This project creates a safe-haven for the homeless women of Madrid, addressing both homelessness and gender-based violence. It explores the stigmas surrounding homelessness in Spain and the lack of dedicated facilities for women in Madrid city centre. Drawing inspiration from case studies like the Beguinages from the Netherlands and traditional Spanish patio house typology, the project emphasizes the importance of community, privacy, and safety.
The chosen site in the neighbourhood of Tetuán aims to revitalize a neglected area while providing shelter, support, and a path to independence for vulnerable women. The design integrates into the local context, fostering a supportive environment for healing and empowerment.

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.

This thesis, titled "Inviting the Public," explores the design and transformation of the Public Library in Stockholm, encompassing the monument of the Asplund Library and its three annexes. The project addresses contemporary needs for public libraries to serve as multifaceted community spaces beyond their traditional role of housing books. The research investigates several core questions: How can the Asplund Library be fully public and barrier-free? How can neglected access routes be revitalized into inviting public spaces? How can the annexes be preserved and repurposed to form a cohesive campus with the main library?

Through thorough analysis and design iterations, the thesis proposes expanding the annex buildings and transforming existing access routes into interconnected spaces that promote both passage and leisure. This evolution aims to enhance the library's role as a center for lifelong learning and community engagement. Case studies of modern libraries in Oslo and Helsinki provide additional insights into integrating diverse functionalities and flexible usage of space. Ultimately, the project envisions a Public Palace that caters to evolving societal needs, fostering an inclusive environment for learning and community interaction.

The master's programme in architecture constantly raises the subject of "positioning": How do we position ourselves as designers? How should architecture place itself in a broader environment? The graduation studio of Interiors Buildings Cities focuses on "Palace", referring to complex public interiors whose societal responsibilities are constantly re-interpreted over time. This project on the Stockholm City Library, in particular, urges us to reconsider the meaning of "libraries" as public spaces today – and in the future – and challenges us to adopt such transformation concerning Asplund's architectural legacy.

This also raises the question of how we, as future architects, deal with the past, present, and future.

The previous competition's intricacy emerged from the architecture and competing interests among the library institution, the municipality, and other political bodies. This project, therefore, seeks to form an opinion on how we treat a heritage building. This is especially relevant for architects nowadays because we need to know what to do with the old to build new. Sustainbility of architecture regards not only the tangible aspects but also the intangible ones. Adding another layer of time, therefore, gives the existing heritage building a new life. Yet, we must be aware that our current architectural proposal may not be, and will never be, the ultimate solution.

Just as a library holds books reflecting layers of human knowledge across time, its architecture bears traces of interpretation from different generations. I think that is the charm of this architectural intervention.

This project reimagines the interaction and connectivity between public buildings and the urban networks. Central to the design is an internal street that adapts to the terrain, tying Asplund’s library, the park, the observation hill, the lamella, and new event spaces together, and ensuring access from all directions. Inspired by Scandinavian commercial passages, this new linear-structured complex allows visitors to linger and enjoy the space in any season.

The "exoskeleton" expansion brings extra capacity and versatility to the existing buildings and substitutes as the main part of this new social and cultural destination. It provides the Asplund building with the possibility to be restored as a repository for books and studies. The devolution and reconstruction within the new hierarchy embrace a diverse and hybrid spatial aesthetic and transform the temple of books into a contemporary complex of reading, making, and sharing.

The project redefines the essence of library spaces, maintaining traditional reading rooms while introducing areas that prioritize freedom and spatial experience. Timber frames on tamped concrete plinths create distinct rooms, each integrated with its surroundings: a street connecting the bazaar and the park, a loggia fronting the hill, a pavilion by the pond… Guided by the belief that a well-configured space invites natural use, the ambition of this project is to create a welcoming and adaptable public interior that transcends the constraints of function or programme, starting a poetic dialogue with the ground we inhabit, and the world as a whole.

96 years after Eric Gunnar Asplund designed Stockholm City Library, this narrative portrays the evolution of the Library as a whole, as an essential institution of the local society, and as one of Asplund’s oeuvres. By embracing the surroundings, as Asplund did, and revealing the hidden processes of this public institution, the building will enter a new era that will help it evolve throughout the years and encourage people to engage with the city and its components.
Practically unfolding the guidelines mentioned above meant exploring the scale and the materiality of the interventions suggested.

The transformation of the Stockholm City Library into a common space would not happen through a massive expansion but through acupuncture and highly contextual interventions. Their scale and materiality were explored together in an attempt to engage the library, the city and the landscape.

The protagonist of this year’s graduation studio is the Stockholm City Library. It was deesigned by famous Scandinavian architect Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) and opened in the spring of 1928. It is a modernist building located in Vasastaden, a very diverse neighbourhood on the Northern Island of Sweden’s capital Stockholm.

The graduation studio, organised by the group Interiors Buildings Cities, started on the premise of two failed competitions that were written out for the Stockholm City library. The project aims to reintegrate the Library into the urban fabric and the city life of Stockholm. It does this by bringing the Bazaar into the building, creating a public, inviting route on the level of Svaevägen Street, and connecting this central city axis to a lowered square that finishes the route throughout the building. While following this public route, the visitor can go up to more focused areas within the library and discover its beautifully kept reading room and Rotunda centrepiece.

The aim is to create a library that not only allows for the individual consumption of knowledge but also facilitates the exchange of knowledge between the inhabitants and visitors of Stockholm.

Stockholm Public Library, as a library from the 1920s, pioneered the use of architectural elements such as the Rotunda and open bookshelves, which softened the oppressive nature of traditional library architecture at that time. It embraced a humanistic approach, fostering a sense of active participation and community vitality among its visitors. However, after a century, the original library's space and knowledge dissemination methods are no longer sufficient to meet the diverse needs of society. This project, based on a failed competition held in 2006 for the expansion and renovation of the library and the advisory brief proposed in 2014 based on the 2006 competition, explores the new social functional positioning and service direction of the library in the face of a multicultural audience and is rooted in the unique political and cultural context of Stockholm. Considering the real conditions of the site and the developmental needs, the project aims to construct a new library to make a supplement of the existing library. It will encompass diverse functional spaces such as an Immersive E-media room, a multilingual reading room, and an urban activity lounge to cater to a variety of audiences. The design also involves the transformation and activation of the overground plaza and underground spaces, facilitating communication and connection between the new and old libraries. The goal is to create an interactive entity that radiates into the urban space.

The project investigates Uzvaras Park (Victory Park) in Riga as a narrated urban figure, focusing on the themes of contestation and reconciliation. It analyzes the park’s role and form in the changing socio-political context and, with the means of spatial design, proposes an alternative vision for its redevelopment from a conflicted demolition site into a unifying habitat of nature and culture.

Based on conclusions taken from the research, the design method manifested itself as the selection and combination of historical layers together in a collage of spatial fictions, playing with and reframing existing dichotomies between their forms and meanings.

All layers were perceived as equally important, that way removing the former hierarchy between them, which was so characteristic of the previous approach to the park – when with each new ideology the previous layer was put into oblivion, as the regime desired to oppress nature into its image. By treating all former visions of Uzvaras Park, completed/only imagined/devalued/destroyed, as reference material for constructing the new park – the project strives for the much-needed reconciliation between these conflicting visions and allows them to coexist harmoniously in this use-wise no longer monumental space of prosaic recreation.

This project explores a revalidation strategy for a neglected and contested neighborhood in Tirana, Albania, whose physical state narrates the historical, political, and social conditions of the place: walls dividing once large gardens, symbols of individual desires that came after the fall of the communist regime, informal extensions to traditional houses, all paired with significant damage from top-down initiatives for grand architectural projects.

Acknowledging limited labor, financial constraints, and time pressures, the project advocates for a capacity-driven approach. The strategy comprises a series of scalable architectural and urban interventions. These range from small modifications, such as brick-supported openings in walls to reconnect divided spaces, to more ambitious projects like a Neighborhood Center that serves as a communal building. Collectively, these interventions act as catalysts, creating a system whose impact grows through interconnectedness and active use. The project demonstrates how intentional design can enable meaningful urban transformation while respecting the complexities of difficult contexts.

In case you feel confused, this is an architecture project based on research which in total took one year. The process was never linear, but the narrative has to be.

For the first six months I studied the essential values of collective housing in post war period, how they prompted to solve housing crisis and how they embraced the collectivism in Europe and China. It turned out that most of them did not maintain the original function as a collective housing for working class. However, the concept of collective living continued to influence urban life. In response, the design approach for renovating the 1952 Workers' New Village in Shenyang, China aimed to demonstrate the potential for reviving this old form for communal living. Minimal intervention and adjustments to thresholds resulted in the creation of a series of spaces ranging from private to public, catering to the demands of the free market and post-urbanization.

This research attempts to develop a space in the city that, outside of the dynamics of consumption, but not denying the dialogue with the city, seeks to intertwine with its overlaps, by defining the public space of dialogue and representation. On the morbidity of performance and expectation, we might say that the contemporary Utopian intent, this thesis, regards defining a potential place, and its interpretive structure, devoid of expectations
– an in-efficient place.

Based in Vienna, Austria, the project deals with the possibilities a new type of public interior has for a gradually flattened historic city centre, concentrating on the role of derelict spaces such as abandoned shop spaces, aggressively demolished building plots or undervalued topographies in this instance an underground car parking have once integrated back into the grain of the city.

The project proposes a new type of urban institution, a network of rooms, reinterpreting and adapting aspects from typologies that local residents would be familiar with such as the ‘Wiener Kaffeehaus’, the ‘Durchhaus’ or the ‘Bildungsgrätzl’ to create a sequence of spaces and rooms that carry a sense of familiarity and intimacy for the users. Situated in the Ruprechtsviertel, one of Vienna’s most historic but underappreciated neighbourhoods, the project questions the means through which architecture can help appropriate a new public interior and reclaim spaces that are currently underutilised. Through this, it hopes to invite local communities and new publics to reclaim a sense of the qualities the city centre had for communal life all these years and continue its legacy through it.

MHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp seek to change its current building and re-establish itself on the wide arena of cultural institutions in Antwerp. Museum has a complex history, from its roots in the anti-museum of the ICC, via the “kunsthalle with a collection” up to today’s aspirations to be a part of a network of regional museums and seeking to take its place within a global context.

The layers of critique inherent in this trajectory are evident in the counterpoints established in the clients brief for the proposed museum: questions of material, abstraction, scale, and scenography underpin an oscillation between what it describes as anti-museum fascinations and technical museum requirements. Underpinning this are fundamental questions about contemporary art’s history and its relation to wider questions of culture, society and the world of art and artistic practice, embodied in its attitude to the very idea of the museum.

The MHKA's legend was built on contacts with avant- garde movements in art of the 1950s and 1960s, such as minimal and conceptual art. Their most prominent representative was Gordon Matta Clark, who worked in Antwerp at the time and whose artworks formed the foundation of the museum's current collection. Initially informal, the movement became institutionalized over time in the form of the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC), and decades later the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp (MHKA) became its successor. The planned construction of the new museum also involves renaming the institution the Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art (VMHK).

The duality between the avant-garde past and the institutional present is an important part of the museum's identity. How does one think about the setting of the Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art in a way that respects its critical history and context in which it operates?

Humankind has always made art. Through its appeal to the human senses, it has helped to shape the ways in which we perceive the world around us and, in its varied forms, offers a means beyond language through which we have become able to articulate our relationships with one another. Throughout the ages art and architecture were facilitators of societies’ development and transformation, of which the peak was embodied by the 19th century palaces of culture: public museums and galleries. Later, as modernity rapidly adapted the world to human needs and subsumed sublime nature within its own image, art became means of resistance. Expanding out of the studio and the gallery it moved outside, to portray and critique the relentless industrialisation against its own backdrop. Artists co-opted and adapted redundant structures left behind by the contemporary city’s rampant process of change.

The competition brief for the development of the M HKA, the contemporary art museum in Antwerp embodies many of the larger issues that arise from the forementioned shift. It emerged out of the activities of the ICC (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum), which was founded in the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960s, and had a long history of making place for itself in which an adaptation of an actual palace and an old disused office building were considered, until it finally settled in an old grain warehouse to become a full-fledged museum in 1982. The next step in its development, which is planned to move the museum into a new, purposely build location asks therefore to be consciously understood and developed. It is to be placed near the current building, as an urban figure in focus of undergoing conversion of a monumental former dock into a linear public park.

The proposal turns challenges of the competition brief: an existing building on site, the scale of the programme and limited budget into factors that generate quality. Efficiency is used to shape identity, linking to the legacy of Antwerp as a harbour city. It is a building that does not mimic the expression, but follows the logic of efficient structures for the industry. A museum that accommodates existing structure, the art, the general public, gallery visitors, and the neighbours. It creates environments, provides striking curatorial settings and versatile workspaces and does so with minimal means while fulfilling strives of the competition brief and reducing the carbon footprint. It welcomes the legacy of the M HKA as a pioneering institution that always appropriated spaces, exposes the back office to the visitors to contrast them with pristine gallery interiors, and becomes an icon by establishing its own league instead of trying to fit in. Yet it fits within the city.

In summary, the design proposal is a new building for the contemporary art museum the M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerpen), which in the future will be the Flemish oriented contemporary art museum VMHK (Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art). The project location is the existing court of appeal on the Zuiderdokken in Antwerp. The existing building will be demolished because of spatial and technical requirements and will make room in my proposal for a new museum: The building arises from the park, which the building faces. A landscape slopes up to the building's public ‘forum’ space. It is a raised level, where one can look over the flood defenses onto the river, while the art handling truck enters the building underneath. This artificial landscape, which forms the base of the building, consists entirely of recycled concrete, with various repurposed aggregate materials. Above the forum space rises a large volume, a biobased box, with all the 'silent program' of the museum. The careful placement of circulation cores allows for large art spaces.

The new design for the Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art (VMHK) endeavoured to provide a contemporary interpretation of the nineteenth and twentieth century warehouse architecture, translated into a contemporary art museum. The 'Warehouse for Art' symbolizes its role as a repository for the museum’s knowledge and art, while at the same time identifying with the genius loci of the former port identity found along the Scheldt river and its surrounding brick buildings.

This industrial character is neutral, but not as aseptic as a characterless white cube and does not lose itself in architectural caprices. Moreover, the design its flexibility makes the building adaptable for its upcoming function as a museum and the ones after, thus making it future-proof.

Simultaneously, the design questions the conventional notion of a contemporary museum, aiming to transcend its exclusive institutional character and function as a public building instead. Within this pursuit of an 'anti-museum', the warehouse exemplifies a departure from the typical museum typology. Instead it represents a typology that contemporary art museums have discovered in industrial heritage and can fit into newly constructed buildings of the twenty-first century as well.

The new VMHK (Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art) is not intended to be just a museum, but an attraction open to all. A place where people can go to see an art exhibition, grab something to eat, read a book, etc. Mies van der Rohe once said that “the first problem is to establish the museum as a center for the enjoyment, not the interment of art.” Accomplishing this task means removing all kinds of barriers between institution and community. Only in this way do art and culture truly become a 'social lift'. Indeed, how can a museum think of positioning itself internationally if it cannot even open its doors to its community? The new Flemish Museum of Contemporary Art is an always open door. A museum open to all.

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.