The Bundestag is the German federal parliament and with its 736 representatives it is the biggest freely elected parliament in the world (Mayer, 2021). The size of the Bundestag fluctuates every election term because the German voting system works with overhang and levelling representatives (Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, N.D.).

The range of possible mandates varies from 598 to over 1,000 members, highlighting the considerable variability and uncertainty in the system (Vehrkamp, 2021). With more than 7 employees per representative (Bundestag, 2022)., the Bundestag can fluctuate with over 3.000 employees per election term.

This gives the obvious problem that it is very difficult for the Bundestag administration, to know how many facilities are needed. In the Bundestag, there is a forced use of home office, wooden container offices, and temporarily built offices, to try to facilitate the Bundestag (Ismar, 2021). This is also a problem on the sustainable side because temporary facilities are not sustainable and energy inefficient.

These problems are also true for any proposed designs for a new parliament building for the Bundestag. So, to counter these problems, a new Bundestag parliament building should be able to adapt to the change of users per election term.

Some questions that arise when looking at the possible solution of adaptability are: how are architectural elements related to this and how can the program best be used? How can digitalisation play a role and is it may be possible to have programmable and adaptable floorplans or room uses? How will the cyber security be accommodated for possible digital meetings? And how can all this adaptability help in sustainability?

The research and design question that follows out of these questions: How to design the adaptable Bundestag parliament of the future to sustainable facilitate the fluctuating number of members?

To answer the research question and come to a conclusion/final design, the research into the client will be done by gathering information through internet, interviews, and written questions. For the site the main research methods will be mapping information and site visits. And for the program the research will be done by case studies on other federal parliamentary lower house buildings. Because the Bundestag is idiosyncratic in its fluctuating size, the comparisons will be in square meter per employee.

The final goal is to design a new sustainable Bundestag parliament building that is adaptable in use and program, and not negatively affected by the fluctuating number of members of the Bundestag.

The following research focuses on "The Human Body Shop", an institute for human body augmentation. It is a hospital-oriented project based on the following research question: “How will human body augmentation reflect change in the hospital typology in the future?” Hospitals are some of the most critical buildings in society, but they are only part of it during times of necessity. The highly complex programs and dominant circulation systems of the traditional "healing machine" have created a labyrinth environment that society tends to avoid rather than engage with, discover, or feel connected to.

Innovation in the field of human body augmentation has initiated a shift from buildings functioning as healing machines to the human body itself as the locus of healing. This shift not only alters the human body but also transforms the hospital typology as we know it today. Future hospitals will specialize exclusively; in this case in the customized procedures involved in augmenting human bodies. These institutions will also engage in research and educate the next generation of professionals, as well as the broader society.

The continuous advancement of technology will necessitate a flexible program, which in turn will require a modular structure. This flexibility opens the possibility of reimagining the hospital as a more open and integrated environment, redefining its relationship with public spaces. These spaces will not only provide an escape but will also create opportunities for the public to gather for various activities and engage as a community within the scale of the neighbourhood; within the larger context of Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany.

The future modular hospital typology will be seamlessly interwoven with everyday life, transforming its image from that of an isolated institution to a subtle collection of buildings integrated into the urban fabric. Introducing "the Human Body Shop" - a new hospital typology that is not only part of society in times of need but also an integral part of daily life.

This project focuses on the discrimination against child justice and proposes the solution of creating a seperate specialized juvenile courthouse for youth offendors. Children are after all our future and should be properly taken care of.

For several decades, architectural theorists have argued that there is a loss of meaning in architecture, caused by an over-emphasis on scientific thinking and the devaluing of poetic practices. Some theorists have presented ways to return meaning to architecture: Juhani Pallasmaa has called for empathic imagination and Alberto Perez-Gomez for attuned architecture. However, neither has offered methods for how to achieve those ends.

This research aims to bridge theory and practice by developing methods for attuning to a location and its inhabitants. It focuses on ways to become attuned to a place and people, in order to imagine spaces empathically and tailor architecture to the affective qualities of a place.

To best develop methods that identify these qualities, this research looks at familiar places, that is, places we assume to know well and therefore may overlook distinctive features. Accordingly, I have focussed on Brigflatts, my childhood neighbourhood in rural England.

I develop methods for attuning in two ways. First, by drawing upon three fields and their related methods: cognitive science and sensory mapping; anthropology and collaborative design ethnography; and architecture and reflections on atmospheres. Second, by creating physical objects that translate qualities and experiences of place into an interactive form.

My exploration of Brigflatts culminates in four large-format paintings that express what I became attuned to. I deconstruct and analyse these paintings to indicate how the on-site activities provided insights into the affective qualities of the location.

While this research looked at a familiar, rural location, I show how the methods elaborated at Brigflatts can be adapted to less familiar and urban environments. I discuss their broader application through a set of guiding principles for methods of attunement.

The research findings feed into a design project set at Brigflatts. “The Quaker Project at Brigflatts” seeks to re-activate a historically and spiritually significant site while balancing the needs of the faith group, the national park planning authority, and the locals living nearby.

Through this project, I explore how architecture can be attuned to a place and a people – how social behaviours, material bodies, and affective qualities can inform the design of new spaces and new experiences of the site and the protected landscape. I ground this project in a real-life scenario, responding to the Quaker testimonies and the National Park’s development requirements. In doing so, I envision a future of development in the Yorkshire Dales that protects cultural heritage, progresses building techniques, and offers a contemporary architecture attuned to its locality.

This project focuses on two problems: the low publicness of architecture of district parliament, and the ongoing growth of distrust between citizens and representatives.

With the theme of digitalisation, this project responds to the problems by proposing a new parliamentary workflow with the use of hybrid communication, which involves the basic parliament programs to prepare for debate, a people’s voices gallery that broadcast opinions of the public, and a data hall that collect and coordinate massive digital information from the public.

The natural temperate grasslands of the Victorian Volcanic Plains [VVP] are one of Australia's most critically endangered ecosystems. Extreme ecological transformations due to agricultural practices and urban development have resulted in less than 1% of the original vegetation remaining in a pre-colonial state. These losses have led to both environmental and cultural destruction among the region's First Nations People, particularly the Wathaurong, whose deep knowledge of the area established complex land management systems sustaining human cultivation with ecological care for thousands of years.

This research and design project posit that to improve the region, a retrospective examination and uncovering of colonialist and First Nations histories is necessary. With the aim to adapt or reengage with FN’s Peoples cultural views and landscape management which is hidden beneath the surface. The project aims to delineate the fundamental views, laws, and dynamics of the First Nations People and explore their manifestation in spatial ecologies. The focus is on translating these insights into spatial, practical, and programmatic forms to reassess the urban-rural and natural landscape of the Victorian Volcanic Plains. Seven major design ideas were developed through the research, informing a new social spatial landscape for the area.

Furthermore, the design project concentrates on developing a First Nations Agricultural campus within the VVP context, aligning with the design and spatial principles outlined in the research. Situated on a farm owned by the Wathaurung CoOp, this project addresses the complex poly culture systems of Agricultural, Socio-cultural, and ecological production/reproduction. It navigates this complexity through three major design scales: the System Scale, the Compound Scale, and the Building Scale, creating a farm-scape appropriate for the region.

The overarching theme of journey, evident in ecosystem movement, land management processes, and seasonal and social-cultural reproduction, serves as the project's ligaments. It connects various design scales and dualistic systems on the site to educate users about 'seeing this landscape with new eyes.'

The Building design component focuses on designing spaces for core processes of the polyculture system, particularly the seed cultivating and processing areas, where the strongest interconnections between the three major polyculture systems are found.

This project stems from a critical reflection on the urban processes of growth that trigger the construction of new cities in Egypt, in particular the development of the New Administrative Capital (NAC) that sits 45 km to the East of Cairo.

Over the last 50 years, Cairo’s built environment has exploded onto its agricultural land, both formally and informally, within its urban fabric, and into the desert around it, in the shape of desert archipelagoes. This is clearly visible when comparing satellite imagery from 1985 and 2020. Egypt’s government promotes the new capital as the key to reducing Cairo’s urban load as a result of its explosive metropolitan population, currently at 21.3 million projected to over 40 million by 2050. The NAC is well underway with ongoing construction clearly visible on site and from neighboring cities such as New Cairo.

What is striking about the NAC, besides the scale of the development, is its architectural and urban narrative. The narrative here entails not only the discourse through which the government presents the project to the public, but also the spatial experience, architectural expression and organization of space. The city from scratch departs from its predecessor taking seemingly little to no reference from it. The government seems to have been eager to move away from Cairo altogether and start with a blank canvas in the desert, focusing on grand gestures of power reflecting notions of modernity and progress and not the needs and everyday lives of the people.

The aim of the research is to observe, analyze and reflect on the social, cultural, economic, urban, architectural, (in)-formal, and political layers of Cairo to examine the need to return to the vernacular in search for a local identity. It asks the question, how can vernacular architecture be redefined to reflect and regenerate the built environment and spatial practices of Cairo and its future urban development? The city offers an opportunity to dig deeper into its fabric and extract narratives of how people live their everyday lives and adapt their built environment to their needs. It focuses on the relationship between people, spatial practices and the built environment, from its urban core and historic centers to its desert cities and extensions.

The design proposal lends itself as an experimental and incremental process that reimagines the process of production of space as a series of vernacular spatial practices. It offers a counter program that challenges the notion of architecture that is fixed in space and time that allows for multiple possibilities within its lifetime responding to people’s changing needs allowing for a process of growth and appropriation. This approach constantly questioned the role of the architect, local materials, spatial configurations and architectural language and expression, in a forum ensuring the design stays true to the redefined vernacular architecture to find the balance between design and appropriation. The project is left open-ended, signaling a sense of incompleteness and a challenge to further pursue vernacular architecture as spatial practices in the search for Cairo’s urban identity.

There is a growing distance between humans and their material surroundings. The Oldambt region in North Groningen and its farming culture serves as an example. Despite numerous initiatives to regenerate this area in recent decades, these efforts have struggled to gain footing, due to a lack of connection with the landscape. The region requires a regenerative approach to new developments, with its abandoned farmyards presenting an opportunity. This led to the following research question: How can landscape stewardship contribute to a regenerative farmyard with a tectonic that depends on the regional landscape?
The research investigated three elements—landscape stewardship, tectonic, and the regional landscape—using the method of wandering, as a tool for observation and encounter. The design explored the emergence of a regenerative building culture rooted in the landscape, focusing on how farming as an ecological relationship with the landscape could support this development. The designer developed a set of design principles based on the three elements derived from the research. They can be applied to farmyards in the area. The three elements—regional landscape, landscape stewardship, and tectonic—are interrelated in research and design. The design aims to illustrate the interrelation of these elements in its architecture and their contribution to the regeneration and preservation of the Groninger landscape, encapsulated in the concept of “Het nieuwe Borgen.”

The project exmines the impacts of Water Culture in the Modern Period in Mexico City and aims to establish an alternate pathway in wake of socio-environmental pressures.

This project in Rotterdam, centered on the Meent, represents a new beginning for revitalizing the city with a Symbiocene mindset through architectural design. As urban populations grow, biodiversity declines and technology advances exponentially, it's imperative to address how we interact with our environment. The Manifesto advocates for eight key relationships to usher in the Symbiocene era: celebrate, master, connect, shelter, concert, make, recede, and familiarize.

The architectural design project aims to foster these relationships within a residential setting by renovating existing post-war buildings into a new kind of living space. The goal is to create an environment where residents can experience and cultivate these relationships through their daily lives.

The design includes various apartment typologies, including cohousing, within the renovated post-war block. The building is transformed into a canopy-like structure by removing internal boundaries and rewilding the courtyard, encouraging interaction with the living environment. Public access from the Meent side invites passersby to engage with the space, while the open grid scaffolding at the back provides a dynamic area where humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans can coexist and learn from one another.

Transitioning to the eight relationships detailed in the Manifesto:

Celebrate – Recognize and appreciate the gifts of our environment, inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer's concept of the Earth's gift economy. It calls for a celebration of Gaia, fostering gratitude and reverence for nature.
Master – Continuous learning and the pursuit of knowledge are crucial for understanding our environment. This relationship emphasizes an ongoing quest for understanding and mastery of our world.
Connect – Engage with the environment through sensory experiences and active participation to foster respect and responsibility towards nature.
Shelter – Balance protection and security with interaction with the natural world, avoiding isolation from the environment.
Concert – Collaborate with other species for a balanced ecosystem, understanding and respecting various forms of interaction within our ecosystem.
Make – Focus on the ethical implications of human creativity and design, fostering positive behavior and aligning with symbiotic dreams.
Recede – Step back and allow nature to reclaim spaces, appreciating and protecting neglected and abandoned areas for biodiversity and ecological balance.
Familiarize – Understand emerging technologies as new "species" with distinct behaviors and impacts, thoughtfully integrating technology to enhance our connection with the natural world.

As summarized, the project aims to create a living environment that not only houses people but also nurtures these eight relationships, fostering a deeper connection between residents and their surroundings. By reimagining the urban landscape in this way, we can move towards a more sustainable and harmonious future.

Monsoon folio situates itself within a vast planetary system as I follow the interactions of the char dwellers with the monsoonal cycles in the Assamese borderlands of India. While in modern writings of cities, the domains of the social and natural have been understood in isolation, cities as human-made and separate from nature, I try to foreground urban developments as a more-than-human assemblage. Far from an urban backdrop, monsoon takes root and ruptures socio-spatial arrangements.

Challenging a predominant focus in academia on studying societal and spatial challenges primarily in the Global South or non-Western environments, this project investigates the urban fabric and hidden socio-political mechanisms of precarity in the city of Munich, Germany. Houselessness appears as the manifestation of a global housing crisis and is with its implications exclusive to the neoliberal city. Within the context of housing distribution and provision, the neoliberal housing market's association of performance with ownership implies a necessary exclusion based on financial capacity. Accepting that the scope of this reality lies outside of the discipline of architecture, shifted the focus on an analysis of the city through the lens of the guiding motif of urban displacement. The aim was to find out how the city defines spaces for public use, what mechanisms are at work in terms of inclusion and exclusion of certain groups of people, and which spaces are essential - but missing.

The visibly precarious conditions of public living imply that public space is not a place meant for all functions. Theories on human motivation suggest that basic human needs are not linked to spaces per se but to an action rendered possible by the protective frame of the built environment. Thus, the project explores the potential outcomes of reimagining domestic patterns outside the confines of conventional residential units. Through ethnographic fieldwork paired with experiments on filmmaking as an architectural method of analysis, a human-centred design evolved that aims at transforming "street dwelling" into a tangible and viable alternative to conventional urban living.

The design endeavours to embed a system for both residential and commercial use within the existing urban reality of Munich. Building on current and necessary transformation processes of the urban fabric, the redevelopment of an exemplary streetscape of the Baaderstraße in Munich houses different acts and scales of appropriation in a design frame that works at various temporalities. The first and most permanent intervention docks on the cities' above- and below-ground infrastructure. On top of it, units are placed that in their design adapt in shape, size, and functions to the local ground-floor conditions. Different lifetimes are included in the temporalities of the site by designing the initial unit for a possible future disassembly. The modularity of the prefabricated wooden construction and sanitary units also allow for a possible scalability to other streets.

Highlighting a necessary shift of the role of the architect to a mediator between the user and the corporate client, the project presents a compromise at the intersection of realism and utopia, offering new dimensions to concepts of urban, communal, and private notions of comfort and emphasizing the importance of inclusive spaces and innovative approaches to address the housing crisis in Western cities.

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology progressively integrates into daily life and domestic environments, it instigates a pressing inquiry: What new spatial implications can arise from the integration of artificially intelligent technologies within homes, and what role can these AI technologies play in reinforcing social interaction among humans and between humans and machines? This paper does not predict the future but instead imagines a fictitious trajectory of the possible development of selected technologies and their spatial impacts on domestic environments through design. The aim is to incite a discussion that tests and explores core values that can be adopted or avoided in the future. This process allows for the contemplation and discourse around these novel technologies, thereby increasing the chances of their positive societal impact.

The paper further expands on the underutilised potential of technology within the architectural field compared to other disciplines more adeptly adjusted to the digital age. Utilising the 'Futurecraft' method, it frames a vision of potential futures, thereby encouraging robust discussion about the role of technology, who should design them, and the ideal ways of implementation. Amid the second wave of AI development, the urgency of examining the human-machine relationship is emphasized, especially given the rise and impact of Large Language Models (LLMs), including models like Chat GPT.

The paper posits the need for a 'Living Lab' - a controlled environment where new technologies can be deployed and tested to understand their broader societal impact. It addresses the ethical dilemmas tied to AI's rapid development and the potential adverse effects of these technologies, shedding light on the possible disconnect between humans and their environments brought about by automation. The discussion aims to develop narratives and spaces where individuals can explore their relationship with technology while ensuring safe and ethical implementation.

The study ultimately aspires to create a stronger narrative that will bring about democratic architecture and consider the rise of LLMs within the field of architecture, underscoring their potential impact and significance.

100 Years of Summer: A ski area brownfield as a testing ground to explore ways of how humans and nonhumans can thrive in a warming alpine landscape, together.
This project started with a romantic fascination for the mountain landscape in my home country, and with wondering what would happen to all the infrastructure in ski areas once there isn’t enough snow anymore to run them profitably.
I soon discovered, however, that there are some much more fundamental questions to tackle first - mainly concerning how we position ourselves as humans in this world: Are we as autonomous from other beings as we like to think? How does our experience of a (brownfield) landscape differ from that of a bird, goat, or flower? What is our role - both our responsibility and agency - in alpine ecosystems? What is the role, big or small, of each other thing? What does it take for the landscapes to be resilient and full of life despite the pressure applied by climate change?
The final exhibition does not answer all these questions. It creates a spatial framework for experimenting with possible answers and tries to expand the (architectural) narrative: from a solely human experience of the landscape, architecture, and activities, to one that acknowledges the role and experience of nonhuman beings like animals, plants, soil, rain, materials,...