Over the past year, we have been working on a proposal for the expansion of the Stockholm City Library. Two main questions have guided our thought process throughout the year: “Why should the Stockholm City Library be expanded?” and “Having chosen to expand the Stockholm City Library, how does this expansion add to the existing Library?”.
Over the last twenty years, several briefs have been launched for the expansion of the Library. When analyzing these briefs, it becomes clear that there is a need for more public space. Furthermore, there is a need for a more contemporary library, with a focus on pleasant seating places for all, and space for contemporary initiatives and events. On top of that, there is an opportunity to bring back adult education in the Stockholm City Library, by freeing up the top floor of the Asplund Building, which is currently used for office spaces.
The expansion adds qualities to the existing building, by creating spaces that look out instead of looking in, with an open and inviting character, in contrast to the Asplund building, which has an inward-focussed character. On top of that, the new extension building creates a connection between the Asplund building, the first annex building, the market square, and the Observatory Hill, while also creating a connection between the interior and exterior of the Asplund building. Finally, the extension building is part of the actual landscape as it follows the structure of the City and the Observatory Hill.

The project deals with extending a monumental building - the Stockholm City Library. It's complexity lies within the position of respect towards the monument which the library is and the work of the architect behind it - Erik Gunnar Asplund. This project proposes to extend as a mean of modernising and coming forward to the needs of growing and changing city.

The focal point of this graduation project revolves around the design and implementation of a new structure for the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp (MHKA) in the Flemish region of Belgium. Founded in 1985, this public institution is set for relocation to the site of the forthcoming demolition of the Court of Appeal in the Zuid district of the city, situated adjacent to the historic docks. Aligned to its multifaceted role as a publicly funded institution the project has to bridge the guvernamental desire to stablish it as an international flemish museum without lossing its identity and origins in the ICC. The brief presents a complex array of contrasting notions that demand careful consideration and thoughtful resolution in a physical embodiment that will transforms the city’s skyline

Thus, the new building investigates an approach that challenges the common formality and rigidity of art institutions without neglecting the required technical specifications of a museum. As a result, it questions how social, cultural and economical dynamics can interlace the principles of the modern museum that cater to the handling of art, in order to cater to the contemporary art museum and foster public spaces for social interaction.

The Pearl River Delta region, where the author of this project grew up, has been a source of inspiration due to the devastating impacts of natural disasters such as flooding, hurricanes, and storms on the limited freshwater resources in the area. Water is a crucial necessity for the inhabitants of the PRD, but the complexity of the water system, characterized by its structure, dynamics, and human activities, presents a formidable challenge. Despite the region's abundant rainfall and hydrological conditions, six cities in the PRD experience water poverty as a result of limited resources.
The existing centralized freshwater supply infrastructure, which relies on transporting water from rural areas to urban clusters, is unsustainable in the face of flooding, sea level rise, and salt tide intrusion. To address this issue, a resilience design framework based on the landscape as a sytem theory is necessary to promote sustainable ecosystem and urban growth. The landscape can serve as a foundation for such a system and provide a means of integrating design into contemporary urban development and transformation. By considering the landscape as a system, the freshwater supply system can act as a rechargeable battery, storing water in potential areas during wet seasons and during times of drought or salt intrusion.
The densely populated Pearl River Delta offers a significant potential for freshwater storage through its urban landscape. This project aims to explore the resilience design framework for freshwater managed recharge, and role of design in incorporating current urban development and transformation activities through urban landscape infrastructure. Through field studies, mapping, historical analysis, and flowscape analysis, the author will design a sustainable landscape system that facilitates interaction among diverse subsystems and addresses the challenge of storing and utilizing freshwater resources in high-density cities.

This year's theme of the studio is based on ‘An Architecture For Art’. From churches and palaces, through the development of the Palace of Culture in the 19th century: public museums and galleries, to modern studios and galleries, art centres and the White Cube of the second half of the last century, and the gradual similarity between commercial and gallery spaces, art spaces have gradually evolved and their attitude towards the public, society and art has changed. The studio focuses on the controversial area of the space of the contemporary art gallery and also considers its societal role and how its responsibilities to the heterogenous contemporary city and its diverse population might be physically manifested in the image and presence of a new public building.
The project takes an actual project as its starting point, allowing the conditions and concerns of a real brief for a real client to be one key reference point in the development of both individual and collective concerns. This year we work on a competition brief for the redevelopment of M HKA, the contemporary art museum of Antwerp, on a new site close to its existing one in the South of the Belgian city. At the same time, the site is in the old court building in Belgium, which is an important architectural heritage, so there is value in considering the retention or partial retention of the old building.
So it became the theme of my project to consider the function of the new museum while preserving the existing building, using the New and the Old to provide variation to the public and exhibition spaces of the museum.

The scope of this graduation project is to design a new building for Antwerp’s Museum of contemporary art (M HKA). A building that can accommodate the museum’s ambitions following the transition from the M HKA to the Flemish Museum of contemporary art (VMHK). The museum has been appointed a location in Antwerp South for its new building and has released a program with its requirements, which has been used as a basis for this project.

Museums are complicated buildings. In order to be able to design such a building, it is necessary to gain a thorough understanding of its environment: the city of Antwerp, and more specifically the museum’s location, the typology of the museum of contemporary art, and of the M HKA itself: its rich history, the type of museum it currently is and its ambitions to become the VMHK.

In its brief, the client describes a desire for an atmosphere of both ‘industrial roughness and domestic intimacy’, as well as it being a ‘robust skeleton and a
volatile space of experimentation’. This notwithstanding, the architecture should
also be sustainable, in a broad sense: in its use of materials, in the use of
existing subsoil (parts), but mostly it should be adaptable to future, different use.

M HKA institution has its roots in the avant-garde, bottom-up initiatives of artists who were escaping the rigidness of institutions and sought for alternative spaces to practice art. There is a fundamental contradiction between what M HKA’s history is and what future it wants. Therefore, I decided to take over the building that exists on the plot to create the last act of appropriation and embody the spirit of the institution by this decision.

As the existing court building could not meet the requirements of the brief and it doesn’t represent any significant architectural values, I treat it as a scenography and a tool to organize a museum rather than a relic. As a result, the massing of the museum wraps and “consumes” the existing structure.

The building is a mediator between two urban qualities - the park and the riverbank promenade. Vast urban space opens for visitors as well as pedestrians who do not intend to visit the institution.

Occasionally, the exhibition part and back office blend together, so the visitor can experience a transparent museum, where boundaries are softened. What is more, exhibitions can happen in corridors or former office rooms as well as in the basement, which compliments vast spaces in the new part of the project and allows for multiple exhibitions to happen simultaneously.

The facade represents the idea of wrapping and hiding, being mostly a solid, hanging element during inactive moments, but it also has the capacity to represent what happens inside the building if needed. Different treatments of metal panels and meshes allow for various levels of transparency and reveal the insides of the institution as well as treating the building as a billboard.

MHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp), is a museum established in the 1970's. Given spatial and characteristic requirements, it is seeking for an expansion and reestablishment in the wide art scene in Antwerp. The MHKA has deep roots in the city itself, including public inclusivity and how people have been experiencing art in various ways. From open public events, to temporary exhibitions, the museum centralizes itself around this ideology and wills to expand this to a greater scale. The new museum, VMHK, is a result of this will. From facilitating isolated art galleries to open forums on different levels, the museum is a place to gather, discuss, experiment and experience. With adaptable spaces that host a variety of public activities; the establishment seeks to act as a ground for inter & intra dialogues for the people, for the art and for the city. It becomes an unfiltered, common ground that embodies the institution's stance and character towards art & people.

The ambition of the National Bank of Belgium's project was to make a National institution accessible to the public. By opening the bank, both ideologically and physically, the dynamic of the bank is radically modified. The confrontation between the Bank and the public provides opportunities to gather, learn and improve. The change is subtle from the outside but radically modifies the way the bank functions.
The creation of a series of spaces within the bank directed towards the different publics of the bank and brings the domestic sphere into the institution itself.
The Bank of Opportunities is a space fostering a new kind of Bank and community.

This graduation project is focusing on and looking for the function and role of the future national bank, as an outcome of its current physical and social situation. The site of the project is the National Bank of Belgium, located in Brussels.
For its program, the bank has a public function and a reception hall, but mainly consist of office spaces and meeting rooms within a, with security line protected, area. The traditional program, like pressing and storing money, is already replaced to new buildings outside of the city center for better efficiency and land use. Next to that, the public and office program is losing its role due to digitalization. Organisational and programmatic changes are already made, but the architecture is still in its former state. Therefore, it is important to seek for new possibilities, and looking to the future role and image of the bank, whilst learning of the history of the Bank and its site.

The Future Bank, the design project for the graduation studio of Interiors Buildings Cities, questions the current role of the National Bank of Belgium withing the city of Brussels, as the institution has distanced itself from the city by the digitalization and outsourcing of former location-bound banking activities. This graduation project, ‘The Future Bank: Designing the Intermediary Space’ addresses the issue by reconnecting the bank building and the city through adopting a more public character. The building is partially transformed into an educational cluster, to house study facilities for students, a library and public archive and the banking museum. Two central courts are created within the building: the auditorium court and a public courtyard. Both of which respond to the direct urban context by bridging the height difference between the banking hall, the main entrance of the building, and the Governor’s Hotel, the most historical building part. The banking hall is transformed into a public interior square which functions as the main entrance for all users and as a foyer and lobby space for the auditorium court and the courtyard. A public route is constructed from the banking hall to the entrance of the Governor’s Hotel, which redraws the boundary between the public and private functions in the building. The design of the intermediary space, the space between the public and private functions, responds to the reconfiguration of the publicly accessible space within the building. By incorporating workspaces and social facilities within the design of the intermediary space, the relation between public and private functions is emphasized. This way, the appropriation of the building and the interrelation of its different users is manifested architecturally on the user-level.

The agricultural landscape in the Netherlands has changed drastically over the course of the last 70 years. After World War II, it was governmental policy that pushed the transition to intensive farming by giving out subsidies. These developments have also had an impact on the province of Friesland, where agriculture has a long history and is thereby embedded in the province’s landscape identity. However, years of scaling up have caused a loss of small-scale structures in the landscape. The result is not only the disappearance of a historic cultural landscape but also the rapid decline of a biodiversity. Fertilisers and pesticides are the two biggest polluters of Dutch surface water, both secondary effects of intensive agriculture. Today, the balance between ecology, the landscape and intensive agricultural practice is lost.

This thesis has two main objectives. First a study, to understand the agricultural developments that have taken place since World War II in the Netherlands and specifically Friesland. This study will examine the effects these developments have on ecology, social structures, and the cultural heritage found throughout Friesland. Secondly, a research-by-design assignment aims to find a solution to how a new balance between agriculture, ecology and the landscape can be found through design. Three strategies are developed which are emphasising cultural-historical structures, strengthening ecological values and working with the vernacular.
The strategies are implemented on a regional scale in Friesland and on a local scale in dialogue with a local farmer.

Through various scales, ecological corridors are strengthened in the area by introducing nature-friendly banks along waterways. These ecological corridors will connect routes on both land and water with cultural-historical structures in the area. In addition, a small-scale farmers’ nature network is implemented. On a local scale, a water-purifying helophyte field will be constructed which filters agricultural water run-off before it discharges into a local waterway.

This project can serve as a reference to how we can move towards a newfound balance between ecology, the landscape and agricultural practice in the Netherlands.

A selection of the material from Drawing Rooms on display in the faculty.@en

In the coming 80 years, the rise of productivity will result in two main directions: first, decentralization of work and production; second, economy turns its focus to emotion and wellness. So we claim that “Pleasure and Leisure are becoming the next leading economy.” We envision Amstel to be a (P)Leisure City. Within this context, the Fun Universe is an entertainment complex dedicated to producing, presenting and broadcasting all types of social entertaining and visual augmented activities including cinematic experience, interactive performing arts, immersive gaming etc. It is an urban scale "Westworld", a vertical theme park that contains various popular destinations.

The projects aims at implementing the use of fabric formwork as an alternative method to renovate existing buildings. As a case study the technique proposed in the research was applied to the new design for the Hennebique silos building in Genoa (Italy).

The exhibition ‘Learning from Models’ was on show from 18 May to 8 June 2018 in the BK Expo room of the Faculty of Architecture TU Delft.@en

The exhibition ‘Learning from Models’ was on show from 4 to 26 October 2018, location Open Space, Maastricht Academy of Architecture. Physical models are important in the education of architects and designers. In this exhibition we show the importance of the scalemodel as a research instrument, models in which the work of Tessenow is the starting point and focus of experiment. The exhibition shows models that were made to research the early works of the German architect Heinrich Tessenow, created between 1905 and 1925. Especially this work gives an insight into the phase between classicism and modernism, but more important, these projects demonstrate a strong ‘interior sensibility’ grounded in the tradition of anonymous architecture. It is remarkable that Tessenow’s modest approach is still a source of inspiration today among practicing architects, designers and educators. So it happened by mutual engagement in Tessenow’s work, that three schools of architecture did meet and used physical models as an educational tool, each in a different way. This exhibition brings together the models of Maastricht Master of Interior Architecture, The Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio and the Faculty of Architecture TU Delft.@en

During expert meeting New Light on the Festspielhaus: Inspiration for architecture and design. Neues Licht auf das Festspielhaus: Inspiration für Architektur und Raumgestaltung. Part of the project Reconstructing the future: Space, light, movement, Utopia. Rekonstruktion der Zukunft: Raum, Licht, Bewegung, Utopia.@en