Reintegration not Importation, Irish not Exotic, Big House Solution not Ghost House and Ecology not Tourism.

Necessarily Eurometropolitan is the latest publication by The Berlage and discusses eight architectural projects on the borders between Belgium and France, relating to productivity and the picturesque. It is edited by Salomon Frausto and is part of a series of publications related to Bare Necessities, a program examining the origins, innovations, and legacy of architectural modernism in order to address present-day urgencies in the built environment. @en

The river Leie is a commercial waterway that flows from Pas-de-Calais to Gent. Between the cities of Armentieres and Mennen, it defines the Belgium-French border. Seven islands along this 20 km-long section are the product of canalization, introduced in the 17th century. Over the following years, this waterway developed into an infrastructural artery by the construction locks chambers in order to overcome height differences. By the mid-20th century, however, the canal went into decline, prompted by the slow demise of the industrial activities in the region. More recently, this wider area has been redefined not through industry but political bureaucracy, with the dissolution of permanent border controls. Ironically, despite this erasure of boundaries, the line of the waterway and its canal infrastructure has remained rigid – a register of a former industry, but one without any form of public, or indeed human presence.
The idea of the public festival is as old as the public itself. In the context of the Eurometropolis, Belgium has a long-existing festival culture, from the historic Flemish kermis to its more than thirty annual festivals. Similarly, France has historically delivered policies of access to culture for the masses. However, over the last 20 years, the seasonal musical festival, sited in large and typically rural areas, has emerged as an increasingly prevalent type, pulling the festival away from public, urban space. This move out of the city is largely because of the size of the audiences–a mass and density of people that would collapse existing urban structures. Based in International Standards, this audience is housed in temporal structures, but the effect of lacking permanent infrastructure is a forfeiting of its public function and responsibility outside the bounds of the festival. Architects cannot design the feast, the concert of the festival, and actual inhabitation cannot be designed; however, permanent elements can define how inhabitation might take place, and this does definitively fit within the remit of architects.
Since the ephemeral nature of the contemporary music festival deprives the festival of any architecture quality, laying foundations is the first, significant step towards an architectural scenario in this de-industrialized region. A festival ground forms the extension of a canal lock, and can simultaneously be seen as larger systematic strategy for the reuse of an underused waterway infrastructure. The lock’s only occasional use mirrors the essentially cyclical nature of the festival. At
the same time, its permanent infrastructure offer the opportunity to improve the logistics of the festival, such as the transport and storage facilities. The waterway is not only a scenario that actively attracts and hosts spectators in search of experience, but is also an infrastructural framework for public inhabitation. The multi-cultural and de-industrialized river Leie offers a scenario to re-think the preconceived rigidity of the waterway infrastructure.

Asphalt Gardens are a landscape intervention alongside the E17 Highway that connects Belgium and France.
The project looks at the idea of highway landscape as a pastoral landscape. It deals with what is artificial and natural, with the idea of perceiving something through a window frame, through speed. It deals with the specific environment of the Eurometropoils and by extension the northern European Landscape. Appreciating the as found condition as a given situation of the motorway landscape, Asphalt Gardens provokes the ideas of beauty. They don’t acquire borrowed beauty but they celebrate the rough and artificial highway landscape.
The manner of our regard to discarded artifacts, such us the ordinary highway defines the way we look landscapes and how we can create gardens. The highway landscape has a particular aesthetic language and beauty. In the same context, a garden next to a highway can be beautiful if it refers to the highway.
The project focuses on the highway landscape as a particular post-industrial territory which deserves attention because of its dominance and use.
The world landscape gradually changed in meaning through the last two centuries. First it meant the picture of a view, an artist’s interpretation of a scenery. Informal landscape tradition, such as the 18th century English gardens designed from Humphrey Repton, was influenced by the pastoral landscape. The gardeners, with a similar way as the painters of pastoral and picturesque landscapes, decided what to include or omit in their design. They created stylized, picturesque landscapes, leaving out from the composition the muddy roads.
In this logic, the garden consists of a series of pictorial compositions. In each of these pictures we find the basic principles of harmony, unity and contrast. In the landscape paintings of Jacob van Ruisdel and Van Goyen, the northern European landscape is depicting as an as found condition and that makes it pastoral. In many of the paintings the idea of harmony between the man-made and the natural is introduced with the ruin. The artificial is taken over from the natural and the ruin harmonizes the two contradictory principles.
Aspalt Gardens recontextualize existing artifacts and reflects the reality in a way that provokes relations between objects and materials that are taken for granted. They suggest a new reading and observation of the ordinary landscape.

The news has always been a public program. Before the printing press was invented, word of mouth was the primary source of news, gathered and distributed through pubs, inns and markets. The invention of the printing press brought an autonomy in news production, technology made the news more coherent, content controlled and regulated, ensuring that the same news travelled to more people. This, according to Victor Hugo, transferred the responsibility of conveying human thought from architecture to printing, from the book of stone to the book of paper, which was far more well traversed path in the city, through the form of an arcade, to renew its relevance within public life, while presenting an opportunity to increase its credibility by being in constant public view. Born out of industrial overproduction and new goods that flooded the market, arcades in 19th century Europe consolidate and put in public view the new products of industrial luxury. The symmetrical sky-lit interior street acting as a shortcut within the dense city blocks provided a way for the extension of public space on private property. While they were extensions of streets, with interior facades, signage, colours and lights of the commercial establishments, they were covered, protected from the weather, hence behaving like a public drawing room, where the collective lives, experiences, understands and invents. The New Newsroom utilises these architectural elements, incorporating them into a productive space; the shop windows look into podcast stations and screening rooms, benches along the interior façade act as social space, the street lights give a hazy domestic glow to the productive news floor, that acts as a constant backdrop to a frantic city life. solid and durable; and now to the book in the cloud, that is more permanent still through its physical absence. “This will kill that… Printing will kill Architecture”.1 The book of paper was still monumental, immortalised through its multiplicity. The power and autonomy of the press still ensured grand newsroom buildings, and tall skyscrapers where the paper was produced, that continued to be a prominent part of the public urban environment like the public halls of Fleet Street in London, the Hall of Inscriptions of the Chicago Tribune, and more recently, auditoriums and retail spaces in the New York Times, and event spaces and debate centres as part of the curated public program of the Guardian. In an era where we have multiple news sources, an overwhelming number of opinions through the social media, every tweet and Facebook post, considered news, goes onto the immortal web of the internet; the newsroom is not an autonomous organisation for news production. Though this allows for smaller organisations and different voices that occupy abandoned warehouses, former residential buildings ,the multiple contradictory outputs have caused the news to lose its credibility. The New Newsroom puts the gathering, productive and digestive spaces of the contemporary newsroom within the

This thesis proposes the construction of three temporary pavilions at Place Francois Mitterrand in Lille, France. The pavilions will be part of the event “Lille World Design Capital” of 2020.
“Everything is a matter of perspective”. Place Francois Mitterrand, the public core of the 1989’s Euralille Masterplan by OMA, is seen by many as a residual and ordinary space, however the use of perspective can change its perception, and reveal it as the result of an innovative project that wanted to break with the traditional urban planning.
This project proposes interactive pavilions that work as classical optical devices, the goal is through framing relevant views of the site facilitate its reading as a symbol of urban design. The proposal is presented as a dialogue between the ambitions of Rem Koolhaas for Euralille and the pavilions. The selected views illustrate fragments of the architect discourse.
The superimposition of the classical perception of space in this postmodern project raises the confrontation of many ideas, such as: inertia x movement, simplicity x complexity, order x fragmentation, singularity x plurality, and reveal perspective as a matter of ideology.
Propositions
1. The juxtaposition of different infrastructures gives the identity to Euralille. Place François Mitterrand, the public core of the masterplan, was designed to reveal all the complexity of the program. Despite its potential, the square is perceived by many as an ordinary space.
2. The coherence of Place François Mitterrand is not formal, but perceived through movement, opposing the classical principles of composition of space. The perception of this space is translated in a fragmented sequence of blurred images.
3. Rather than calling Place François Mitterrand an ordinary and residual space, the experience and perception of this space
could be altered to reveal it as a symbol of post-modern design.
4. Linear perspective is used as a tool to change the role of the commuter to the observer of Place François Mitterrand. Through framing a unique and static view, the one-point perspective provides a linear understand of a space.
5. Camera lenses are the new eyes, and photography is how we experience space and time.

La filature is a call for the disruption of the post-industrial heritage.
Imitating the filming technique of montaging and cutting to introduce the
foreign type of the Movie Palace into the obsolete textile factory
Desurmont. The project uses the pre-existent conditions of the ruin as sets,
backgrounds for the production of films and as ornaments for the Movie
Palace, as a counter reaction to current understanding of industrial heritage
and as a opposition to current development of the cinema type.
Between 1893 and 1929, the society Jules De Sourmont and Sons built
their main site factory of spinning wool in Tourcoing, in the North of
France. The use of reinforce concrete allowed the construction of large contemporary films. It challenges preconceives ways of making and
thinking architecture and cinema.
Openings in the walls and floors are made to let the camera pass and shot
continuous scenes from space to space, transforming the complex in one
single set. The cut of the cinema becomes the performer. It deconstructs
the factory main building to transform it into a movie palac. It shape is the
result of the technical specification of the film industry standard of quality
THX, the procedure of demolition to guaranty the structural stability and
the programmatic functions of the movie palace.
The fear of demolishing something and never have it back, block the
transformation of the post-industrial heritage, “It is time for a no-blame
conversation about letting some things change and even letting some
things go.” . La filature celebrates the ruins, is an alternative proposal for
the Desurmont factory, not its complete demolition, neither its complete
transformation. It proposes hard cuts of the building to show an alternative
way of dealing with heritage to accept the reality of the ruin.
spam using bearing beams, thus liberating the floor plans for big chains of
machines to process the wool. In 2003 the Desurmont factory closed, it
could not follow anymore the evolution of the industry. The concrete
structure can no longer host the innovations of the industry. The structure
that once made the company so productive and modern, was now force it
to the bankruptcy, and the abandon.
Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel, an American theatrical impresario, inaugurated
The Roxy theatre in 1927. The opening hosted the silent movie “The
Loves of Sonya” starring Gloria Swanson. Its rather modest entrance
disguised one of the most cavernous lobbies ever built, and a magnificent
auditorium equipped with the latest technology. Sublimely ornamented, it
follows the type’s sequence of spaces commonly used in the movie
palaces. Sadly demolished in 1960.. The movie palaces like Roxy or
Gaumont in Paris could not compete with the modern suburban cinema
multiplexes. Those macro complexes of mass consumption are simple
black containers that provoke the boredom of the spectator.
Sergei Eisenstein argued that “Montage has been established by the Soviet
film as the nerve of cinema”. But what happens if instead of edit the film
we edit architecture? The project uses demolition tools to transform the
spaces and curated the ruin as a counter reaction to the over edited

The proposed project is an Archive of Work for the Eurometropolis area of Lille-Tournai-Kortrijk. It stores physical and digital records from the region’s professional activities with an ambition to make its collected knowledge accessible.
The area balances between a post-industrial identity, characterized by coal mining and textile factories, and a new strategic placement as the ideal investment location for business and services like logistics, design and information technologies. This shift from the primary and secondary sectors of economy to services related to digital technology, is also reflected in the collected material.
Higher educational institutions developed parallel to the previous industrial development in order to provide research in the same fields. Today, research centers try to link again education with the contemporary growth of digital production and commerce. The Archive of Work is the mediating partner between industry and education. While serving its administrative function, it serves as a bridge between the past and the future. By becoming an integrated part of the educational system, the archive can offer its collected knowledge for further research in the professional world against the region’s high unemployment.
The chosen site for the archive is the disused freight station Gare Saint Sauveur, centrally located in Lille. This location places the archive among the civic buildings of the city, like the town hall, the museum and the library, suggesting its urban nobility, as one of the main public institutions. Located along the horizontal boulevard connecting the new master planned area with the existing city, the Archive serves as a gate, joining the former industrial site with the urban fabric. This position sets the Archive as a monumental institution in the city center of Lille.
The building consists of eight floors, organized in two volumes with a cut in-between them. Precast concrete panels create a closed envelope, providing insulation for the storage rooms while thin window slits, indicate the accessible spaces within. Concrete’s austerity and roughness communicate the building’s industrial content, despite its mute and closed exterior.
Archives operate with a clear separation between storage and human accessible areas, clearly outlining circulation paths of the archived material, the working staff, and the visitors. In the proposed building, the public areas are not separated, but placed in-between the storage rooms to evoke an interaction with them. From the closed ground floor, a public ascending route leads the visitor to the middle part of the archive, an elevated square, offering views above the city. From this space that can serve as a meeting place, one can explore the rest accessible parts within the facility, placed in various levels around the vertical voids, in conjunction with the stored formats.
The project is altering the archive, from a storage infrastructure to a productive educational facility. This new character can transform the institution from a collection of dead objects, to an active organism, providing a space for reflection and gathering for the community while transmitting its collected knowledge.
Propositions
1. The archive is not an administrative storage facility, but an educational institution and thus it should be open to the public.
2. The archive, as a civic building, belongs to the cultural and educational facilities of the city, the library, the university and the museum.
3. Industry and education used to be more closely related, as research would explore for production.
4. The Archive of Work is necessary to bridge industry and education, as without understanding the labor of the past, it’s difficult to innovate in the present high-tech economy.
5. The archived elements are not objects of a museum, but they can only be understood through activation. The archive provides the necessary facilities to comprehend and interpret the data in order to produce new knowledge from it.

The Claim for a Good Life is a book in a series of publications related to The Good Life, a program dedicated to exploring the relationship of the built environment to collective pursuits, personal aspirations, and our contemporary world.@en

The Dutch west Caribbean company is a modest proposal. The company was created as an architectural response to an ongoing geopolitical and geoeconomic process (the development of the offshore economy). A process, whereby not only unusual goods such as artworks, battles of wine and stolen antiquities (that were in times past, part of the collective goods) were turned into commodities, but also basic human rights such as the right to asylum, freedom of speech, right to health and more are being turned into commodities. The Dutch west Caribbean company is focused on tax havens and the Freeport as a withdrawal facility, one that seeps through the cracks of national sovereignty and establishes its own logistics network.

The offshore world has been gaining enormous popularity since the 1980’s and despite increasingly defining the operations of the globalized economy and the spaces it generates, it is a spatial phenomenon that is mostly ignored by the architectural and urban discourse. Manifested by the forms of tax havens, freeports and special economic zones, the offshore world offers an exterritorial space where people, objects, and capital can operate beyond the burdens of national sovereignty, and remain in an unregulated limbo, in theory, forever.