This master thesis aims to raise a discussion about the new Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. The competition brief for the redevelopment of the M HKA, published by the Flemish Community in 2019, is taken as a key reference point. The brief proposes a move into a new, purpose-built museum on the site of a courthouse building that will be demolished, two blocks down from the current site, as an urban focal point for the newly built monumental linear public park in Antwerp South. Within this urban plan, the existing museum would most likely be demolished to make room for a new housing development.

However, the political and financial motivations behind the move to the new location, which is, according to the brief, based on the site’s iconic potential, can be questioned. Especially since M HKA’s anti-institutional history is intrinsically connected to the existing museum. During the 1980s, a 19th-century grain warehouse was squatted by a group of Belgian artists as an alternative gallery space and was converted to a museum to accommodate M HKA in 1987. Instead of building a new museum on the proposed site, this project proposes a museum building that continues to grow from the existing museum and extends its industrial character. The existing museum is placed in relation to both the large industrial structures, documented by the Bechers, and the cathedral, which can all be characterized as large structures that exist out of different parts that have developed over time and are able to accommodate different alterations by either adding or removing parts. The construction of the proposal is spread out over different building phases so that the museum can be kept open during the construction. The proposed museum of contemporary art is not a static institution but an anti-monument that is able to respond to changing societal, political, financial, or institutional changes, in which the possibility of incompletion becomes part of the building.

The project rethinks the City Hotel and its accommodation of tourists within Amsterdam. Additionally, the building answers the question of urban densification and building within the historic centre of Amsterdam and revises the social precepts of privilege inherent to the elite architecture of the ‘Binnengasthuis’ area.

‘De Nieuwe Doelen’ constitutes in a social framework functioning as a collective house for diversity, effectively acting as a charitable institution, where twenty four rooms offer a place to students disadvantaged by their ethnicity and the white, secular tradition that exists within University of Amsterdam. The underprivileged citizens are welcomed to build on a grounded community where they are empowered by the architecture and grandeur of the context and recognised as an integral part of the campus, solidifying their position within the university.

The building enacts as a public platform, resonating notions of discourse inherent to the direct historic context. The project uses the fundamental models of the ‘Intimate City’ as a dogmatic approach; the ‘Venetian Campo’, the ‘Urban Loggia’ and the ‘Vienese Café’ inform the collectivity, informality and public permeability of the project. The notions of hospitality and charity, inherent to the morphology of the context, clarify in the social and spatial characteristics of the contextual model of ‘het Gasthuishof’, the Dutch analogical model to the ‘Venetian Campo’, which are inscribed into the tenet of the building.

‘De Nieuwe Doelen’ opens up a sequence of courtyard spaces that exist within the morphology of the ‘Binnengasthuis’ area. The building naturally extends the colonial architecture of the context, yet it reimagines the characteristics of privilege by creating an open and continuous public interior, existing of the continuous topology of the ground floor and basement and a highly permeable plinth to the context. The community floors rise above the gravitas of the construct; a formal public room of discourse where a telescopic seating system constitutes a sense of fluidity, aiding its multiplicity. By agency of intricately organised thresholds, an open and continuous interior is organised, existing of a collective gallery, as a place of residing, and contiguous rooms of privacy, resembling the highly informing model of the Gentlemen’s Club. Throughout the construct, integrated furniture in both collective and private spaces, establish instruments of appropriation. The formality of the social construct, enacting as a blank canvas, awaits appropriation of its inhabitants, awakening the significance of ‘De Nieuwe Doelen’.

The graduation project “ House of Music” elaborates on the notion of designing a major new concert hall and music school in the City of London. The new concert hall will be situated at Museum of London which is located at the edge of the modernist Barbican complex. The project proposal is to redefine the relationship between the Barbican Complex and its surrounding city and accommodate its citizen in the contemporary culture.