Leftover spaces are neglected and obsolete spaces within the city. As they are temporarily unoccupied by defined urban functions, leftover spaces provide unique “interstitial conditions” that open for wild species as well as different informal social activities, offering crucial complements to the formal and defined urban spaces. In this context, the design of leftover spaces poses a paradox between the practice of design that projects a set of definitions onto the site, and the indeter...

Shell structures carry loads with their thin yet curved shapes. Being thin means shells require little material, which is desirable for minimizing embodied carbon footprints. However, the feature of being curved implies shells require immense effort to design and fabricate. To address the challenges, this dissertation consists of three parts: developing a design algorithm based on radial basis functions (RBFs), inventing a fabrication technique based on reconfigurable mechanisms, and producin...

Indoor navigation applications are actively investigated and developed due to their capacity to provide users with essential information in the modern extensive building complexes. Therefore, many researchers have developed a range of indoor navigation applications, which have focused on aspects such as localization, indoor route computation, and human spatial cognition. Unfortunately, current indoor navigation systems do not consider the user's access rights when it comes to navigating safel...

There is a growing public expectation that universities should start focusing on delivering sustainability. The topic of sustainability in higher education has gathered a significant amount of interest from students, academics, governments and international organizations.

With a plethora of declarations, initiatives, marketing and assessments, there is a need to assess what the stakeholders want in order to make decisions regarding an institutions sustainability. Ultimately, students are the ...

The section Heritage & Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology deals with the built environment in terms of conservation, refurbishment and re-use. Reflecting the department philosophy, this book focuses on the durability and sustainability of existing buildings (heritage in a broad sense, from historic buildings to listed monuments), considered in terms of material and building techniques, form and function, and part of the wider context of sites and...

What physical and morphological conditions need to be in place within an urban environment in order for Complex Adaptive Systems dynamics arise - such that the physical components (or ‘building blocks') of the urban environment have an enhanced capacity to discover functional configurations in space and time as a response to unfolding contextual conditions?

This thesis looks at how cities operate as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It focuses on how certain characteristics of urban form can ...

This PhD thesis focuses on Urban River Corridors (URCs) as spaces of social-ecological integration par excellence—that is, spaces where the interaction between the urban systems (carrying the ‘social-’) and the river system (carrying the ‘-ecological’) is (potentially) the most intense. The general hypothesis is that with an integrated spatial understanding, planning and design of rivers and the urban fabric surrounding them, cities could become more resilient, not just to flood-rel...

Anchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural that characterize Spanish modernity, and analyzes the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, as they focused on the importa...

In de zeventiende eeuw liet de stedelijke elite op grote schaal buitenplaatsen en landgoederen in het Hollandse laagland aanleggen. Zij verkozen de meest welgelegen plaatsen voor hun zomerverblijf met speelhuizen, bomenlanen en geschoren hagen. De voorkeur om in elkaars nabijheid te gaan wonen was veelal ingegeven door eenzelfde gebruik of vanwege een vergelijkbare stedelijke of landschappelijke beleving van de omgeving. Door identieke keuze drukte de elite hun stempel op het landschap.

Door ...

Joke Reichardt: Reis door een land vol wonderen. Architect Willem Marinus Dudok op lezingentour door

Amerika, 19 september-18 december 1953 Frederik Vandyck en Matthijs Degraeve: ‘Baukultur’ in Brussel. Kleinschalig industrieel erfgoed van bouwbedrijven als drager van de productieve stad Hélène Damen: Sober Nederlands vlagvertoon. Naoorlogse ambassadegebouwen in Washington en Bonn Publicaties: Marinke Steenhuis (red.), De nieuwe grachtengordel. De realisatie van het Algemeen Uitbreiding...