The area around the Almendares, Havana’s most important river, is where I make my promise to Havana. Armed with the specific conditions on site, that promise will be given shape by cleaning up the river, restoring the landscape, building 41,000 housing units (25% of what it now lacks), reinstating the area’s cultural legacy and affording greater mobility through the city. In order to be able to make good this promise in the socio-political and economic context of Cuba, I propose a spatial framework and strategic design principles that can be realized by combining top-down and bottom-up developments. Lastly, I propose a number of catalyst projects that can begin immediately and can be the start of further developments to fill in the spatial framework. This way, I hope to bring the ideal of a happy city that bit closer....

Neutral ground for the discourse on the morality of opposing political systems

The project examines the new opportunities emerging within the interlocking realms of politics and architecture. It explores the role architecture can play in absorbing conflict situations in a divided society. Not by aiming for a consensus but through mutual understanding for different world views....

The 1:1 model designed for this project is speculative by nature and targets the 21st-century recluse who seeks to escape day-to-day life. I did research into actual examples of present-day recluses and was fascinated by their lifestyles. ...

Expeditie Rotterdam or the quest for hidden space in the inner city

This innovative graduation project takes an in-depth look at Rotterdam's perimeter block type with service yard (expeditiebouwblok, hence the title) with the aim of giving the hidden space in this post-war urban fabric a new lease of life. The design for one such block (Sint-Janshof) in Hoogkwartier, an area in the eastern part of Rotterdam's inner city, comprises work and retail space at ground level and 42 housing units accessed from the communal deck. It sees opportunities to achieve the desired increase in the number of dwellings in inner city areas. This would enrich urban public space in the process as well as preserve the reconstruction-era architecture....

A transplantation hospital for the airport city

It is the year 2050. The Organ Factory has been projected in the core of the Schiphol Corridor. It is a hyper-specialized hospital which performs transplantation surgeries and distributes freshly biomanufactured organs, combined with a medical resort. Airports are forever expanding and urbanizing. Cities in turn are becoming increasingly shaped by world citizens who stay there for the shortest time. As the sense of distance diminishes, the natural limitations of the human body become increasingly burdoned by our hectic way of life....

Located on a test site at Oosterschelde in the province of Zeeland, this graduation project presents a proposal for a productive and protective ecosystem. It constructs four new spatial typologies, for seeweed plantations, mussel-pole fields, oyster reefs and salt marsh meadows. The intention behind this mix of ecological infrastructures is to achieve far-reaching environmental advantages. The proposed compounding of different loops is to maximize the yield. These loops include wave attenuation and the promotion of complex relationships between nutrient and carbon cycles and the habitats on site....

From the city of production to the productive city

This graduation project presents a study into the potential role of architecture in transforming the Russian city of Tolyatti into a city of knowledge. ...

Valparaiso is a fragmented city, one where the landscape defines its boundaries.

Valparaiso’s amphitheatre setting has seen the city gradually become trapped in time. Its future is unclear because of its somewhat marginal tourist industry and the uncertainty surrounding its port’s global relevance. Colourful houses and art mask a city in desperate need of regeneration. ...

A better life and death for livestock

My final-year project seeks to address the issue of how to combine the different stages of an agricultural production chain within a single architectural object. It also addresses the future of farming, as well as suggesting how we might find a solution to its current problems. ...

The future of leisure in the context of Akihabara

The idea behind Video Games Theatre in Tokyo’s Akihabara area is to create a compelling, dynamic space that would engage players and spectators alike. The combination of virtual and real, as in a video game, is popularly regarded as something that transcends the purely material. The two are not detached but exist alongside each other. And architecture can mediate between them. The spaces inside the theatre offer the same level of immersion and complexity whether the game is on or off....

Architecture and the logic of dreaming; a design for an autobiographical house

I'm chasing the night so I can find rough bones and bitter diamonds Let it find you -Oscar and the wolf ...

Emptiness as a departure point for architectural urban design at the Marine Site in Amsterdam....

My research focuses on the phenomenon of Socialist mass housing in Lithuania. This industrialized housing was the physical outcome of the Utopian promise to provide every Soviet family with its own apartment. In the 1990s Lithuania underwent radical changes in the wake of its transformation from a Soviet Socialist system into a democratic and independent state. Surrounded by proliferating shopping malls, the physical outcome of capitalism, the Soviet mass housing neighbourhoods remained unchanging relics of what had been built sixty years earlier. What is the next step in the story of these prefabricated house-machines (as Le Corbusier would call them)? By embracing speculation as a method, I have sought to explore possible and/or impossible future scenarios and ask myself, ‘What if...?’...

An attempt to rediscover a place for meeting nature in the centre of a modern city.

Antwerp Zoo was the site chosen for developing a pilot for Life Garden. The design presents a domain in the city where plant and animal life, liberated from direct human pressure, can be found in its natural state. This place offers a welter of opportunities to come into contact with the living world through recreation, cultivation and contemplation....

In Warsaw, our troubled society has reached a peak exemplary of this 21st century of contradictions, where contrasts like past and future or connection and disconnection to tradition coexist. The Garden of Tears presents a design for a Forum for Polish sorrows, traumas and complexes, as a mirror of contemporary Polish society....

The smallest particle as a solution for the turbid Western Scheldt

Liquid Land presents a design proposal to combat the turbid water of the Western Scheldt using natural forces that can decontaminate it. The Western Scheldt is a polluted estuary, an open inlet that is simultaneously a river mouth. This project calls for another way of addressing the turbid water and silt by no longer regarding the silt as waste. This can enrich the nature on site without affecting the estuary's contributions to the economy....

A new inclusive residential environment for dementia patients and those close to them

From One Room to Another presents an alternative residential environment for people with dementia. Drastic changes to our healthcare system are putting this exponentially growing and vulnerable target group at risk. Increasing cuts are being made to the healthcare setting and living environment of care homes, the result being dementia-unfriendly living conditions. On top of that, this target group is forced to live at home for an increasingly longer time, when the home environment was never designed for dementia. This creates an unsustainable situation for all involved....

Set in Arnhem's station zone, this building for hip hop culture was inspired by the block party events held in the 1970s in The Bronx. It has passages, alleys, squares, stairs and galleries. Rather than having a specific programme it contains space that can be claimed. The rooms are positioned and dimensioned in such a way that the activities that take shape there in time become part of the building and its architecture....

Design for a housing complex on Hoogte Kadijk in Amsterdam whose vulnerable residents can be self-sufficient and are stimulated to take part in society....

This final-year project develops the potential of the traditional Swahili house for the inhabitants of cities in Tanzania and presents an alternative to the deployment of China-financed Special Economic Zones in Africa. These SEZs are the darling of Africa’s political elite and the favourite vehicle of China’s ambitious One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. In reality it is nothing less than a copy-paste process of creating urbanity ex nihilo, out of nothing. The upshot is a homogeneous area with nothing for its current users to focus on and bearing no relation to the urban context. Thus, for every Special Economic Zone there exists a ‘Special Sacrifice Zone’, a messy prelude marked by environmental destruction and enforced resettlement. This project responds to the urgency of this issue....

Promoting urban vitality in the masterplanning process of Ecopark New Town in Hanoi...

Designing with erosion to improve well-being – a case study of the Volta Delta, Ghana

This project presents a landscape and architectural design in which the process of erosion accommodates rather than frustrates. The design seeks to incorporate erosion as a beneficial element of daily life in Ghana’s Volta Delta Region, a coastal area sadly facing severe erosional threats due to human activity and climate change. ...

Can highways be a strategy for regional developments in South Limburg through landscape design?...

A walk through Rotterdam’s Old West quarter

The design consists of an urban plan that unfurls a sequence of public spaces. Subtly inserted across the the context, these interventions combine as an area of encounter. One of the interventions has been worked up into an architectural plan. The project seeks to show that design briefs in a larger urban area can be more firmly stitched together by uniting architecture and urban design....

A metabolic urban food chain

This project is a scenario study. The Foodline provides an urban food chain, including vertical urban agriculture, through the stacked production of water-based food in a conditioned and artificially lit space. It unhitches intensive agricultural production from the usually large-scale use of space, raw materials and energy. With a smart design we can even let our food production grow while reducing our food footprint. The unparalleled potential of this solution has been explored at a specific site in Groningen....

META is an architectural installation that lays bare the consequences of unchecked digitization using real-life narratives. It is an installation artwork whose reach extends from the scale of the individual home to that of the region. It shows the consequences of life in a world where nothing seems to escape the march of progress. META began as the dream of a new modern-day Utopia but morphed into a pessimistic scenario more realistic than Utopia....

Refugee camps are the cities of tomorrow

Located in southeast Amman, the capital city of Jordan, the Palestinian refugee camp of Al-Wihdat has an estimated 75,000 inhabitants. Camps and cities are often regarded as two separate entities, but increasing numbers of people are fleeing to the city instead of to a camp in no-man’s-land. This has ushered in a new worldwide phenomenon, refuge cities. The new reality of the refugee crisis challenges us to abandon that biased juxtaposition and instead look for the similarities between camp and city. Wihdatopia examines this interlinked future in three components: empirical research, design and reflection....

This design for a housing complex for families in the city centre of Eindhoven introduces a new way of living. Its strategy of sharing facilities creates the space appropriate to the domestic needs of families. Kitchen, playroom and suchlike can be omitted from individual units so that these are kept affordable....

Sited in the grounds of an abandoned power plant on the periphery of Porto, the project constructs an urban park that facilitates all segments of the population and incites them to rise up the social ladder. ...

The end of ownership is near; soon we’ll be purchasing space on subscription.

In the Netherlands, houses are getting bigger and fewer people are living in them. At the same time there is clearly a housing shortage. On top of that, we own far too much stuff while raw materials are running out. Cupboards are bursting at the seams, there’s a shed filled from floor to ceiling and an attic full of stuff we’d forgotten even existed. We keep buying things to fill the empty spaces in our house....