University Buildings play complex roles as public buildings. They provide a space for their primary goal of teaching, learning, and research to transfer knowledge while also contributing as a public space for interaction within the university and community and further with the society of the host city. The spatial configuration and relationship between the campuses and the city changed over time as the number of students increased and the city’s morphology developed. As the learning space on the campus includes not only closed classrooms and laboratories but also outdoor areas for transdisciplinary cross-fertilization, the sense of sharing public spatial configuration gives strong co-dependency between the university and the host city.

This project, "Shaping Public Consciousness; City Miniature of a Vertical Campus" is to create not only a building, but a place, where people and city streets connect by sharing and learning the knowledge and culture under its primary function as the campus. Spuiplein in Den Haag, the project site, has experienced drastic changes through continuous demolition to construct new high-rise towers with new characteristics. For an active city like Den Haag, the spaces between buildings are crucial for the quality of publicity as they form the social behavior and attention of the city. The project explores human-oriented public spatial configuration by integrating research-by-design principles that prioritize sensory engagement, spatial fluidity, and human-centered design by adapting phenomenological elements with the use of existing building.