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.

This thesis challenges the political imagination of the border as a fixed structure, aiming to change the way the public thinks about and interacts with borderscapes. It explores how borderscapes, particularly those between Morocco and Algeria, serve as platforms for showcasing state identity and ideology, while simultaneously becoming spaces where border communities question and redefine these ideologies.

Research shows that despite the border closure between Algeria and Morocco, border communities remain connected through informal cross-border trade. These communities continuously find ways to cross the border to meet their needs, creating new opportunities for social and economic growth. This impacts local markets and ways of living, fundamentally challenging our understanding of borderscapes.

Taking the informal as inspiration for rethinking urban spaces, the project proposes dynamic design strategies for redefining the borderscape, using Oujda, a city in northeastern Morocco near the Algerian border, as a case study. It builds on the existing politics of tolerance, fostering the creation of self-organized settlements along an abandoned railroad that once connected Algeria and Morocco. The long-term vision is for these growing settlements near the border to lead to the gradual reopening of the border, with a traveling market serving as a connector and an agent of resilience and change in borderscapes.

The reconstruction of Rotterdam after the bombing in World War II is a well discussed subject. The literature and the public opinion are positive and negative on the outcome of the reconstruction of Rotterdam, although it seems to lean more toward a negative narrative. Both plans, Plan Witteveen and the executed Basisplan are discussed and compared a lot.
Nevertheless, the research on if Rotterdam would be a better city if the first plan was executed has not been done. In this thesis the answer is tried to find on what Rotterdam would look like if Plan Witteveen was executed and if the city would have had a more human scale. It turns out that Rotterdam would been a greener city, with more water, space for pedestrians, humanscale architecture, something that is tried to accomplish by urbanists in current times.

In the 20th century, the field of architecture underwent significant transformations, initiating interdisciplinary collaborations with various artistic domains such as painting, literature, and cinema. This departure from traditional design processes signifies a shifting perspective towards the essence of architecture, thereby creating opportunities for artistic interventions. Among these interdisciplinary intersections, cinema has emerged as a prominent subject of study within architectural education, owing to shared narrative exchanges and spatial organization principles. Both architecture and cinema evoke sensory experiences and emotional responses through their manipulation of spatial and temporal elements. Architects engage in narrative storytelling through spatial sequences, akin to filmmakers constructing scenes, blurring the boundaries between static structures and dynamic narratives. The reciprocal influence between cinema and architecture is evident. Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" exemplifies how architectural environments enrich cinema with depth and emotional resonance. Conversely, cinema inspires architectural design, particularly through montage techniques. Architects like Rem Koolhaas integrate cinematic narrative principles into their works, creating dynamic spatial sequences reminiscent of film editing. Under the influence of cinema and architecture, directors like Alfred Hitchcock and architects like Adolf Loos independently utilize similar spatial narrative concepts in their respective works.

In the midst of industrialisation and simultaneously glimpsing the first sights of globalisation, the 20th was eminent for its many technical successes but also its social and environmental consequences, which created an unprecedented division in society. Wishful utopian thinking arose as a result of this dissatisfaction, and some architects adopted this idea to visualise a ‘perfect’ world, adhering to their political, social or environmental ideologies. The now clichéd term ‘sustainability’ was rarely of consideration at that time, but climate-conscious thinking and a desire to transition to a ‘greener’ lifestyle are evident in some utopian societies envisioned by architects and designers such as Ebenezer Howard and Paolo Soleri. Their ideas were presented to citizens as a model world where ecology, humans and architecture reside in complete harmony, encouraging people to take part in the common good. Images and advertising techniques were used to promote this ideal society to the public by depicting the ‘not yet’, giving designers the power to make sense of an unforeseen future. This thesis further explores how these environmental utopias, developed with comparatively little knowledge of the climate crisis to today, have influenced so-called independent sustainable communities in the contemporary world, and where, if at all, we can draw a line between utopia and ecological urban design.

The 1960s in Finland were a period of experimentation with concrete, steel, and color, that coincided with a period of rapid economic growth and urbanization. In the building industry, the role of the architect evolved to become a civil servant in a way, entrusted to alleviate shortages in housing and commercial space. Heikki Castrén and his wife Mirja were a pair of such designers, collaborating with the “prophet of Finnish brutalism,” Viljo Revell, before launching their prolific joint career. Regrettably, today they are mostly associated with the “ugliest building in Helsinki,” and offices that may be nondescript by today’s standards. However, their works serve as an underappreciated blend of cultural, technical, and social influences that speak to their time. Shaped by formative years working in Toronto, their career reflects the flow of modernist architectural ideas between North America and Finland during the mid-20th century. With little coverage in English, the projects have been lumped into wider trends of Finnish architecture and have lacked oral histories and personal narratives to better contextualize them; these include the iconic Helsinki City Center, innovative Pohjola Insurance Building, and intimate Skata cottages.

Communism was a big part of the Bulgarian history that started after World War 2 and lasted until the last decade of the previous century. This period greatly influenced the current architecture, and mindset and ideas of the people. It is famously known for regarding every individual as equal, which resulted in every person having the same opportunities and resources in their lives. Hence, big building blocks were built to provide housing for the people. These high-density flats were known for their cheap and easy to build construction, later resulting in gray and repetitive building blocks, which in Bulgarian are known as “Panelki”. During that period these building blocks provided all the necessary things that their inhabitants needed, such as courtyard open spaces, which were positioned between two or three building blocks, where the children could play freely, while their parents watch over them from their own apartment. It also provided people with a sense of community, as all necessities, such as shops for food or clothes, were positioned “around every corner”. Hence, the small neighborhoods were self-sufficient in a way, which led to the people living in them becoming familiar with each other. Therefore, in this essay the concept of sharing and equality would be investigated as a predominant theme in people’s lives and the architecture that surrounded them, portrayed through the public and private spaces of the typical residential flats “Panelki”. The research would include methodological research methods, such as interviews, mental maps, and collection of primary gathered data, in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the proposed topic.

This paper analyses the use of natural light as a design element in museums. While the design of natural light is important for all types of buildings, it takes additional layers of complexity in museum buildings and exhibition spaces. Due to the need to preserve the artwork, museums tend to become black boxes, with no interaction with the outside. Even so, there are numerous architects who have designed museum spaces that make use of natural light in incredible ways. This paper wishes to look into different ways in which natural light has been used in museums, what is its role, how it interacts with the exhibition, how was it implemented, etc. To do so, it combines a literature review of architecture books and articles with image analyses of sketches and photographs of three museums chosen as case studies: the Aalborg Art Museum by Alvar Aalto, the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, and the Museum of contemporary art in Herning by Steven Holl Architects.

Infrastructure is a system in cities that is designed to aid the life of the people. In Jakarta, the trace can be found throughout history with a major one started in the colonial period with city wall and canals construction. Eventually, the post-colonial government took over and continued the infrastructure development in forms of street and public transportation. In each of the development stage of city planning and infrastructure, there could be found various political intentions that resulted in social implications that translated into city image and people’s identity. The paper delves into some instances of Jakarta’s planning and infrastructure throughout the history to witness the city’s transformation in forming today’s street-center culture of Jakarta. Map reading exercises are mainly used to form connections with photo archives and commentaries on electronic medias to understand the dynamics of government domination and responses from civic daily movements.

The paper investigates the social production of space in Taman Anggrek Mall, a luxury mixed-use superblock built in 1996 in Jakarta, Indonesia, through social media narratives. Once the largest mall and home to the first ice rink in Southeast Asia, Taman Anggrek Mall was designed to embody modernity and the consumerist middle-class of 1990s postcolonial Indonesia and is a form of land commodification that is ever-present in urban Jakarta – a city flourishing under the culture of consumerism. As we are moving forward in digitalization, social media opens another dimension in the dynamic aspect of collective memory formation. In our content-starved society, the spatial dimension of social media archives introduces new pathways to mnemonic practices in reconstructing the memory of places, and in turn, shaping our perception of these places in lieu to the collective memory. This study aims to understand the relationship between the collective memory production through social media and its affect to our spatial perception in the lived space, through the context of Taman Anggrek Mall.

The city of Bengaluru in Southern India, like many other large South Asian cities, has undergone expansion at an exponential rate in the past few decades leading to rapid transformation of its urban landscape. This has also involved a drastic change in the forms of nature in the city, and a change in the attitude and relationship of people in the city towards nature. Having major ecological footprints, densely populated and booming cities such as Bengaluru need to be better studied when investigating the global environmental crisis. This paper is a historical analysis of the change in the material and functional role of nature in the city through an in-depth literature review. An ideological framework of nature in the city is first established. The paper then discusses nature in the urban landscape as a manifestation of these different ideologies, from the city’s formation around the 16th century CE to the colonial period, followed by the period of rapid urbanization after independence.
In Bengaluru today, several ideologies of nature that are multifaceted and often self-contradictory coexist in the same space. Remnants of the Garden city aesthetics from the colonial period intermesh with native elements of nature regarded as sacred in temples, as a source of livelihood in peripheral areas, and as spaces for recreation by the bourgeoisie. Therefore, tackling these issues must go beyond multidisciplinary action and include an approach that involves participation of multiple actors across social groups.

This article explores stories of the first digital tools in architectural design, with a focus on the Cybernetics movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Through an examination of pioneering technologies, their initial promises, and the subsequent reasons for their failure or abandonment, the text aims to shed light on the historical development of digital tools in architecture and design. By questioning prevailing definitions of success and failure within the context of architecture technology history, the study encourages critical reflections on alternative paths that may have shaped current digital toolsets. Additionally, the analysis includes an exploration of the sentiments of professionals, users, and the broader public during this transformative period, revealing the significant influence of community voices on the trajectory of digital architectural toolkits. Drawing upon extensive literature reviews, archival document analysis, and case studies including the “Lightpen”, “Sketchpad”, or the “Lincoln Wand”, this article contributes to filling the gaps in existing knowledge regarding the lesser known, often peculiar from modern perspective, cybernetic tools in the context of architectural design.

This paper looks back into the past, to Bucharest during its communist regime. The communist regime lasted from 1947 until 1989, when it ended with a revolution. From 1965 until its end, Nicolae Ceausescu was the leader and his plans and ambitions created big losses among the population and the city.0F0F This research focuses on the analysis of the central area of the city before it was demolished due to new plans coming from Nicolae Ceausescu. It endeavors to scrutinize the Uranus neighborhood and the transformation of the location over time from the personal experiences of two individuals who were born there and resided there for approximately sixteen years. Tudor Popescu and Catalin Stoica, childhood companions, will impart oral narratives of how the neighborhood used to be before the demolition, how their lives used to be, and how they were affected by the transformation. Following the research question “how do the former inhabitants of the Uranus neighborhood remember this neighborhood?”, this paper will look into the memories triggered by revisiting the neighborhood.

This thesis examines the role of humour in architectural design. The research question of the thesis is: ‘What can be learned from the integration of humour in architectural design by looking at historical examples?’ Using literary research and case studies from the 1970s to the 2010s, the thesis aims to provide insight into how humour can play a role in architecture. Psychology research on humour can be summarized as the following: humour is usually a result of a violation of expectations, of which a viewer realises that it isn’t excessive in any way. The way architects implement humour in architecture varies greatly. Architectural humour is often used to critique the architectural ideas of that time period. Humour in architecture is mostly considered a rewarding endeavour, but some architects claim that architecture has to be taken seriously; it takes up space and materials and impacts people’s lives directly. In some cases, the humour used by architects also resulted in some people being offended by it, and that is worsened because buildings are long-lasting. In short, humour in architecture can enhance a building, and it should be explored more, both in research and in practice.

The New Administrative Capital of Egypt is a city from scratch located in the desert, 60 km east from Cairo, set in motion in 2015 and already visible on site. Egypt’s government promotes the new capital as the key to reducing Cairo’s urban load due its explosive overpopulation. The main strategy is to relocate the government buildings from their current location in Downtown Cairo to the new capital with the aim of drawing people away from Cairo’s saturation. This desire to build a new capital is not unique in Cairo’s rich history with Nasr City, in 1958 and Sadat City, in 1977, both built to tackle the same problem. The purpose of this research is, through understanding Cairo’s’ explosive population, explore the framework of the emergence of each of the three capital cities and analyse the evolution of the discourse around their development, how they were promoted to and received by the people, revealing their individual agendas.

A project evoking every superlative, Castle Drogo symbolizes the design approaches of Sir Edwin Lutyens, and the shifts in our society’s appreciation of them, better than any other of his works. A neo-medieval castle finished in 1930, it represents the end of an era while at the same time anticipating contemporary architectural principles and aesthetics. Through its strikingly modern design, it condensates 800 years of architectural elements into one convincing whole. Castle Drogo’s relative obscurity, even within the architectural field, comes as a surprise to those who recognize the lessons it can teach designers today. Lutyens’ skill at reinventing historical principles into new buildings seems prescient at a time when the tenets of modernism are increasingly invalidated. Indeed, the vernacular and the site-specific are more popular than ever. In this context, Lutyens’ philosophy seems surprisingly current. Unfortunately, Castle Drogo’s fanciful and anachronistic nature has limited its appeal to designers: a prestige project of unusual taste and limited use, it is often dismissed as a symbol of Edwardian excesses. Within this reality, however, lies an architectural tour de force that merits to be recognized as such, by both designers and society at large.

This thesis explores the influence of space on the formation and preservation of postmemory through the literary novel Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, adapted to screen by Liev Screiber. The starting point of the research is an attempt at a better understanding of the roles of reality and fiction in the case of Trachimbrod, the location of the story, and Trochenbrod, the actual place that inspired the novel. A Ficto-Critical approach is used as understood by Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead, as it gives room to an untraditional exploration of a specific narrative in order to produce a critical and personal position towards it. In combination with Marienne Hirsh’s theory of postmemory, interpreted for this paper as a productive system: postmemory ‘making’, the story reveals a hidden agency of individual and collective memory, that interact through the spaces we inhabit.
The work of theorists of the spatial turn are used to study the weight and significance of space and the differentiations within the broad concept of space. The interactions between those spaces are acknowledged to be anchored to all individuals, who then influence that cycle of information exchange. Moreover, within the frame of the focus on trans-generational relationships so specific to this novel, the dimension of time is questioned in relation to space. By compressing and expanding the traditional conceptions of time and space, depending on the openness or far-awayness of an individual towards a memory, the growing line of history reveals either nothing, or everything. In the case of the latter, collective memory is built, starting from an individual illumination to see the hidden process, projecting imagined spaces into spaces of memory and therefore erasing the division between reality and fiction.
The thesis concludes that what is generally called as the perceived physical environment is argued to be: a formation of sets of points of which the time and space coordinates can be modified trough fiction.

This thesis examines the complex process of memory making and unmaking during Armenia’s early, mid and post-transition periods as a Soviet republic. By positioning the statue of Vladimir Lenin, which once stood at the central square of its capital city, as a focal element of the discourse, this thesis uses the analysis of the bodily interplay between the statue and its viewers to narrate the transitional conditions of each time period. Drawing on multidisciplinary references and archival materials, it identifies key themes that define the main transitional reconfigurations in the three stages of the statue’s lifespan in the center: birth, life and death. By discussing alterations of semiotics, perceptions and emotions, this thesis argues that the statue is not a passive object subject to transformation, but rather a pivotal player in the process of the transformation that in turn plays an important role in the construction and deconstruction of the collective memory.

Throughout architectural history, outstanding architects have often been outstanding travelers. Sigurd Lewerentz, a legendary figure in Swedish modern architecture, is undoubtedly one of them. Lewerentz, who started his independent architectural practice in 1910 and died in 1975, lived during an exciting period that saw the emergence of many revolutionary technologies. Like his fellow modernists, Lewerentz embraced them. But unlike his peers, his passion for new technologies radically extended to his travel - he only used a camera to document things, rather than drawing in sketchbooks. Based on the concept of aura proposed by the German thinker Walter Benjamin, a new perspective to understand Lerwerentz’s photos is proposed. And by reflecting on previous studies of two important sacred buildings designed by Lewerentz, namely the Resurrection Chapel and the Church of St. Peter, this paper presents some alignments between the photographs and the designs, which reveal Lewerentz’s approach to learning from travels.

This history thesis, through the case study of Hermoupolis, the port city of the island of Syros, investigates the spatial imprint of the social functioning of that region during the 19th century. It is an attempt to study the development of the whole city and the evolution of a network, extending beyond its physical boundaries, when everything was at its full and Hermoupolis, one of the most critical commercial and industrial centers. Undeniably, the interaction of land and sea, through the people and their actions, formed the unique entity of this multilayered city. Therefore, the waterfront, as the physical border of that interaction, is the place that can reveal that process as a palimpsest of every former condition. Through a systematic study of the local archive of the island, this research combines different mediums to produce a map corresponding to that era to underline how this city was formed through the constant interaction of land, people, and sea.