The water tax in the Netherlands provides the funding for all the water management in the Dutch deltas. In the US there is no such tax, this means funding big civil projects may be problematic and not so easy. Therefore it is necessary to explore smaller scale solutions for the problem of sea level rise.
In the San Francisco bay area, there are many communities which are prone to flooding in the near future. Some of these communities have a high social vulnerability for disasters like flooding. This means preparing and recovering from flooding’s(or earthquakes) proves to be very difficult for the communities. That is what this project is about, providing a small scale safe location and give the opportunity to decrease the social vulnerability in these communities.
The solution that is suggested is a terp(dutch) on with people can flee when the area is about to flood. On this hill a school and community centre are located. The school functions in times of need as an evacuation centre and provides food and drinking water to its inhabitants.

Homes for sustainable living

‘’The good intentions and creativity of citizens and their willingness to make a difference is one of the most underutilized resources we have today’’, says Global Ecovillage Network Europe (GEN). Bottom- up initiatives like ecovillages and the recently emerged Dutch ‘Tiny House Movement’ are sustainable projects organized and shaped by people who adopted a sustainable lifestyle and with that contribute to the reduction of climate change. It appears that similar people, who are also willing to reduce their carbon footprint, can’t find a suitable living environment in the current housing stock that fully meet their needs. While, in a world where nowadays climate change is a big problem, we should encourage this group of people to get most out of their willingness by giving them the right circumstances in the built environment. As architects, we can learn from the way residents of tiny houses and ecovillages organize and shape their environment, and use this knowledge in the design of future dwellings. By visiting and interviewing the residents of tiny houses, and by visiting and talking to the initiators of ecovillages, aspects that are being integrated in tiny-houses and eco-villages that support a sustainable lifestyle are found. Mainly, sustainable methods for energy- and water consumption, food consumption, the way they deal with transportation and product consumption are discovered.

While cities densify, and fill up with building mass, it is of great importance to pay high attention to good quality public space. People should feel at home not only inside their private dwelling, but also outside the building - in the city itself. Architecture has to provide possibilities for people to establish social contacts and on the other hand offer shelter and intimacy. This is one of architecture’s twin-phenomena. Richard Rogers states, that we as architects always have two clients: the people who use the buildings and the people who pass by the buildings, for whom the buildings form outside space. They have different ways of looking at things. “Public spaces - our streets and squares, parks and pavements - are the stages for public life; the public realm is at the heart of our life as social animals.” It is this ‘twin-phenomena’ of architecture - the phenomena of public and private - that interests me.

Architectural theory has illuminated the inherently connected relationship between fashion and architecture. Both disciplines shelter the body, react to spatial volume, rely on a process, and take a work of creativity from its two-dimensional concept into a three-dimensional reality. But the end result does not come out of the blue. It is the design process that leads to a building or fashion collection. And even though designing is just one verb, it actually is a chaotic sequence of activities; a complex, personal, creative and open-ended skill as described by Van Dooren et al. (2014). Is the framework of generic design elements that is developed for explicating the design process helpful to compare the design approaches in fashion with the architectural design process? The results of interviewing three fashion designers show similarities, differences and unique design tools and opportunities used in fashion. These can then be reflected on the architectural design process, and approaches of applying fashion tools in architecture can be considered.

Driven by my fascination for utopian open structures that give answer to the unexpected, I have been exploring the meaning of flexibility for the city of today.
The project is called Arrival City: a radical transformation of the modern ruin at the Hofplein-area in Rotterdam into a transitplace for all kinds of newcomers.

Abstraction plays a central role, as both a language and an essential tool for design. However, because it can be vague, confusing, and even paradoxical at times the process of abstraction is rarely explicitly investigated in architectural education. As a result, inexperienced architects often do not have a clear idea of what abstraction is, or how to best use it. The following research sets out to address this problem by proposing a simple, yet comprehensive teaching model that would aid beginner architecture students in their understanding and use of abstraction.The designed extension for the national library of Bulgaria is an example of the proposed teaching model and the described abstraction process applied and tested on an architectural project.

Global climate change is an inescapable discussion today. Our history shows us the constant need to move along with this changing stream of life, as more and more extreme climate-related events happen every day. I witnessed the sad consequences of flooding problems due the Tsunami in Sendai, during my exchange period in Japan in 2012. Facing the problems of this disaster has been the start of this exploration in urban- and architectural water management. This thesis is an evolving process in finding answers to the key question “Which design solutions at a building level will help Cần Thơ adapt to the worldwide climate related flooding problems?”. The final result is identified in three separate objectives: 1) To create a toolbox with climate adaptive and particularly water robust solutions on a building level for the design process of houses in delta areas; 2) To propose a sustainable climate adaptive solution on a neighborhood level with particular attention to the existing tube houses in Ninh Kieu (District Centre of Cần Thơ, Mekong Delta, Vietnam) for the year 2100; 3) To propose a climate adaptive and water robust architectural re-design for the tube houses in Ninh Kieu for the year 2100.

This paper reports on the exploration of the architectural design process involving both the expression of the intuitive and tacit as well as the rational and explicit. The purpose is finding out the role and influence of design approaches and design methods within the design process regarding these opposites by reflecting on my own process in two design experiments. Results show that, although very differently perceived, design approaches and methods are of significant importance functioning as the overarching structure. It is the dialogue between the tacit and explicit, the intuitive and rational, that shapes the design process. The acknowledgement and awareness of this fact can help communication between teachers and students but also architects and clients about the content of the design process, which too often is perceived as an unexplainable and mystique process.