This research paper aims to explore performative dissident practices within the context of Madrid, focusing on how architectural practice can gain insights from these practices to inform the design of interventions or conditions that foster empowerment, particularly for vulnerable communities. The intention is not to provide a socio-political critique, but rather to advocate for the significance of these urban battlegrounds as pedagogical instances that can enrich architectural discourse. Therefore the research seeks to answer the following question:
How can architectural practices, focused on contested urban environments, draw from the dissident practices manifested in the built environment and thus foster resilience for the vulnerable communities?

In the rising action of the research, the paper first constructs a methodological and theoretical tapestry, developing a lens through which to conduct a site analysis. This is done by employing architectural analytical drawings, as well as narration and experimental writing, to highlight the more latent, experiential aspects of dissident practices. The climax of the research applies this lens to three squares within Madrid’s most vulnerable neighborhood, Embajadores/Lavapiés. In the falling action, the research delves deeper into the site of choice and its significance for the project and expands on the conceptual framework that can be applied towards a design of conditions.

The foodscape of a city is a complex set of systems and actors that is directly linked with the city through the acts of producing, processing and consuming food. These acts shape not only the surrounding hinterland but also the environment, infrastructure and social make-up of a city. The relationship between the city and this hinterland has almost completely disappeared over the last century. This has negatively impacted the way food is valued which has caused negative consequences such as environmental degradation, disappearance of relationships and knowledge, and a worsening of both human and animal welfare.

The focus of this project is to reestablish this lost relationship through an architectural project that reintroduces historic conditions and practices and combines them with contemporary flows and actors to form a program that fits the 21st century. This will result in a pilot project which will demonstrate how architecture can have a central role in reestablishing the relationship between consumer and the food they consume, and thus the creation of a sustainable foodscape, resulting in healthier and happier cities.

The research hypothesis is that extensive layering and apparent modifications in the San Isidro area along Manzanares, dictated by the necessity of expansion, have changed the site’s everydayness. As a result, patterns of continuities and discontinuities began to take over the area, which needs to be addressed in the contemporary context and life of the city. This calls for an architectural intervention which aims, beyond the project itself, to the seamless transition of current and future everyday rituals. Due to urban stratification, there is an accumulation of multiple functions, atmospheres, daily rituals and routines over the greater area of San Isidro. In particular, the San Isidro, San Justo and Santa Maria cemeteries, alongside the park, festivities, and infrastructural networks, pose a convoluted environment where the different functions compete for prevalence. Simultaneously, their borders blur, putting the contemporary rituals in danger instead of promoting their evolution/development along the urban context. Furthermore, the city’s current and future development plans treat the areas mentioned above as sites of additions; it is not interested in preserving or developing existing characters; rather, it imposes new ones. Instead of trying to solve or alleviate the complex current state, it adds more layers to the existing ones. The graduation projects need to act as a reflection and critique of the current situation.

Soil extraction results in different material qualities. Some products, like coal, are affiliated with industry and pollution. Others, such as marble, equal to perpetual wealth and aesthetic. In the region of West Macedonia, in the North of Greece, those qualities coexist in the form of mines and quarries, creating a material network. With starting point the difference between marble and coal, the research investigates extraction practices as a multilevel topic, an ever-growing field where artificial and natural landscape blends. In the possibility of extraction sites closure, questions emerges in regards for the impact in city, environment and humanity sites towards a future transition. Those sites wound create a new archaeology, signs of an era of Anthropocene and a wounded nature.

Hence research circulates around three themes. First it examines the Hinterlands as a system of operations carrying industrial production, following by the sites of extraction and the narratives around them, in pursuit of the spirit of place. The third aspect is a cognitive examination of the human position into those practices. A placement of human through craft proposes a rethinking of materiality and nature as active agents. This affiliation with non-human entities underlines a transition of culture into a caring state, creating an ecosystem sympathy. Goal is to find answers about the recovery of post-mining territories, the revival of this inert anthropogenic environment.

The notion of ornament is as intractable as it is central to our discipline. The considerable body of work delving into this topic, including recently, serves to illustrate the ongoing interest of our societies for architecture that exudes character. We will explore the ornament from the prism of labour forces, defining the contours of an emerging type of workers we will call the “neo-producers”. To do so, an outline of the theory of Western ornamentation will be sketched to contextualize the research. Consequently, we will delve into the neo-producer’s origins and definition. The worker’s unique characteristics compared to existing actors will be underlined as well as their close links with the mass-customization revolution. Then, their impact on architecture will be studied, arguing they could represent the key to producing feasible, expressive designs.
The disruptive nature of this new role will be underlined, as well as the opportunities it represents, notably to produce affordable, condition-specific ornaments. In a wider lens, the topic will be connected to important epochal changes like artificial intelligence, sustainability or technological acceleration, as the ornament reflects and materializes societal conditions. Of course, since the topic of the ornament is inherently a discussion about beauty and how to create it, there can be no definitive answer. However, we will see how many different factors come into play for a society to create ornamental systems it deems fit for purpose, and at heart, no individual change can lead to a ornament’s renaissance. There is hope, though, that the neo-producer could be the first step towards a more expressive architecture.

The institutionalization of the architectural practice has caused a linear life cycle that relies on the efficiency of mass standardized products, not only exacerbating ecological effects but also breeding mediocrity in architecture. An epistemic break from the creative and tangible process of craftsmanship, which has been marginalized as practice of the past. The aforementioned restrictive qualities of the practice have spurred the emergence of new counter ideologies in repair and reuse, which embrace the heterogeneity inherent in wear. The context of Madrid provides an opportunity to explore the idea of crafting wear, beginning with empowering an network of traditional crafters and extending to overlooked actors in material aging, enriching discourse and exchange of material knowledge towards a more mature attitude in hybrid design. The transformative impact of embracing wear in the urban fabric can cultivate a communal sensitivity towards architectural expression of material aging. In adopting a hybrid expression of wear, from the craftsman to the public, interweaving various knowledge domains carving a niche in the practice of architecture, that develops into a thriving network of skilled crafters in material wear.

Tourism has been more than ever integrated into a global chain and accessible worldwide. This planetary reach allowed small villages in pristine territories to be independent from the eyes of the extractivist industries and included in the economic development plans for the first time. However, this economic opportunity served as an instrumentalised discourse and exposed these areas to extended urbanisation, unsolicited industries and new forms of exploitation. This research delves into the multifaceted aspects of the tourism paradox: exploring the inherent link between tourism and infrastructure, including its impact on extended urbanisation, cultural-environmental exploitation, degradation and preservation opportunities.

With a specific emphasis on the indigenous riverine village of Alter do Chão in the Brazilian Amazon Forest, this research follows two main argumentative frames: It examines (1) the notion of tourism under the lenses of colonisation, to discuss accessibility and present the methods, designs and practicalities in which infrastructural development is implemented. Then, it advocates for (2) viewing the Amazon as an Altered Nature to explore the ongoing agency of local communities in the region. Finally, the project proposes alternative strategies for territorial planning, design and management, aimed at benefiting from the tourism industry to leverage agency and preservation of cultural and traditional practices.

An architectural project on Care, uncovering the mysteries and strengths behind the softness that Care brings. This project has been about both questioning and writing the role of Care in Architecture, and Architecture in Care. The project is situated on one street in the city center of Madrid. The street functioned as a sequence of stories, as a site of investigation of care, as a site for design intervention, as a connection between actors and building. In order to translate signs of Care into a building, five topologies were chosen. Each with different signs and scales of Care in an Urban context: Parish, Muur, Kitchen, Balcony, Props. The research of the one street and its five topologies is conducted using a mixed methods consisting of sampling, mapping, photography, writing, participatory observations. The results were translated into both a toolbox for Caring Architecture and a Caring building. The building itself showcases Care as affordances, Care as a choice, Care as a shield, Care as a wall, Care as a network. Because Caring Architecture allows, it should not shout.

How can we move from an extremely prescriptive institution to one that empowers not only the users of the building, but also the whole neighbourhood and, ultimately, the whole city?
A Victoria Kent Social Integration Centre, formally known as Yeserías Prison, is the main focus and starting point of my design.
Of the twenty-one prisons that operated during the Franco regime, CIS Victoria Kent is the only one still functioning as a penitentiary institution. The rest of the former prisons have been returned to their original educational or religious functions or, to bury an uncomfortable history, have been demolished and the land sold to profit-seeking developers for housing. This building contains an important part of the city's history, having originally been built in the late 1920s as a beggar's asylum, then as a prison for political prisoners and finally as a women's prison. Currently, the building serves as a social integration centre for third-grade male inmates.
The main ambition is to challenge the prison to become an open institution and a valuable asset to the city and the community. Both spatially and programmatically - how can such a structured and controlled space become an system that opens the guarded wall to the community and helps inmates make a more seamless transition back into society?

This research is rooted in defining the marginlands of Istanbul; comprised of the city’s backstages, cracks, and fissures. It proposes an intervention along the historic margins of the city’s Land Walls, now swallowed by urban sprawl and existing as an interstitial inner-city threshold. The lands of such margins harbour an air of latency, having recently been razed to the ground, or earmarked for oncoming ‘urban transformation’; one that can only be described as ‘hyper-commodification’. Local planning authorities commercialise lands historically hosting informal practice under the guise of creating common public space. However, the resulting parks, playgrounds or sports fields simultaneously erase the material and cultural fabric of such margins.
Through ethnographic research, the project documents and celebrates the hidden spaces carved out of the marginlands for marginal actors to co-exist in the relentlessly commodified city. I will introduce three Custodians doing so within the framework available to them: the Street Gleaner, the Moat Gardener, and the Last Inhabitant. The proposed intervention provides a physical and social framework to host such custodians, their practices, and the materials that have already seeped into the city’s fissures. This design proposes a toolbox of affordances at three scales: Territorial, Structural and Habitual, to foster a Contemporary Commons in this context. Enabled by the toolkit, it begins the transition away from the more precarious occupations of the Custodians towards more productive practices engaging a wider and more diverse network of actors associated with the chosen sites. The resulting Commons acts as a platform for enrichment of involved actors’ roles: master, teacher, pro-sumer, maker, activist, learner, apprentice - diversifying and strengthening the former margins.

Throughout the course of time, there has been a progression starting from the preservation of buildings and sites, to the conservation of specific elements of these landmarks, and now shifting towards adaptive reuse where the goal is to maintain cultural heritage through values and attributes. According to Aldo Rossi, there is no guarantee of effective continuity, and it is crucial to understand the process of transformation and determine how to act in such situations (Rossi, 1982). While numerous industrial buildings have been repurposed and given new functions, it remains a subject of debate whether they have succeeded in conserving the identity and historical essence of the structures.
This thesis aims uncover the significant and possibly forgotten or overlooked layers of an architectural product to then synthesise and integrate them into a new narrative, using an interpretation of the concept of collage as a tactic in architecture. In exploring the concept of complementarity, the thesis will delve into the idea that the integration of contrasting elements or ideas can create a harmonious whole. Similarly, a collage brings together disparate fragments to form a cohesive composition.
Emphasizing the concept of complementarity, similar to a collage, architecture reveals evidence of time and its process of construction, a work of architecture contains accumulated history as it is lived and engaged rather than observed” (Shields, 2012). An architectural piece is “rarely experienced in its totality, […] but as a series of partial views and synthesise experiences.” (Holl, Pallasmaa, & Perez-Gomez, 2006).
By embracing complementarity, architecture can establish a dynamic relationship between the existing context, the proposed interventions, and the emerging necessities, ensuring that the. essence and significance of the original structure are upheld while allowing for meaningful adaptation and transformation. Therefore, the essay will explore concepts such as collage and the notion of complementarity in terms of research and design within an architectural framework.

Extractive and productive landscapes are the backbone to contemporary
urban life. However, they are commonly overlooked by the fields of spatial
studies and practices. One amongst many, Cubatão’s petrochemical hub
reveals the systematic ecological degradation resulting from resourceintensive
commodified politics, couched in the widely diffused rhetoric
of development and progress and distinctly linked to events of the Global
North. Impending global shifts, such as the retreat of fossil fuels and the
increase in renewable energy sources, raise questions on the vulnerability of
these places and on their abilities to evolve spatially, ecologically and socially.
Through a critical review of what has been conducted so far in terms of
design, planning and policies and a reflection on the agency of Architecture,
the research speculates over new forms of space production that engages
with the complex spatial conditions and the diversity of agents on site.

In the face of the prevailing norms and practices in contemporary architecture, there is a growing need to find alternative ways of making architecture that prioritize human experiences, social interactions, and a deeper connection with the built environment. The examination of empowered play as a revolutionary approach to design is the focus of this thesis, "Retreat the Line," which offers a break from conventional paradigms. It emphasizes the importance of challenging the prevailing urban planning trends that prioritize financial gain and rigid quantification, often leading to the commodification of public spaces. Instead, the argument for a qualitative approach put out by suggested moments of architecture embraces wastefulness, unexpected moments, and the co-creation of spaces that encourage serendipity and delight.

"Retreat the Line" is an appeal for architects to adopt a more all-encompassing and human-centered approach to design. In order to build lively, inclusive, and meaningful built environments that improve quality of life and develop a feeling of community and belonging, it urges practitioners to investigate the potential of the architectural agency.

This research aims to uncover the hidden/overlooked potential of high streets, which will contribute to enhancing their quality and highlighting the significant role these streets play in the formation and creation of community spaces in the city. The design aims to use the opportunities of different spots along the shopping streets that are important places for communities as a catalyst for change in the streets themselves. By identifying and connecting "hot spots," where a prominent presence of people is observed, and introducing new places, an interconnected system is formed, strengthening the overall fabric of the high street. Furthermore, through the strategic placement of a diverse range of functions within the existing building of the former shopping center and a newly designed structure, the project seeks to attract various actors and activate the new hot spots inside out. This research and design endeavor strives to unlock the latent potential of high streets, fostering vibrant and inclusive community spaces that promote engagement, interaction, and a sense of belonging.

This research paper focuses on the phenomenon of social and urban morphological contrasts within community boundaries caused by socioeconomic inequality and the process of urban development. This paper also discusses the reason and the spatial needs for social integration. This topic is becoming increasingly relevant in London because of the gentrification process in multiple urban edges around central areas of the city. However, it is also relevant in cities around the world where gentrification has caused social segregation problems. Hence there is an urgent need for an urban development strategy that provides spatial opportunities for interactions and innovations.

In the face of rapid urbanisation, population growth, and environmental degradation, there is an urgent need to rethink the design and construction of urban spaces. The thesis investigates the potential of architecture as a catalyst for the regeneration of the area surrounding the Abbey Mills Pumping Station in London, UK. The process is symbolically viewed through the lens of cyclical agricultural fallowing as a method of urban renewal. This perspective positively interprets the dormant state of the site, perceiving the temporary cessation of capitalistic activities as an opportunity for other ecosystems to thrive. Drawing from cultural landscape theory and incorporating the idea of architecture as an accelerator in urban ecosystems, the thesis culminates with the notion of "the incomplete". It suggests a framework for progressive change and eventual occupation of the post-industrial site over time. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this research aims to uncover the potential and challenges of urban transformation as part of a more socially and environmentally conscious architectural practice.

Water and the relationship we have with it are disloca- ted in the contemporary context of the city. Present-day structures of society represent water as a human made commodity, whilst it will always be an elusive element of nature, the human body and the environment. How can we redesign city water into practices that reconnect us to the element and its natural and social qualities?
A litterature study sets out the extent of meanings and underlaying structures of water in the city. The typo- logy of the 19th century bathhouse is used to elaborate on the way architecture has shaped use and culture.
Three contemporary case studies expand on architecture that supports a richer relationship with water.
Water moves through a multitude of spheres, we have physical, emotional and imaginative interactions with it. The idea of a sublime nature or a nature we have control over is a lie, in the context of the city water is more a product of culture than it is of nature. A more hybrid mentality that encorporates the differnt spheres would lead to a more sustainable view of city water. Wa- ter in the city is a common good, it’s part of society and the individual and should therefore be accessible and understandable. Architecture is not the solution to the disconnect, but has the responsibility to touch upon the different spheres and is in the first instance about trans- parency and accesibility.

Street Food markets have been a key ingredient of the urban life for centuries. In many cases the direction and intensity of urban expansion was strongly reliant on the emergence of the street food market and vice-versa. These link between the two has been inevitable historically until now and will probably continue as such in the future. However, the city changes on daily basis and, being a reflection of it, so does the market. While the former speeds up, becomes more erratic and stressful, the latter slows down, transforms into a space of gather and pleasure, exceeding beyond its food trade function. Therefore, their relationship also changes, with the market becoming an instrument of healing for both the city and the individual. London, being a distinct example of the contemporary megapolis and having a key role in the historic evolution of street food markets, was chosen as a test bed for the research to untangle what is the situation of the street food market today as an urban and experiential entity and question its future potentials.