The dense city center of Den Haag is a place of constant redevelopments and a need for more multiplicity. The area is populated with inaccessible governmental buildings with fortress-like designs. The proposal reuses the existing National Library and National Archives while connecting to Leiden University Tower. It captures the flow of the city and directs the public inside.

The proposal aims to create and celebrate diversity. By inviting the general public inside the vertical campus, the university gains the new meaning of a marker in a city, a stage. Campus becomes a place for cultural exchange, public gatherings, and extra stage for minorities. Students benefit from improved creativity, innovation, civic engagement, and many others.

The design follows the Space Catalogue to ensure spatial diversity. Different floors, and moments inside them, provide unique experiences and new ways of learning. Various types of stages give students opportunities for social interactions, ranging from intimate to grand atmospheres.

The Cultural City Hub is a social condenser, that blends cultural and educational programs, but also multiple paths of life. In Dutch society, we see that over a quarter of the population relates to a different country, where one parent, both parents or themselves are born abroad.Therefore, we can conclude that ‘Culture’ means ‘Cultures’. When looking at education, the Dutch education system does not represent this multiplicity of cultures, therefore creating an imbalance within the system and society. The Cultural City Hub combines cultures and education into a Vertical Campus, creating the campus for the future.

The Vertical Campus as an Interface not only looks at how a campus can be created on a small footprint by introducing verticality, but more importantly how it can function as an interface by offering spaces for interaction between students and industry, public and private, individual and collective. While the different parts of the program are connected by a public backbone, a collective circulation space as a continuous element throughout the Vertical Campus, the learning environments themselves have become hybrid by introducing non-acadamic elements. Furthermore, these environments differ in which ways they encourage interaction by varying their architectural characteristics, which all together results in numerous surprising combinations.

The Commuversity serves a dual purpose as both a public space and a campus, blending
seamlessly into the urban fabric of The Hague. My graduation design aims to create a
vertical campus for the 21st century, serving as a vessel for a learning community to form
while extending the city's horizontal public space

This project explores the concept of an urban approach to campus design. where the campus is integrated into the urban life of a city, as opposed to traditional Anglo-Saxon learning style (Weber, 2018), where students learn in an isolated machine, often located in the outskirts of a city, to gain knowledge and then enter the real world.

With this project the campus is introduced in the dense city centre of The Hague. At this location there is no site left to build. This brings the challenge of expansion while dealing with existing resources. Verticality might be the obvious answer, yet verticality brings its own new problems of vertical isolation, vertical travel times and only a small contact area (the plinth) with the public realm. The risk of a mono-functional monolithic approach to building, overrepresented in the location area, has to be avoided in order to create a campus that is truly interacting with city life and the public realm.

The form of learning is also getting rethought with this project. The design explores learning as a way of enhancing creativity, freedom, intuition and multiplicity as opposed to the more traditional platonic approach of the one, the analogues, the similar and the negative as mentioned by Deleuze (1994).

The Vertical Campus in The Hague redefines the synergy between educational institutions and urban environments amid increasing urbanization and scarcity of (public) space. By transitioning from a traditional horizontal sprawling campus to a vertical framework, this concept addresses the challenges and opportunities of this transformation. This project strives to expand the city’s public space “vertically” to create a place where The Hague can escape from all the hustle and tension. Central to this concept is the “Vertical Town Square,” which provides the basis to weave the education campus into the urban fabric, aiming to reduce the anonymity in the densely built-up high-rise areas and create a place to stay in the city.

The Vertical Town Square transcends conventional educational atmosphere by creating a dynamic and inclusive environment that supports both formal and informal space for development and interaction. The focus of this concept is not on the interaction of different cultures, but on encouraging interactions that occur unconsciously to create a social and interactive context. The squares are unprogrammed places where spontaneity and informal encounters can flourish, while preserving and enhancing the intrinsic value of existing public spaces. This integration serves as inspiration for the multiple town squares, each with its own unique spatial design features, which enrich the academic and social domains by facilitating collaborative and experiential learning.

In higher education, "teaching" often refers to lecturing. Teaching at universities involves more than just lecturing, it involves creating conditions conducive to learning that involve relational, personal and emotionally challenging activities. This environment transcends traditional static classrooms and provides a dynamic and interactive environment for both formal and informal learning. Contemporary society often ignores the fundamental role of universities and rarely questions their importance or function. It is essential to see universities as institutions that shape a culture of lifelong learning within the community. This approach enriches the community but also responds to changing spatial dynamics. This creates a space where educational and social interactions can coexist, supporting lifelong learning and active participation in the community.

The building's various town squares are integrated into the urban landscape, allowing the Vertical Campus to promote inclusivity and accessibility while keeping education a public good. The campus provides environments that offer both extroverted and introverted functions, such as squares for meeting, creativity and relaxation that allow for unexpected encounters, serendipity and innovation. This diverse building supports exchange and diversity of development and promotes a living space that accommodates disorder and dissonance. Individuals can only participate in and contribute to changing our time if they are given the opportunity to shape it themselves. The campus will provide a platform for this.

The assignment of this graduation project was to design “The Vertical Campus: A Public Hub of the Future in The Hague”, a mixed-used building that contains public, university and (governmental) office spaces of about 30.000 m2.

My problem statement addressed the issues of well-being and mental health of students in higher education and how urban densification can be designed vertically with a mixed-use building program. This led me to the architectural concept of Biophilic Design and how nature can promote evidence-based wellbeing and academic performance.

Thus, my design proposal is called “Campus of Wellbeing: The Biophilic Knowledge Hub”. Hereby, I propose a design that is situated on the edge of the park (‘Koekamp’) in front of the Central Station of The Hague. It’s a fragmented structure, a green hybrid, that merges architecture and nature, and aims to dissolve the “Green Border” between city fabric and forest. This urban concept is accompanied by the design of the ‘Biophilic Space Catalogue’. In this catalogue, I’m presenting the conclusions from my literature research that resulted into the design of different architectural spaces dedicated to various user groups, ranging from public to students or nature.

On a technical level, I was looking into how materiality and a passive climate concept can support my approach of designing healthier spaces and how a large-scale building can contribute to a better urban climate despite densification. Besides that, with this project I was also experimenting with the structure to reach my design objective of having a low impact on the ground floor because of the project's sensitive environment being located in a park including various plant and animal species.

With the advent of hybrid education since the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for campuses and educational buildings has undergone a transformation. The introduction of hybrid education has led to classrooms being more readily vacated than before, as students now have the option to attend classes remotely from home. To address this increase in vacancy, educational buildings that center around hybrid education should incorporate hybrid programming. This is where the significance of hybrid architecture for educational buildings becomes evident, also in case of the Vertical Campus that will be designed for a new green area near The Hague Central Station. This problem statement forms the following research question: How can hybrid architecture and hybrid education be connected through a building designed with hybrid building technologies located in a new green area near The Hague Central Station? The objective is to design an educational building suited for hybrid education using hybrid building technologies and hybrid design solutions for the programming whilst being located in a new green area near The Hague Central Station

Berlin’s history of oppression gives it an interesting role in the development in European thought. In this project, that history is recontextualised through the story of electronic dance music (EDM) and used as a basis for an alternative approach to both old & new potential models of society.
The project attempts to create the infrastructure for an autonomous local community in Friedrichshain, resisting the globalising oppression of neoliberalism. The ‘vacant space’- plot located near the famous club ‘Berghain’ is a typology that can be found across Berlin which suggests a different approach to society that is analysed and used for an architectural proposal. Inspired by the non-hierarchical infrastructure of the network, this project proposes a series of indeterminate modular skeletons that can be appropriated by the local commune. The project is managed by a democratic digital portal using a ‘shared ownership model’, which also provides ‘open source’ libraries for a series of different products ranging from modular building components to digital code, music, books, artworks, etc.

The purpose of my graduation project, “BREAD AND WINE. Celebrating multi-ethnicity through food” is to investigate the role the celebration of food in human culture and to analyse its potential contribution to fighting discrimination and creating a sense of belonging in diverse neighborhoods. The topic focuses on how the cultural and social aspects of food can be integrated into the design of a Public Condenser, but also how the functions and spatial programme of a public building can support the gathering and sharing of food and how the design of a public building in general can reflect the cultural diversity of the community it serves.

In Friedrichshain, Berlin, modest architecture with minimal interventions is utilized as a thoughtful response to the complex social and economic issues, including gentrification, that characterize the constantly evolving environment. This architectural approach seeks to tackle these challenges by embracing a restrained and humble style, while remaining flexible and responsive to the unique needs and dynamics of the local community it serves.

"The proclivity to unrest and 'culture of conflict' can be linked, in part, to Berlin residents' characteristic tough, combative physiognomy and how they have imagined and represented themselves and their city over time" (Davis, 2007). Berlin has witnessed conflicts on various fronts, including politics, social issues, economics, and culture, often resulting in major violent incidents. The city continues to exhibit inconsistencies, contradictions, and conflicts regarding the identity of the Commons. As power structures and capitalist formations push people further apart, the architecture of the future must seek ways for people to live together.

The proposed project aims to explore the relationship between architecture and communication by recognizing architecture as a medium. In this case, architecture is seen as an urban collective infrastructure that not only accommodates but also generates diversity in every sense. The Public Condenser of the 21st century is envisioned as an active infrastructure playing an urban role, serving various forms of expression and ideologies.

Representation and imagination of the Commons, as well as the expression and transmission of knowledge, are closely associated with the communication organs and how they are employed within the city. Recent history has shown that essential information is often transmitted through a top-down mechanism that reflects the agendas and ideologies of specific communication bodies and institutions. However, the 21st century allows people to access and compare information more freely and easily. Therefore, the "old" ways of communication need to adapt to the "new" in order to remain relevant. Otherwise, certain values and existing communication organs, such as the Neues Deutschland building, will no longer be able to effectively respond to the public's needs.

In general, Berlin lacks spaces for expression and communication platforms, not limited to virtual ones, where these expressions can be showcased through bottom-up media formations. The project aims to address this gap by creating a Public Condenser that serves as a physical and virtual platform for diverse expressions and communication. By providing spaces for people to express themselves and facilitating bottom-up media formations, the project seeks to foster a more inclusive and participatory urban environment.

In conclusion, the proposed project recognizes the historical conflicts and culture of unrest in Berlin and aims to address them through architecture as a medium for communication. By adapting to the changing dynamics of information transmission and creating spaces for expression and communication, the project strives to build a more inclusive and diverse urban environment where people can come together and share their ideas and perspectives.

The building aims to use water to address issues on two levels. Firstly, on a local level, it is a public condenser aiming to provide family resources and water recreation activities that are lacking in the neighbourhood of Friedrichshain, Berlin. Single child families make up for the majority of households in Berlin which leaves the bulk of peer-to-peer socialisation of children outside of the home. On a wider level, the building addresses water as a public right and a threatened resource. Public consciousness of water issues in Germany may not be prevalent as Germany enjoys high-quality drinking water all year round but with the recent droughts and effects of climate change, this is projected to change in the coming future. Furthermore, my fascination with using water as a design device lies with how water has always been a gathering point, a place to meet, socialise and relax. The dynamic state of water presents numerous opportunities for it to be used as a spatial tool both indoors and outdoors.

By bringing landscapes inside, this project is opening up nature to the people of Berlin, with a multi climate approach in the city. This prototype for condensed public green, is the starting point for creating a new modular building type with integrated urban gardening. Other Berlin neighbourhoods already have temporary communal gardens and commons as a central meeting place. With a permanent building as a centre, a neighbourhood garden’s position can be guaranteed for a long period of time.
In this indoor green condenser a combination of multiple green related functions and gardens can be enjoyed all year round. To make that possible, the site gets divided into acres through a grid of 10m by 10m. This grid is both suitable for landscape architecture as for open plan buildings with a column-structure. Every segment of the grid is then programmed with building functions or as part of the landscape around those functions. To every function one or more indoor green typologies are applied. These are then modified to fit in the grid. That way a patchwork of gardens and modules starts to take shape.
A great variety of landscaping and functions will give the users an experience that exceeds the lack of green in the city. The components of this prototype can be applied to a location where there is active demand for an expansion and condensation of greenspace in densifying cities, specifically in post-war neighbourhoods. It can be tailored to the proportions and the climate zones of the locations where the concept is applied. Thereby, Landscape Inside outlines an answer to the reality we all face in the unstoppable urbanisation of the future.