Graduation Week publication 2026 by Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

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UND O R GRADU

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GRADUATION PROJECTS 2025-2026

This year’s graduation projects reveal a generation of designers who understand the built environment as deeply entangled with the world’s ecological and social systems. Across architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture, recurring themes emerge from this graduation catalogue: living with water rather than fighting it, restoring natural systems, reusing existing buildings and materials, strengthening communities, protecting biodiversity, and reconsidering the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. This is especially significant because this year marks an important moment for the academy’s Climate Curriculum. Over the past four years, climate-conscious thinking has been increasingly embedded throughout the education. The students who began their studies in 2022 are now the first generation to graduate having experienced the Climate Curriculum for the full four years. Looking across their graduation work, its influence is clearly visible, as a way of understanding a design assignment, a place and the responsibilities of the designer. The projects demonstrate just how diverse that understanding can be. One immersive project responds to sea-level rise by reconsidering our cultural and existential relationship with the North Sea. Another looks to Gotland’s historic meadow system (an early form of agroforestry) to explore biodiversity, food production and adaptation to a changing climate. Elsewhere, demolition materials in Amsterdam Noord become the starting point for circular architecture, while a project in Enschede proposes reopening lost stream valleys to make the city more resilient to extreme rainfall. Other projects address climate-resilient urbanisation, regen-

erative water systems and new forms of coexistence between people, landscapes and ecosystems. Together, these projects suggest a broader shift in design practice: from isolated interventions towards systemic and regenerative approaches. They show climate awareness becoming part of the foundations of the spatial design disciplines. Madeleine Maaskant director Janna Bystrykh head of the Master’s programme in Architecture Anna Gasco head of the Master’s programme in Urbanism Joost Emmerik head of the Master’s programme in Landscape Architecture

ROLE PLAY Artjom Morozov Hesse de Jonge Maurijn Rouwet Mikki Broeren Raidun Schott Cesar Salas Abreu Gabriëlla Pekelharing Danique Nuiten Julia Landreau Patrick van Schaik Julia Parton Dion Bruijn COUNTER PLAY Mathijs Metten Iris van der Walle Jurgi Cinta Boris Cribio Henry Holmes Jeroen Piels Ruben Dahmen Kasper Lemminga Niccolò Rimoldi Sebastián González Tovar Che Yi Shih Oswin Noordergraaf INTER PLAY Yangwook Kang Anne van Hamburg Inge Noten Yves Paquay Marith Bos

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Babs Hofland Maëlle Turgeon Zoë Papadopoulos Anna Hering Bregt Balk Isabel Huis in ‘t Veld

RE PLAY 34 Mindy Li Jeffrey van der Sluijs Nancy Dantese Liselot Buurman 38 Nigora Atta Timo Banning Fernanda Bittencourt Thyra Bakker 42 Lesley Thoen Henry Pulido Garzón Thijs Klein Ovink Dominique van der Heijden 46 Rogier Hoppenbrouwers Jeroen de Rooij

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PLAY GROUND Play Ground is an invitation to never stop playing. During the Graduation Week 2026, the Academy of Architecture is transformed into a giant game board, where visitors become active players in the discovery of this year’s 47 graduation projects. Through this exhibition, guests are invited to play critically with the chances, roles, boundaries, opportunities and strategies of the design discipline. Stemming from an innate human need for play, freedom and curiosity, Play Ground guides us in exploring the creative process and the game-ification of design thinking. Play Ground urges us to reflect; what rules can we bend or follow? What tools can we play with? What kind of player do we want to be in the game of the profession? This thought derives from our understanding of working with and within growing constraints - from clients, institutions, fundings, sustainability, space and time constraints. On the Play Ground, approaching constraints as opportunities is a fundamental part of creating. Over the years, the Academy has played this role exactly; providing its students with an open playground for curiosity and experimentation - giving opportunities to shape their own paths, make their own rules and respond to the world around them, all within a structured, evolving framework of design education. This year’s curators, Anna Torres and Jacopo Grilli, imagine Play Ground’s exhibition to reflect this tension -

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evolving between rules and freedom, making room for learning, playing and reflecting. The graduates explore four archetypes of playful design attitudes - from embodying different roles, re-interpretating existing boundaries, to mediating between systems and imagining counter practices, they position themselves as active players in the Play Ground. These four design philosophies can be traced throughout the exhibition under the following themes: Role Play Counter Play Inter Play Re Play Play Ground welcomes you to play along and discover the works of these 47 graduates, following the path of the board game. Play along, follow the rules, or make up your own, take shortcuts, try your chance and most of all, have fun!

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ROLE PLAY This selection of graduation projects brings together a wide array of designer attitudes. In their approaches, graduates shape and explore different roles for themselves, defining designer archetypes in response to their audience. Here, participatory practices are central to the design ethos - the methodologies respond to the social nature of the themes explored. From community engagement, field research, immersion, and observation, these graduates position themselves as connectors in a horizontal process, beyond traditional top-down power structures. The playfulness of their approaches opens up new possibilities as process-oriented designs rather than result oriented designs. Players embody, explore, project, empathise and conversate as tools for designing. Strongly anchored in present-day thematics, these graduates embody the fluid role of the designer. Acting sometimes as local community connectors, other times as anthropologists, observers or mediators, these players help us redefine the traditional vision of the designer into an adaptive, ever-evolving role. Role Play invites us to explore the spectrum of design characters.

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QUEERING THE BOUNDARY This project was inspired by a moment in my early childhood when I, fascinated by beauty, went to explore flowers in the garden of my daycare. Somehow, my teachers regarded this behaviour as odd for a boy. As a society, we tend to create boundaries, categories and norms, and we continue to hold on to them stubbornly, even when doing so harms people and the environment. For my project location, I chose a fragment of the A12 road, as it cuts through the ancient forest park, Haagse Bos, in The Hague, intensifying the boundary between two zones. I observed the potential for connection on the site and designed a hotel that blurs A12 as a boundary, turning it into a bridge between two sides of the road, and challenges our conventional ideas about cohabitation. Queering experience will be achieved through offering the spaces that are gradient, mutable and odd. Users will be surprised, invited to be curious and offered a possibility to connect with other users in a diversity of ways. The hotel will be collectively owned by the group of queer folk, and would be available to anyone who is open to queer their boundaries.

Name student: Artjom Morozov Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 27 August 2026 Graduation committee: Dafne Wiegers

(mentor), Noortje Weenink, Charlie Clemoes Additional members for the exam: Paul Kuipers, Renzo Sgolacchia

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Project location. Den Haag, Haagse Bos Project overview. Axonometry

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Circulation loop along the road. Short sections Mutable space. Long section Mutable space. Plan fragment

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Debate disco. Perspective view Mutable element. Perspective view Lattice structure and clay material transition.

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9 Normative and queer hotel clash. Perspective section 10 Normative and queer hotel clash. Perspective

view 11 Lattice structure (600 x 600 mm) and modular wooden cube (200 x 200 mm) - assembly. Mockups

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TO FLOURISH Reclaiming health in a post-war district undergoing mega-densification. To Flourish is a design-led research project that explores how urban design can strengthen health and healthy life expectancy in post-war neighbourhoods under heavy densification pressure. The project focuses on Den Haag Zuidwest, where persistent health inequalities coincide with large-scale housing growth and urban renewal. The project uses the Blue Zone of Ogliastra, Sardinia, as an ethnographic reference. During two months of fieldwork, I studied how health-supportive everyday life is shaped by spatial and social conditions: proximity to landscape, walking as part of daily routines, informal encounters, strong local identity and shared forms of care. Rather than copying the Blue Zone as a model, the research translates these observed mechanisms into urban design principles for a very different context. In Den Haag Zuidwest, this ethnographic approach continued through prolonged observation, participation in local initiatives and work in a community garden connected to the food bank. These experiences revealed how health is affected by stress, housing conditions, public space, social infrastructure and the possibility to feel ownership over one’s environment. The main themes of the project are connection to nature, healthy

daily routines, social infrastructure and layered identity. These themes are translated into a spatial framework across three scales: the wider urban system, the public space network and the urban block. The design proposal shows how densification can become a lever for healthier living conditions when housing growth is linked to green-blue structures, slow mobility, collective spaces, active ground floors, climate comfort and local ownership. To Flourish reframes health as a spatial and systemic agenda. It proposes a health-led densification strategy for Zuidwest and develops a transferable design methodology for post-war districts facing similar pressures.

Name student: Hesse de Jonge Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 30 April 2026

Graduation committee: Ingeborg Thoral (mentor), Irene-Luque Martin, Chris Romanos Additional members for the exam: Robert Younger, Hiroki Matsuura

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Blue-Zones global Healthy habits

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Principles for the healthy city From Blue zones to city program Historic structures Den Haag Zuidwest

System for a resilient Zuidwest

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Healthy corridor 2035 How the system lands Orange zone healthy densification strategy

10 From anonymous to belonging 11 From Individual to community

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STADSREMISE A Network of Harbour Railways as an Instrument for Social Cohesion. Amsterdam is expanding towards its harbour. Plans for a new urban district are placing increasing pressure on the existing communities within the development area. Spaces currently occupied by allotment gardens, informal trading communities, local associations (including a pigeon-fanciers’ club, an equestrian centre and a dog training club) and facilities for homeless support are at risk of disappearing. At the same time, heavily used public spaces such as Westerpark have already been designated as the principal park for the future residents of Haven-Stad. My design proposal Stadsremise (Urban Depot ) explores the possibility of creating a public realm that embraces these uncertainties rather than displacing them. It investigates the potential of Amsterdam’s existing network of harbour railway tracks and the associated industrial heritage buildings as the foundation for an accessible and socially inclusive public realm within the ongoing transformation of the harbour area. The existing railway network can be a significant asset for the new urban district: as a physical connection between its various neighbourhoods, as an experimental space for communities, and as a carrier of identity for the emerging city quarter. The currently inaccessible Zaanstraat Marshalling Yard has the potential to

Name student: Maurijn Rouwet Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 24 September 2025 Graduation committee: Wouter Kroeze

become an important connective landscape between Amsterdam’s historic centre and Haven-Stad. As the city continues to expand towards the harbour, the marshalling yard will occupy a central position, offering the opportunity to strengthen spatial continuity and social cohesion across this evolving urban landscape. This graduation project argues for preserving the marshalling yard as an open and unbuilt landscape. The proposal investigates the potential of the existing railway infrastructure and the former maintenance depot to be transformed into a brownfield park and neighbourhood community centre. The design envisions a public realm that fosters hope and social cohesion in response to the contemporary challenges facing the city. It proposes an informal public space that encourages participation, shared experience, appropriation, imagination, dialogue, and a sense of wonder.

(mentor), Machiel Spaan, Hanneke Kijne Additional members for the exam: Jolijn Valk, Gerjan Streng

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De Stadsremise Zaanstraat emplacement

Existing Situation, Haven-Stad Framework, The emplacement Remains Open (left to right)

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Site Plan Ground Floor Plan

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The Swimming Pool Overview of the Architectural Interventions

8 Building Concept: Transforming the Maintenance Depot into a Polyvalent Landscape

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DE KERSENBOOGERD ALS GELUKSMACHINE Making space for those with double bad luck. A neighbourhood once designed as a promise of a better future can, decades later, face a very different reality. This tension is at the heart of my graduation project on Kersenboogerd in Hoorn. As a post-war growth district, the neighbourhood was shaped by ideals of space, accessibility and happiness. Many of these qualities are still present and align with the principles of the 5-minute city. At the same time, the neighbourhood faces social and spatial challenges, including loneliness, crime, feelings of insecurity and demographic imbalance. The central area is home to a relatively large number of vulnerable residents, including lonely elderly people, young people and people in need of care. For these groups, the proximity and accessibility of amenities are particularly important. Yet the current public space does not sufficiently support social interaction and is often experienced as unsafe and anonymous. As a result, residents are not only socially vulnerable, but their physical environment can reinforce this vulnerability. My design De Kersenboogerd als geluksmachine (Kersenboogerd as a Happiness Machine) explores how Kersenboogerd’s existing qualities can help break this cycle of ‘double bad luck’. The main interventions

focus on enriching, enlivening and anchoring the neighbourhood. By weaving together housing, community functions, cafés and restaurants, amenities and places to meet, a lively centre with greater social oversight can emerge. The existing linear routes are strengthened as important everyday connections and linked to a new central square next to the railway station. The residential areas are also connected by pedestrian and cycling routes and provided with their own meeting places. The goal is not to design vulnerability out of the neighbourhood, but to remove one form of bad luck: an unsafe, anonymous and unsupportive living environment. Public space thus becomes an ally, encouraging social interaction, safety, accessibility and resilience. The residents facing this ‘double bad luck’ are not only given a place in the neighbourhood, but can become its very ‘birds of paradise’.

Name student: Mikki Broeren Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 26 August 2026 Graduation committee: Herman Zonderland

(mentor), Luuk Koote, Pieter Hoexum Additional members for the exam: Hein Coumou, Iruma Rodríguez Hernández

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Aerial View – Existing Situation Double Bad Luck Concept Diagram

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Site Plan Spatial view Centre Spatial view Courtyard Spaces

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Spatial view Green Neighbourhood Courtyard Spaces Central Square

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HET SCHEVENINGSE BOS A new radical intervention. A perfectly straight road cutting through wild dunes. Eight rows of trees, embankments on both sides, a toll gate and strolling noblemen. This is the image that fascinated me and became the starting point of my project Het Scheveningse Bos (The Scheveningen Woods): an engraving by Christiaan Huygens from 1665, created to convince people of a connecting road from The Hague to Scheveningen, crossing the shifting dunes. This radical intervention reflects the human desire to control the landscape. Through his design, Huygens protected people from the overwhelming force of nature. In the current situation, the landscape has turned into an inversion. Nature is no longer the dominant force; the city and its culture are. The forest along the Scheveningseweg carries the pressure of centuries of human use. Disturbance, pollution, eutrophication and acidification increasingly put its ecological value and vitality under pressure. The place calls for a new radical intervention. The design gives the forest back to itself. It receives the space to restore its natural structure and resilience by changing the accessibility of its most disruptive factor. At the same time, the design invites a shift in perspective: from bushes to forest, towards wonder and awareness of different timescales. A play of ac-

cessibility emerges, determined by what the forest can carry. Within this project, a design method was tested for applying a poetic approach, in which feeling and knowing are given equal value. The location is explored with as little prior knowledge as possible, through intuition and observation. Only after that comes the factual. In this way, a kaleidoscopic way of looking emerges, in which different forms of knowledge come together. This project centralizes other values alongside the controllable and the measurable: designing with time, uncertainty and letting go as instruments. The design creates the conditions for the landscape to continue developing itself, far beyond the lifespan of the individual.

Name student: Raidun Schott Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 26 August 2026 Graduation committee: Hannah Schubert

(mentor), Paul de Kort, Yttje Feddes Additional members for the exam: Willemijn van Manen, Roel Wolters

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Fascination: Zeestraete engraving – Christiaan Huygens, 1665 Conceptual translation of the design

Spatial concept

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Page from the intuitive logbook Concept: Inversion Cross-sections: current situation – design

– after 10 years – after half a century

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Design principles Field map: places of wonder and responses to context

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THIS IS WHAT THERE IS... NOW WHAT? Participation, Activism and what does design have to do in all of this process? This project isn’t really about coffee. And it isn’t really about architecture either. It’s about how architecture can support the sustainable growth of an existing social transformation, instead of introducing a new one. While architecture by itself will not fix our problems, architectural expertise could play a determining role in these complex processes. This project summarises the mutual learnings of a relationship that has been developing since 2023 with Petare, a place with a complex and rich identity that is often overlooked and generalised through negative connotations, and Zona de Descarga, a community-driven initiative, specifically through Café Petare Blu, an urban coffee cultivation project that aims to create a network of coffee producers for both personal consumption and local sale. This project does not try to solve the problems of Petare or our cities, nor how to grow the best coffee. These are processes that go beyond the architecture profession. Instead, it tries to prove that the idea of growing coffee in an urban context is spatially feasible. This project is about understanding what the role of architecture could be when working outside of the “formal dynamics of the profession.” Through this ongoing process,

I came to understand that the role of architecture is not always to create growth, but to remove the obstacles that prevent it from flourishing. Architecture becomes a set of tools that can make existing forms of growth more visible, connected, and capable of expanding. As architects, we shouldn’t focus on creating self-centered narratives, but rather on contributing our expertise to allow many other stories to be heard. Proposing dreams that would not end up being paper utopias, but rather dreams that could hopefully develop into concrete realities.

Name student: Cesar Salas Abreu Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 27 August 2026 Graduation committee: Bart Bulter (mentor),

Gabriel Visconti, Elisa Silva Additional members for the exam: Ricky Rijkenberg, Ania Molenda

Café Petare Blu

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The goal of integrating coffee cultivation into an urban context.

Migration & progress

1945 - Migration towards the urban cores

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Cafe Petare Blu and the questions of the project Migration & Progress, a shared identity

Too many questions… Is the project feasible? What is the role of the architect?

1945- present Progressive evolution of the dwelling

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From Petare to Caracas Elements of the barrio

La platabanda

Petare overlooking el Avila

The Barrio Dwelling (A multigenerational process)

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Form the stairs to la platabanda , main elements of the barrio From Caracas to petare, urban contex.

Height ( relative to “el loro alley

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Plants arrangement : To ensure the proper growth of your plants and make efficient use of space, follow the guidelines below to calculate the space needed for the number of plants in your vivero.

= 50cm x 50cm

Jaime’s Platabanda

10 plants + 30 cm circulation

After 4 rows, leave 1 square (50cm) for circulation

Arrangement in Jaime’s platabanda: Area B 3.5 m2 = 140 plants

October - December

Area A, 5 m2 = 200 plants

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VIvero layout - 560 plants Shade examples

Shade examples : 1 meter in height is enough for the plants, but if possible, make the shade structure tall enough to allow someone to stand inside.

Jaime’s Platabanda

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Vivero layout - Plant arrangement Vivero lay out - Shade example

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UPSIDE DOWN (D)URBANISM An (in)formal network strategy for the Central Business District of Durban, South Africa. Growing up in Durban, South Africa, shaped my awareness of the city’s contrasting urban realities. While I attended school in the relatively privileged neighbourhood of Durban North, my family lived in a lower-income area still marked by apartheid’s spatial legacy. This experience made the inequalities embedded in Durban’s urban structure increasingly visible and motivated my commitment to spatial justice. Returning to Durban in 2025 with an urbanist’s perspective allowed me to study the Central Business District (CBD), with a particular focus on Victoria Street. Through walking, observing, mapping and speaking with residents, I encountered an area often labelled unsafe or undesirable, yet rich in culture, history, informal trade, accessibility and everyday urban life. This project investigates how a human-centred socio-spatial design approach can strengthen the liveability, inclusivity and identity of Victoria Street and the wider Durban CBD. While current development strategies often introduce generic projects that overlook the area’s existing character, this proposal seeks to recognise, reinforce and build upon the qualities already present. The project presents a toolbox of design ingredients for transforming

Name student: Gabriëlla Pekelharing Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 9 July 2026 Graduation committee: Jerryt Krombeen

public spaces and adjacent buildings. Public-space interventions are positioned as catalysts that can create immediate social value while encouraging longer-term investment in surrounding properties, benefiting the local community. It also proposes a network-based approach connecting informal work, housing, mobility and climate-resilient public spaces across the inner city. Unlike concentrated development strategies that benefit a limited area or group, this approach distributes improvements more widely throughout the CBD. Ultimately, the project reframes Durban’s inner city not as a forgotten problem area, but as a valuable urban landscape. Its existing identity, communities, and everyday practices can provide the foundation for a more inclusive, caring, accessible, climate-resilient and highly liveable city.

(mentor), Jessica Hammarlund Bergmann, Chuma Mbambo Additional members for the exam: Iruma Rodríguez Hernández, Robert Younger

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Six calls to action & a toolbox filled with 24 design ingredients to transform the Victoria street and greater CBD area

Case study analysis: eye-level observations throughout the Victoria street

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A layered network strategy transforming the Durban CBD Call to Action 1: Welcome to Victoria street

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Call to Action 2: Pedestrian Precinct Call to Action 3: Crazy Climate Proof Transformation of the Victoria street, Durban

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ONTPRIKKELD Exploring Luwte (sheltered spaces) in Delft. Ontprikkeld (De-stimulating) is a personal thought experiment. Stemming from a personal struggle with sensory overload during my time based in Delft – and observing the lost connection between the city and the landscape – I set out to identify the factors contributing to this overstimulation. What role can I play as a landscape architect? What if we designed spaces of calm and shelter within cities, integrated with nature restoration? SENSORY OVERLOAD IN DELFT Public space is becoming increasingly overburdened by an accumulation of street furniture, parked vehicles, private encroachment and the constant presence of noise, movement and air pollution.

INSPIRATION AND LESSONS This research draws inspiration and lessons from Japanese culture, where the concept of de-stimulation is deeply rooted. The Japanese concept of ‘Ma’ embodies an essential spatial quality of slowing down, absence and silence. A field trip to Kyoto provided insights into the components of sheltered spaces and landscape elements that help alleviate sensory overload for people.

DE-STIMULATING DELFT Combining knowledge of the peat meadow landscape with insights into designing for de-stimulation, this project proposes designs for three locations in Delft. Each location reconnects the layer of cultural history with the local landscape, as well as with human experience and the need for sensory relief.

DARING TO MAKE CHOICES This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: not everything fits anymore. Public space cannot endlessly absorb new functions without losing its quality. The question, therefore, is not how we can fit more in, but what we have to consciously leave out. Space should not primarily be used for stationary cars, but for silence, cooling, social interaction and breathing room. Furthermore, incorporating local landscapes and elements fosters a sense of calm and a connection to nature.

Name student: Danique Nuiten Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 26 August 2026 Graduation committee: Sjaak Punt (mentor),

Ronald Boer, Mirjam Koevoet Additional members for the exam: Brigitta van Weeren, Pierre Alexandre Marchevet

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What is overstimulation? What is Ma? Reducing sensory overload in Delft’s historic

city center Three sensory experiences in the reflection garden

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Wandering in wonder at the play of shadows Three local nature types and landscape experiences

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An alternation of enclosed fen woodland and revealing open space. Long vista through a structure of pollard willows

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9 Cross-sections sunken landscapegardens 10 A literal green inbetween space consisting of sa local alder hedge structure

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MANU UMBRA Hands in shadow. The project examines the spatial marginalisation of building caretakers and facilities management workers within contemporary architecture. It begins with a simple observation: the maintenance-free building does not exist, yet the people who maintain it are consistently made spatially invisible. At the centre of the project is the term spatial dignity: the recognition that every worker has an essential right to a workspace that reflects their equal worth, regardless of role or status within a building’s hierarchy. This extends to what the project calls circulation dignity, the right to move through a building via routes not defined by one’s social invisibility. The research is grounded in interviews, readings and regulatory analysis conducted across different countries. It spans eleven facilities management disciplines, from cleaning and security to sustainability and smart building technology, and examines different building typologies: the office tower, the educational institution, and the domestic domain. Across all three, caretaker spaces follow the same pattern. They are placed in the basement or at the back of the building, in rooms with little daylight, minimal space, and no relationship to the primary architecture the building presents to the world.

Rather than proposing solutions, the project works to make a condition visible that architecture has consistently chosen not to see. It moves between registers, from regulatory analysis to architectural speculation to performance, treating each as a different way of documenting the same invisible labour. Maintenance is approached not as a technical afterthought but as a form of care that holds a building in time, and the project asks what it would mean for architecture to take that care seriously, spatially, from the very beginning of the design process rather than after it.

Name student: Julia Landreau Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 9 July 2026 Graduation committee: Valentina Fantini

(mentor), Giulio Margheri, Laura van Santen Additional members for the exam: Machiel Spaan, Anna Zan

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A 1.4x1.4m square symbolising the space allocated to a caretaker within a building

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Axonometric drawing situating a caretaker pavilion within the systemic city Axonometric drawing situating a caretaker

pavilion within the systemic city Image of the Facility management architectural speculation

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Facility management architectural speculation without its maintenance labour Image of the Sustainability management

architectural speculation Sustainability management architectural speculation without its maintenance labour

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EEN WOONLANDSCHAP VOOR GENERATIES A neighbourhood that grows with its residents, from planting to maturity. A living environment is never finished. This principle forms the core of my graduation project Een Woonlandschap voor Generaties (A Living Landscape for Generations) on De Haagse Beemden, the largest district of Breda (approx. 25.000 residents) and the neighbourhood where I grew up. What was progressive in the 1970s – spacious, green, and child-oriented – is now at a turning point. The population is ageing, vitality is under pressure, and residents increasingly live alongside one another rather than with one another. Developments take place in a fragmented way, and a coherent vision for the future is lacking. Rather than analysing this from behind a desk, I went into the neighbourhood. I joined the local community network, spoke with residents, key figures, and organisations, and learned the social structure from within. One ambition was repeatedly expressed: to reconnect residents. Not building in numbers, but building on communities. In a neighbourhood with many older residents, this presents an opportunity. This generation is not only in need of care but also carries experience and engagement, and can therefore act as catalysts for social and spatial renewal. From this insight, I developed a future perspective towards 2075,

structured around four development lines: social, active, local, and mixed residential landscapes. My proposal makes encounters natural: the Burgst estate becomes a public green neighbourhood centre, business parks gain residential functions, existing residential areas are mixed with light work functions, routes along the railway and the river Mark become livelier, the water becomes navigable, and monotonous playgrounds are transformed into vibrant community squares. The metaphor of the apple tree runs through the project: the neighbourhood is a living structure that requires time, attention, and connectedness to grow. Districts like De Haagse Beemden carry great potential in their structure, space, and demographics, allowing them to gradually evolve into a resilient living landscape for generations. For me, this means that my engagement continues actively, together with the neighbourhood network, to help realise this future.

Name student: Patrick van Schaik Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 27 January 2026

Graduation committee: Martin Probst (mentor), Yvonne Witter, Auguste van Oppen Additional members for the exam: Tess Broekmans, Sander Maurits

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A future vision for Haagse Beemden The path toward the future

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3 People living parallel lives 4 The future perspective through four development pathways

5 How can you contribute to your neighborhood?

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6 Connected residential landscape 7 Burgst as the green and social heart of the neighbourhood

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FROM FEAR TO CARE From Fear to Care explores how architecture can contribute to addressing gender-based violence, by reimagining the city as a place of collective care. The project is situated in Cape Town, South Africa, where it began by asking how architecture might actively contribute to reducing gender-based violence and creating environments that support women’s safety, dignity and participation. Rather than treating violence solely as a social or criminal justice issue, the research investigates its spatial dimensions, examining how histories of spatial marginalisation such as colonialism, apartheid and ongoing inequality continue to shape women’s everyday experiences of the city. As the research evolved, its focus shifted from violence towards the networks of care that already exist within Cape Town. Through interviews with local women, mapping, observation and historical research, the project identified the women who sustain the city through informal economies, community support, stewardship and cultural practice. Instead of proposing entirely new systems, From Fear to Care asks how architecture can recognise, strengthen and spatialise these existing infrastructures of care. This research culminates in an architectural speculation titled amaPrecinct, located in and around the Company’s Garden in Cape Town’s city centre. The proposal consists of

three interconnected interventions that support healthcare, informal exchange, collective gathering, indigenous landscape and long-term stewardship, creating a framework that enables care to become visible within the public realm. From Fear to Care ultimately argues that while architecture cannot eliminate gender-based violence, it can help create the spatial conditions that foster care, participation and collective responsibility. It proposes a shift from architecture as an instrument of power towards architecture as civic infrastructure for care, demonstrating how spatial practice can support more inclusive, resilient and equitable cities.

Name student: Julia Parton Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 8 July 2026 Graduation committee: Lada Hršak (mentor),

Dr. Natalie Dixon, Keneilwe Ramaphosa Additional members for the exam: Ira Koers, Marten Kuijpers

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Render of amaCircle of Care amaCircle of Care Ground Floor Plan Section of amaCircle of Care

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Render of amaExchange Alley amaExchange Alley Ground Floor Plan Section of amaExchange Alley

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Render of amaGathering Place amaGathering Place Ground Floor Plan Section of amaGathering Place

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EVENT BIEB HAARLEM A new typology for the library as an event space. My project Event Bieb Haarlem (Event library Haarlem) explores the relationship between the library’s fixed, everyday programme and a new layer that is being added to it. The library is becoming increasingly important within society; it is a place that grows with the times. Not knowing what the library will look like in the future, I imagine that a new typology of library could develop on the station square: an event library, creating space for cultural expression, cultural exchange, and cultural events. The core of the building has a dual function and can be adapted to the type of event by means of a configuration. The concept of the building also emphasizes the importance of the existing value of the library, with program elements such as reading rooms, seating areas, workspaces, and bookcases forming the basis of the design. These everyday library spaces are located around the shared traffic area, where the diversity of the city can be seen in the building itself. Different user groups move through the building here. But this same space can also be used as an auditorium with a stage for events. The core of the building, which functions as an urban plaza during the day, thus has a dual function. The design connects to the ground level and creates a porous

ground floor, with the various program components forming an extension of the ground level and its surrounding context. The Event Bieb Haarlem is a new type of cultural building that Haarlem has not yet seen, and it explores what the library could be in the future.

Name student: Dion Bruijn Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 16 September 2025

Graduation committee: Arna Mačkić (mentor), Miguel Loos, Martine van Vliet Additional members for the exam: Bart Bulter, Freyke Hartemink

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Model Lay-out Rooms

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Rooms Entrance Auditorium

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Outdoor bench Facade concept

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9 Children’s room 10 Orchestra 11 Site plan

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COUNTER PLAY

COUNTER PLAY This category of Graduation projects designs counter proposals to existing narratives. They challenge rules, structures, and imagine new alternatives to current systems of working. They address resistance, speculation and disruption. These proposals are future focused, charged with the imaginative power to bring us along new narratives. They play with new forms of power structures, reimagined political contexts and utopian visions, giving shape to bold design proposals. The toolkit of the Counter-players includes unwavering optimism, constructive criticality and complex storytelling. The proposals range from scenarios for future vision to alternative economical models, political shifts, utopia and climate resilient thinking.The results are translated down to how to build, speculate and critically re-imagine our future. Counter Play projects us into future speculations with imaginative instruments and enthusiastic attitudes.

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LIVING DEFENCE Nature as strategic ally. The world is once again entering a period of uncertainty. Geopolitical tensions are increasing, war is moving closer to Europe and the impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly visible. As a result, security and resilience have returned to the centre of societal debate. Yet military security and climate adaptation are often approached as separate challenges, despite both unfolding within the same landscape. Living Defence explores how the landscape itself can play an active role in future questions of security. Historically, this was not uncommon. Dutch rivers, wetlands and inundation systems were used for centuries to slow movement and gain time. Although modern warfare has changed significantly, physical space remains crucial for accessibility, logistics and societal continuity. From this perspective, the project introduces the concept of the Delay Landscape: a landscape that is not primarily aimed at stopping an opponent, but at organising time and resilience. By strengthening natural systems, a landscape emerges that influences movement, protects strategic areas and simultaneously contributes to ecological restoration and climate adaptation. The design strategy is based on three spatial principles: rewetting, roughening and concealing. By retaining water, creating more

robust and less predictable landscapes, and shortening lines of sight, a layered system emerges in which nature and defence reinforce one another. On a national scale, this is translated into a network of Delay Landscapes. The Peellinie forms a spatial exploration of this approach. Within this former peat landscape, historical defence structures, water challenges and ecological transitions converge. By reactivating the inherent qualities of water, soil and vegetation, a landscape emerges that is not only more climate resilient and biodiverse but also contributes to a new perspective on security: security as an intrinsic property of the landscape itself.

Name student: Mathijs Metten Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 9 July 2026 Graduation committee: Remco van der Togt

(mentor), Brigitta van Weeren, Aura Luz Melis Additional members for the exam: Berdie Olthof, Ziega van den Berk

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The principle of ‘warwilding’: combining ecological restoration, climate adaptation and landscape resilience

The concept of the Delay Landscape, translated into three spatial principles: Rewetting, Roughening and Concealing

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The Peellinie: a future network of landscape resilience in the Peel region Wetland area as an ecological system

Controlled disturbance through military use as a landscape management strategy

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Wetland area as a defensive system Integration of a ha-ha profile with an eco-wall as a local depression for water

retention and delay Principle of local topographical elevation as a means of slowing movement

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DE VERBANNEN ZEE Balance as a force of nature. My graduation project De verbannen zee (The Banished Sea) centres on a re-evaluation of our relationship with water, shifting from anthropocentrism (control) to symbiocentrism (partnership). It demonstrates that letting go of rigid control does not automatically lead to loss but can bring a new and resilient balance. Here, balance is an active force of nature that provides opportunity for ecological richness and new forms of coexisting with nature. Currently, the sea in the Eems-Dollard estuary is banished behind rigid dykes. This technical separation has caused a landscape crisis: while polders are frozen in time, the outer-dike estuary suffocates in its own silt. This project proposes a radical future perspective in which the sea regains control as the architect of the landscape by strategically breaching the dykes. This increases the estuary’s capacity, lowering flow velocities so silt can settle and the land can grow naturally with rising sea levels. To restore the balance, the project requires humanity to take a temporary step back, surrendering intensively used land so the landscape can recover. Within this sheltered landscape, a gradual zoning between wilderness and culture emerges. Only once the tidal dynamics stabilise will humans return, not as rulers, but in a small-scale, non-invasive way.

Within this controlled dynamic, people find a safe haven through a new typology: the dyke-terp. These circular, modular settlements use the existing dyke structure as a backbone. Inhabitants function self-sufficiently through small-scale farming and an internal freshwater lens that stores rainwater. By cautiously skimming marsh ridges to guide the water and elevate land, our living environment grows in harmony with the sea. The result is a dynamic coastal landscape where the rigid division between land and water permanently makes way for a resilient ecological transition zone.

Name student: Iris van der Walle Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 16 June 2026 Graduation committee: Hanneke Kijne (mentor)

Jonas Papenborg, Ziega van den Berk Additional members for the exam: Yttje Feddes, Pierre Alexandre Marchevet

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1 Visualisation of the new balance in 2080/2100

Visualisation of the dyke-terp

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3 Zooming out to the larger system 4 Zooming out to the larger system 5 Tidal dynamics in the North Sea and the

Wadden Sea Differences between an estuary and a delta

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7 Visualisation and diagram of the breach in 2040

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RITE OF PASSAGE Set within the radically transformed landscape of Groningen, the project explores an alternative relationship between people, landscape and ways of living. It proposes an intervention for a travelling community that reconsiders mobility not as a condition at the margins of society, but as a way of restoring a deeper balance between the individual, the community and the environment. The project is guided by questions of belonging, home and our place in the world, using water as the central connecting element within the landscape. If movement has always been fundamental to human life, why has sedentary living become the defining condition of civilization? And how might a nomadic way of life help restore our connection to the landscape, its waters, seasonal rhythms and the wider environment? Rather than redesigning or reclaiming the landscape, as was historically done through large-scale interventions in the region, the project works with its existing conditions while reintroducing some of its original environmental dynamics. It draws on regional forms of living, movement and landscape practices to explore how the landscape might become more resilient through new forms of coexistence. The project takes the form of a seasonal journey from Schiermonnikoog to Groningen, passing

through three key locations: Zoutkamp, Electra and Aduarderzijl. Positioned along a route shaped by water-management infrastructure, each site becomes a moment of arrival, exchange and transformation. Ultimately, Rite of Passage asks whether belonging might be understood not through permanence, but through the relationships we build as we move through the world.

Name student: Jurgi Cinta Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 27 August 2026 Graduation committee: Patrick Roegiers

(mentor), Vibeke Gieskes, Ronald Boer Additional members for the exam: Katja Hogenboom, Anna Torres

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The Journey. Scale plan depicting the full journey

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The Sites. Scale plan depicting the three sites of the proposed interventions First stop. Zoutkamp visualization

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Second stop: Electra visualization Third stop: Aduarderzijl floor plan and section

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First stop. Zoutkamp floor plan and section Second stop: Electra floor plan and section Exploded. Isometric view of the shelter design

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HOMO STAD To Belong. HOMO STAD asks a simple question: how does architecture influence homosexual life? The answer unfolds across a 30-metre-long hand drawing composed of tableaux vivants and more than a century of Amsterdam’s queer spatial history. Public urinals, Café ’t Mandje, cruising parks, Hotel Tiemersma, saunas, darkrooms, the Homomonument, Pride and Grindr are brought together within one continuous landscape. The Amsterdam represented here never existed at a single moment. Historical time is deliberately suspended: vanished buildings remain standing, landscapes from different periods overlap, and private interiors connect to public space. The drawing creates a city of its own – a speculative homosexual city assembled from Amsterdam and organised through desire, secrecy, resistance, pleasure and care. The project combines archival research, interviews and a personal dérive through parks at night, urinals, bars, clubs, saunas, hotel corridors, bedrooms and a considerable number of questionable doorways. It reveals that queer architecture rarely begins with buildings deliberately designed as queer. A urinal becomes a cruising ground; a park becomes a sequence of rooms; a house becomes a café; a canal becomes a Pride stage; a phone connects a bedroom to the wider city.

What repeatedly matters are the conditions architecture creates: thresholds, visibility, circulation, proximity and concealment. Darkness, vegetation, steam, sound, atmosphere and bodies themselves become architectural materials. Desire makes people extraordinarily attentive to space. Few analyse an entrance, staircase or lock more precisely than someone arriving at a stranger’s apartment at two in the morning. Architecture is never only what it was designed to be. People occupy it, misuse it, hide inside it, dance through it, desire within it and completely reinvent its programme. A city always contains more cities than the one shown on its official map.

Name student: Boris Cribio Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 19 August 2026 Graduation committee: Jochem Homminga

(mentor), Vibeke Gieskes, Anna Torres Additional members for the exam: Raul Corrêa-Smith, Hedwig van der Linden

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The Controlled City Architecture of Concealment

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Park as Room Domestic Interiors Hospitality and Identity

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Steam as Threshold Street as Stage

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From Desire to Care Rewired Homo Space

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SWADESHI EXCHANGE Institute of Indian Information. Swadeshi Exchange reimagines an abandoned Mumbai cotton mill as a publicly accessible data hub. Merging the city’s industrial past with India’s digital future, the proposal is set in 2030 as India becomes the world’s largest generator of information. With over a billion internet users and Mumbai serving as the landing point for major undersea cables, the city is uniquely positioned as the nation’s primary communication port and a critical node on the global information landscape. Responding to India’s digital rise, this project aims for a self-reliant and culturally-embedded architecture that challenges conventional data centers. Typically opaque, resource-intensive and disconnected from daily life - by positioning infrastructure as an urban asset, it proposes a data center that is both publicly accessible and physically self-sufficient. Echoing the 1905 Swadeshi self-reliance movement, it advocates for a physical and digital independence - in sharp contrast to today’s monopolised technology landscape. Blending the city’s progressive entrepreneurial culture with advanced digital infrastructure, as cotton once was, data here is filtered, processed, trained, and traded, inspired by the site’s industrial past. Located between the hyper-modern Bandra Kurla Complex and the informal hillside settlement

of Kasai Wada, the site encapsulates Mumbai’s urban tensions. Formal and informal, east and west, land and sea - the project uses digital infrastructure itself to bridge these divides whilst simultaneously preserving the mill as a rare and valuable public green space. It envisions a mixed-use district incorporating workshops, marketplaces, amenities and energy systems - articulating concealed networks as visible, legible and tangible. Swadeshi Exchange aims to reconnect fragmented parts of Mumbai, redefine sustainable data architecture, and create publicly accessible industry. Ultimately serving as a prototype for tropical cities entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution - demonstrating how infrastructure, ecology, heritage and community can coexist with India’s exponentially-expanding information economy.

Name student: Henry Holmes Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 17 December 2025

Graduation committee: Burton Hamfelt (mentor), Madir Shah, Anne Geenen Additional members for the exam: Jarrik Ouburg, Txell Blanco Diaz

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Swadeshi Mills Road Site overview – Swadeshi Mill Data exhibition hall

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Dome marketplace Longitudinal section Walkway view West

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View North East Site model overview Axo fragment

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MÉT BOERENVERSTAND Farming and experiencing the bio-based supply chain in the Bommelerwaard. A while ago, I swapped village life for city life. This change of setting has altered my perspective on the region I come from. The Bommelerwaard, an agricultural region between the Maas and the Waal, with its villages, grasslands and vast polders, seems from a distance to be a place where life unfolds at a leisurely pace. At the same time, beneath that seemingly tranquil landscape lies a complex web of interests, systems and economic forces, all of which have an impact on the soil. Since I left, I have felt a growing sense of connection to what I left behind, precisely because of the complexity of the situation. I therefore wanted to explore what responsibility I can take on here as an architect. The origin of this project lies in the idea that, as architects, when we choose a material, we also indirectly shape the physical and social landscape from which that material originates. After all, the material landscape – the place where raw materials are cultivated and harvested – often remains, both literally and figuratively, at a distance in our thinking about materials. But now that building with biobased materials is rapidly gaining ground, and more and more parties are committing to their use, these material landscapes are drawing ever closer. And if we want to grow raw

materials locally, on the scale of the Netherlands, this means it will happen ‘just round the corner’ and thus become visible. This fact leads me to believe that we, as architects, must at the very least have an understanding of the situation that will unfold there, as we will share responsibility for it. This project, Mét Boerenverstand (With Farmers’ Common Sense), addresses this very issue. It investigates the potential impact of the bio-based transition and the associated supply chain on the landscape and the built environment surrounding our homes, workplaces, daily lives and experiences. It is not only concerned with how a new raw materials supply chain functions, but also with how it can be integrated spatially and socially within the region.

Name student: Jeroen Piels Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 27 August 2026 Graduation committee: Floris Alkemade

(mentor), Lieke Jildou de Jong, Raoul Vleugels Additional members for the exam: Jeroen van Mechelen, Aura Luz Melis

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Model of the region Harvest on the land

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A visible material landscape An experiential materials landscape From plant to prefab

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The bio-based chain Housing in material-dialogue with the industry First and second line in dialogue

9 The work yard 10 Inside the assembly hall

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WHAT DOES THE HOUSE DESIRE? My graduation project What does the house desire? (Wat wil het huis?) explores how architecture changes when design is not fixed in advance, but emerges through physical experience, material engagement, and making. Instead of working toward a predefined end image, I developed a set of ‘dogmas’: guiding principles that structure the design process without fully determining it. These dogmas are not strict rules, but focal points that allow continuous response to what the site, materials, and act of making reveal. The central decision in this project was to conduct the research physically by building a small house. This house functions both as a dwelling and a 1:1 design laboratory, where designing, building, and living merge into one continuous process. By being constantly present on site, architecture becomes a direct interaction between body, material, and space. The project is structured around six dogmas, each addressing a different aspect of the design process:

Together, these dogmas formed a working method rather than a fixed doctrine: they sharpened my attention during the process and were themselves tested, confirmed, and refined through the act of building. The project is grounded in a critical reflection on contemporary architectural practice, where image-making, rendering culture, and abstract optimization are often detached from the act of building itself. This research instead seeks to restore the connection to making: to craftsmanship, material behaviour, and the immediate consequences of design decisions. By working with reclaimed materials and existing components, the project also explores how architecture can become more sustainable and context-driven. Materials are not treated as new products, but as part of an ongoing cycle in which reuse and reconfiguration generate new spatial meaning. Ultimately, the project does not aim to produce a perfect object, but to develop an architectural attitude rooted in body, environment, and making. In doing so, it hopes to contribute to a practice that is less polished and image-driven, and instead more grounded, experimental, and connected to the physical reality of space and material.

1. The project grows from observation 2. The entire design takes place on site 3. The body as measuring instrument 4. The designer builds himself 5. Material is local and from waste streams 6. The design is never finished but continuously rewritten Name student: Ruben Dahmen Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 22 June 2026

Graduation committee: Machiel Spaan (mentor), Ira Koers, Patrick Roegiers Additional members for the exam: Paul Kuipers, Ricky Rijkenberg

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The House, interior (Photography by Jeroen Musch) The House, exterior (Photography by

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The House, interior (Photography by Jeroen Musch) Proposed Floor Plan

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The House, interior (Photography by Jeroen Musch) The House, interior (Photography by

Jeroen Musch)

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THE OLYMPIC GAME A rule-based spatial strategy for the Athens Olympic Village. Built for a 17-day spectacle in 2004, the Athens Olympic Village was designed as a top-down, masterplan for athletes, not prioritizing the needs of its future residents. Today, the village is a financial burden for the working-class municipality of Acharnes. It suffers from severe heat stress, oversized infrastructure, and unused public space. However, contrasting the neglected public space, residents actively maintain their private balconies and small gardens, proving a fundamental spatial principle: ownership triggers care. The Olympic Game proposes a shift from a static top down masterplan to a dynamic, rulebased urban strategy. By treating urban design as a game, the project introduces a system where residents become active players in shaping their environment. The oversized, failing public spaces are minimized to essential infrastructure, while the remaining land is privatized into a 10x10-meter grid. These plots are leased to residents through a newly established ‘Village Cooperative’, preventing monopolies through exponential rent models and community participation. Instead of dictating aesthetics, a parametric matrix of rules governs spatial performance. Rules such as ‘threshold zones’, ‘noise buffers’, and ‘green lung’ ensure microclimate ad-

aptation, human scale, and programmatic diversity without restricting individual creativity. To prove the viability of this bottom-up approach on a macro-scale, a custom simulator was developed, demonstrating how algorithmic urbanism can generate an organic, functioning neighborhood. By letting go of top-down control and giving power to the community, The Olympic Game transforms a bankrupt Olympic legacy into an adaptable, self-sustaining neighborhood. It creates an evolving urban framework that breathes with the changing needs of its residents, resulting in a village without a finish line.

Name student: Kasper Lemminga Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 27 August 2026 Graduation committee: Markus Appenzeller

(mentor), Martha Seitanidou, Robert Younger Additional members for the exam: Marijke Bruinsma, Ania Sosin

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The isolated, megalomaniac footprint of the 2004 Athens Olympic Village Most of the Olympic venues spread out

over Athens Residents actively maintaining private gardens amidst neglected public space, proving that

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ownership triggers care Introducing a 10x10-meter grid to distribute unused public land back to the residents

Ingredients of the Olympic game

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Section showing the contrast between the public roads and private plots Using the simulator to test rules on village scale

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EXODUS A second hand city. Exodus: a second hand city is conceived as a spatial narrative unfolding in Jakarta, where kampungs, dense informal settlements embedded within the urban fabric, are increasingly threatened by demolition and displacement. Often labeled as slums, these environments instead embody complex spatial, social and economic systems shaped by incremental growth, layered functions and strong community networks. In response to their systematic erasure, the project positions itself as both a critical reflection and a speculative proposal. It introduces the figure of a visionary architect who imagines a new mode of urban production: a city constructed from fragments of kampungs on the verge of disappearance. These fragments, spatial, social and typological, are extracted and reassembled, carrying with them the embedded logics, memories and rituals of everyday life. Rather than operating through a fixed masterplan, the project develops as a dynamic aggregation at the scale of a city, an evolving assemblage capable of growth, reduction and reconfiguration over time. This process is governed by computational design methods, specifically Wave Function Collapse (WFC) and Model Synthesis, reinterpreted as generative urban tools that define how fragments combine, overlap and

propagate through space. Within this framework, a bottom-up logic operates within a topdown system, allowing for variation, negotiation and continuous transformation. In doing so, the project challenges conventional notions of authorship, control and permanence in architecture, proposing instead a model grounded in adaptability, reuse and collective agency.

Name student: Niccolò Rimoldi Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 2 April 2026

Graduation committee: Dafne Wiegers (mentor), Ján Pernecký, Punto Wijayanto Additional members for the exam: Machiel Spaan, Analuisa Moura

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Section A-A’

Exodus: a second hand city

Section B-B’

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1 2038: A second hand neighborhood, Section A-A’

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Occupation Diagram 2038: A second hand city 2038: A second hand neighborhood

6 2038: A second hand neighborhood, axonometric spatial assembly 7 2068: A second hand city

Exodus: a second hand city Niccolò Rimoldi

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8 medium: SLA 3D Print

8 A second hand city 9 2038: Crystalized fragments, SLA 3D Print

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THE SACRED SNAKE’S GARDENS Healing small dots in a vast molecular system. This intervention is a feasible utopia, part of the natural water system of Colombia’s capital city, Bogotá. As a native of this chaotic, nature-embedded city, I focused the project on the natural and societal state of this metro-region, joining diverse causes such as the sponge city and the feminist city through decolonial thinking with different actors such as the Muisca, neighbourhood leaders and members, local landscape architects, urban farmers, water engineers and management experts. The main research subject is the Bogotá River, a waterbody that wanders through a floodable valley in which 12 million people live with other beings, including the principal stakeholders of this strategy: three snakes, or Water-guardian Mothers, as they are known. The three intervention sites are named after them: Mist (City centre – the Golden flying snake, which for the purpose of this study is linked with the dynamics of the flying Amazon rivers); Dew (Fucha River – Attractus crassicaudatus); and Emerald (Tibabuyes Wetland – Liophis epinephelus bimaculatus). Snakes and water are sacred throughout the territories of Turtle Island (North America) and Abya Yala (South America), and from an intersectional position including nature conservation, matriarchal indigenous knowledge, mythology and

landscape design, I have taken this sacred point of view as my main design approach, based on the urgency that the patriarchal and capitalistic system represents for this amphibian landscape, primarily through the expansion of the city and the continuation of the inherited colonisation of land and water. More than a cute project or outstanding landscape visuals, this project is a call-out, a manifesto to resist the emergencies the (human) world is facing right now, which I believe can be improved starting from the community, from ancestral knowledge and from the collective love and understanding of our territories.

Name student: Sebastián González Tovar Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 6 July 2026 Graduation committee: Peter Veenstra

(mentor), Aura Luz Melis, Nikol Dietz Additional members for the exam: Thijs de Zeeuw, Justyna Chmielewska

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Mist (1st site intervention), historical urban layers Sacred spaces, preservation and continuity

of life 3 Permeable, filterable and humidity conditions

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Feminist, autonomous, beautiful and connected city Familiar, intersectional and city identity

Metropolitan scale research map

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Emerald (2nd site) indigenous practices and the Tibabuyes wetland Regional scale analysis, land occupation

and colonization

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GARDEN OF DEMISE A Cemetery of Becoming. This is a project about how death can become a beginning, rather than an end. My curiosity about death began with a moment of confusion during a funeral ritual in my early years – an experience that showed me how death, though inevitable, is often treated as something to be isolated or avoided. In Europe, I found a similar logic: cemeteries sit at the edges of cities, and death is handled quietly, out of sight. Yet people still die – a fact that does not disappear because we stop looking at it. On one trip, I came across a cemetery that also functioned as a public park, where the living and the dead shared the same space naturally. That image led me to ask: could death exist within life, rather than being excluded from it? Garden of Demise grows from this question. Drawing on Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego and the Japanese Buddhist tradition of kusouzu, I rethink how the act of farewell can be shaped by space. The project is set on an abandoned industrial site in Rotterdam’s port district, Quarantaine-Terrein. Human composting replaces burial and cremation, letting the body’s decomposition drive a 20-year ecological succession that transforms the site into a living cemetery. Death becomes the start of new life; the cemetery itself embodies this cycle, as the body nourishes the landscape’s growth.

I therefore designed a complete burial process – from receiving the body, through the accompanying journey of farewell, to final interment and future visits – with each stage given its own spatial setting and ritual pace. This is not meant to help families rush through the process, but deliberately slows it down, giving time and space for grief to be felt, processed, and accompanied. It also lets families, on later visits, see their loved one continuing to exist – in another form of life – within this evolving, growing landscape: death and life forming an ongoing cycle, rather than two opposing ends.

Name student: Che Yi Shih Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 24 August 2026 Graduation committee: Anna Fink (mentor),

Fred Booy, Ricky Rijkenberg Additional members for the exam: Justyna Chmielewska, Charlotte van der Woude

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1 Altarpiece: Transforming the Surrounding Landscape Through the Buried Body 2 Altarpiece: The Body’s Transformation After

Burial 3 Altarpiece: The Transformation of the Burial Grove’s Tree Ring Over Time

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4 Altarpiece: The Beginning of the Funeral Procession, with the Ruined Church as Ritual Site 5 Spatial Section Using Intercolumniation as

Tree Spacing: Initial Phase 6 Spatial Section Using Intercolumniation as Tree Spacing: Later Phase

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Side View of the Burial Grove’s Tree Ring Masterplan

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VINEXT Future vision for the climate robust urbanisation of a post neo-liberal Netherlands. In the summer of 2021, I cycled across Western, Central and Eastern Netherlands with my girlfriend. Everywhere I went, I saw the same pattern: agricultural land being filled with nearly identical expansion districts. Faux historical styles, rowhouses, semi-detached homes and detached villas, all scattered in low density. From Weesp to Wijhe, from cities to villages, the same suburban landscape kept appearing. This reminded me of my work at Karres en Brands, where I had helped design similar developments. A developer once called this ‘the 21st-century residential district’. That idea started to bother me. I wanted to search for a truly 21st-century alternative. A shift toward post-neoliberal thinking: since World War II, our society has largely been shaped by neoliberal ideas: a small government, the individual at the center, globalization and endless economic growth. This mindset clearly manifests in our housing: money-driven development, globally sourced materials, and a lifestyle focused on individual ownership. It has become our Dutch version of the American Dream. But what if we prioritized the opposite? Local instead of global, the collective rather than the individual, and not infinite growth, but a regen-

erative balance. That idea forms the foundation of my graduation project. The urgency of climate-resilient thinking: the Netherlands has always battled water, but the climate crisis shows that this approach is no longer sustainable. We need to build in harmony with our environment again: listening to soil and landscape, avoiding areas that cannot support development, and producing locally what can be produced locally. Not materials and food from across the world, but development within the limits and capacity of place. Real sustainability only emerges when we live in balance with our environment. With my graduation project, I aim to develop a serious, climate-resilient 21st-century alternative for urban expansion.

Name student: Oswin Noordergraaf Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 27 November 2025

Graduation committee: Herman Zonderland (mentor), Hanneke Kijne, Robert Younger Additional members for the exam: Huub Juurlink, Riëtte Bosch

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Plan drawing for a climate resilient and urbanized Wijhe in 2060 Area vision and summary of research and

design approach for the specific location Overview of the different urban fabrics that the new ‘lintkernen’ are made of

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Plan drawing wet urban area (left) and dry urban area (right) Phasing research for locally produced food

and building materials.

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Dense urban station hub (above) and industrial food district (below) The central square (above) and boardwalk

connection the wet world (below) Post-neoliberal principles for new housing typologies

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Y LA

INTER PLAY These projects explore the space between things. They play with boundaries, exploring tensions and relations between disciplines, ecosystems, cycles and users. These proposals allow us to reframe our ways of seeing and to empathise beyond ourselves. They are a testimony to a pressing need of today - to recognise the inter-connectedness of skills, knowledge and perspectives in the context of design. Players weave connections between day and night, seasons of the day; human and more-than-human; immersing themselves into ecosystems; learn to coexist with natural cycles of destruction / creation, giving us an array of highly playful explorations. The methodology of the interplayers resembles a deepdiver approach: They first select a universe to explore, then immerse themselves and empathise with the subjects of their realm, to finally resurface with new ideas and approaches. Inter Play teaches us to relate to otherness with care and precision, transferring knowledge across worlds.

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INTERCONNECTED TALES The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is commonly understood as a line of separation. Barbed wire, soldiers, surveillance and political tension have defined its image for more than seventy years. Human movement has been restricted, but other forms of movement have never stopped. Rivers continue to cross the border, birds migrate above it, and geological formations extend beneath it. Seeds travel with the wind, sound carries across the landscape, and traces of memory remain on both sides. The DMZ is therefore not simply a place where relationships have ended, but a place where many of them have become difficult to see. For me, this landscape has always been both present and distant. Growing up in South Korea, North Korea was constantly present – in school, in the news and later during military service – yet it remained a place I could never truly experience. Even the DMZ itself can only be encountered through controlled visits, maps, satellite images, stories and fragments. What lies beyond inevitably becomes a matter of imagination. This distance became the starting point of the project. Rather than asking how architecture could overcome the border, I became interested in what role architecture could play within it. My attention shifted from the political line towards the landscape itself:

to water, weather, ecology, time, decay and the quiet everyday life that continues within and beyond the border. Interconnected Tales explores this condition through three speculative architectural interventions. Rather than offering solutions, these interventions act as devices through which the border can be observed, imagined and perceived differently.

Name student: Yangwook Kang Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 31 August 2026 Graduation committee: Jeroen van Mechelen

(mentor), Machiel Spaan, Vibeke Gieskes Additional members for the exam: Bart Bulter, Dana Behrman

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Light enters the passage

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Along the underground border Weather enters from above A house carried by the river

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Drifting through the landscape Slowly becoming river Two moons

Whatever the landscape offers

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MAG HET LICHT UIT? A design research to raise awareness about the beauty and importance of living in harmony with the natural rhythm of day and night. Mag het licht uit? (Can we turn off the lights?) is the title of my graduation project. To me, this question is not only about switching off the lights, but also about a desire for rest and calm after a long, busy day. It is a call for stillness and for embracing the beauty of the night, a call to slow down and to pause a little longer at what seems ordinary, but can suddenly become something special. Throughout history, the night has gradually become lighter due to the rise of artificial lighting, and people have become less dependent on the rhythm of day and night in their daily lives. This development continues today. When looking at a night-time map of Europe, it is clear that it hardly gets dark anymore. We have disconnected ourselves from the night and live under a shield of light. Within this shield, we focus on economic growth, efficiency, speed, and progress, filling almost every moment with activity. Moments of doing nothing have become rare; even when we are free, we remain switched on. We have become detached from the night and its beauty. We have slowly erased it. This project raises awareness of the beauty and importance of living in harmony with the natural rhythm of day and night.

It does so through a spatial design that serves as an inspirational starting point for reintroducing the natural nocturnal rhythm into our lives. In the design, different moments of the night are highlighted. Each has its own characteristics, and the design draws attention to these qualities, helping users experience them and become aware of the night’s beauty. A collection of design interventions supports this design, offering transferable strategies that can be applied elsewhere. Through spatial interventions that help people feel safe, navigate in the dark, marvel at, and learn about the night, I aim to reconnect people with darkness. Experiencing its value may contribute to a positive shift in the shifting baseline syndrome, so that one day we might see a rich starry sky again.

Name student: Anne van Hamburg Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 20 January 2026

Graduation committee: Brigitta van Weeren (mentor), Kim Kool, Ziega van den Berk Additional members for the exam: Berdie Olthoft, Mirte van Laarhoven

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1 Counteracting the shifting baseline syndrome of the night 2 Europe by night

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Embracing the natural rhythms Collection of design interventions

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Moving with the sun – activity poster Moving with the sun – detail Twilight – section

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8 Twilight – eye height 9 Moon eclipse – plan drawing 10 Moon eclipse – eye height

11 Night sky – plan drawing 12 Night sky – detail

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NATTE VOETEN OP HET DROGE Climate impact and system restoration in cities on high ground. Natte voeten op het droge (Wet feet on dry ground) explores how climate change is putting increasing pressure on the places where we live. What fascinates me most is the tension between our static way of living and dynamic nature. The research began as an exploration of possible large-scale climate migration in the Netherlands. At first, the focus was mainly on coastal and river areas. But the extreme rainfall in Enschede in the summer of 2024 changed that. Dozens of families were forced to leave their homes after they were declared uninhabitable. The first climate migrants in the Netherlands this century had become a reality, and this happened on the high sandy soils that I had always considered ‘safe’. That event shifted my attention to the relief of the sandy grounds and raised the question of how such a disaster could happen here. In my research, I analyzed the interaction between climate, landscape and land use. The conflicts between these layers formed the basis for a landscape urbanism strategy in which not technology, but the system is central: reopening the lost stream valleys in Enschede. Using stress tests of extreme rainfall and patterns in the landscape, I developed the strategy ‘Enschede Flows’, which goes beyond water

storage alone. In the Stadsveld district, affected by the flooding, I tested the strategy. This resulted in a future-oriented plan in which space is created for water, greenery, development and residents. A story about system restoration, liveability and resilience. Let the disaster and its consequences in Enschede teach us how we deal with our landscape, both in the Netherlands and internationally. By proactively adapting our living environment to the landscape and its systems, and by making room for the effects of climate change, we make our cities and their inhabitants more resilient. And we gain a lot in return!

Name student: Inge Noten Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 7 July 2026 Graduation committee: Herman Zonderland

(mentor), Eric Frijters, Jitske Tiemersma Additional members for the exam: Giacomo Gallo, Flora Nycolaas

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21 July 2024 Plan

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The layers of the analysis The conclusion of the analysis

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Visual area ‘de Kuil’ when dry Visual area ‘de Kuil’ during heavy rain Visual area ‘campus’ when dry

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Visual area ‘campus’ during heavy rain Enschede as example

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MENSEN NESTEN In an alienated era where building has become an industrial machine – concrete suffocating the earth, comfort mortgaging the future – this project returns to the essence. Mensen nesten (Human nest) explores how we can build like birds, beavers, and ovenbirds do: with what the place itself provides, with our own hands, without waste. Ecodorp Wilde Nesten rises in the Mechelse Heide, a landscape scarred by extraction but healing through time. Eight radical nests emerge here – each an experiment in minimal living, maximum connection. De Riethoeve of straw bales and reeds forms the warm heart. De Dennenappel grows from living trees that fuse into an organic framework. De Kloof van Zoden burrows into the hillside, built from earth and roots. De Rietvanger floats above the marsh – a woven cocoon that sways with the wind. Het Zandbastion rises from compressed sand from the slope itself, heavy and enduring as the ages. Some nests have no windows, doors, or heating. Some are seasonal. They demand that you forage, build and maintain. That you accept comfort can come from mass, from community, from a well-placed sleeping spot beneath thick blankets. This is no romantic ideal but a necessary exploration. The construction sector causes 37% of global CO₂ emissions. We must do differently. Mensen nesten shows that build-

ing differently means: returning to craft, to patience, to materials that breathe and decay. To architecture that doesn’t possess but shares. That doesn’t seek to be eternal, but may return to the ground. Do you dare to nest?

Name student: Yves Paquay Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 29 October 2025

Graduation committee: Maartje Lammers (mentor), Maike van Stiphout, Pierre Jennen Additional members for the exam: Marlies Boterman, Peter van Assche

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1 Bird’s-eye view of the straw-bales built safe haven - De Riethoeve 2 Floorplan and facade - De Bron

Scale model - De Rietvanger

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4 Visual impression of a tree nest – De Dennenappel 5,6 Visual impression of an earth nest

– Het Zandbastion 7 Structural 3D cross-section – De Riethoeve 8 Structural cutaway axonometry

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– Het Zandbastion 9 Visual impression of a reed nest – De Rietvanger

10 Visual impression of the bathhouse – De Bron 11 Visual impression of a sod nest - De kloof van Zoden

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WAKEN OVER DE WATERSCHAT Where water silently drains from the hidden water treasure, the foundation for a resilient water system can be found. The Utrechtse Heuvelrug is a uniquely formed landscape that contains one of the largest freshwater reserves in the Netherlands. Yet little of this hidden water treasure is visible on the surface. Its gradual depletion is barely perceptible, even though this valuable resource is slowly diminishing. Historical interventions in the landscape have made groundwater accessible for human use, but at the same time they have caused the lower boundary of this hidden water reserve to become increasingly exposed. What once began as the first water system designed to supply the country estates and manor houses with ornamental water features has evolved into the driving force behind multiple landscape functions. Today, this water system is essential for drinking water extraction, agriculture, nature conservation and the cultural heritage of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. In light of future climate change, strengthening the resilience of this system has become imperative. Only by doing so can the underground freshwater reserve continue to recharge naturally and further desiccation of the Heuvelrug’s ecosystems be prevented. Waken over de Waterschat (Guarding the Water Treasure) pres-

ents a design proposal for the Utrechtse Heuvelrug in which the ridge tops once again facilitate groundwater recharge, the slopes retain and slow down water and space is restored at the foot of the ridge for groundwater seepage to emerge. At the same time, the characteristic landscape features of the Heuvelrug are preserved, with particular attention given to the area’s rich blue heritage. Residents and visitors are invited to rediscover, experience and embrace both the landscape and its underlying water system. In this way, the valuable water treasure hidden beneath the landscape can regain its natural capacity and be safeguarded for future generations.

Name student: Marith Bos Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 8 July 2026 Graduation committee: Willemijn van

Manen (mentor), Bram Willemse, Jana Crepon Additional members for the exam: Saline Verhoeven, Linde Keip

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The Utrechtse Heuvelrug before human intervention vs. after human intervention Situation in 2025 with existing system:

Landscape under pressure

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Design for the Utrechtse Heuvelrug Situation in 2100 with existing system: Landscape lost

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Situation in 2100 with proposed system: A balanced and climate-resilient landscape View from the heathland across the

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surrounding landscape View of the Botanical Treasure Chambers - Recreational Park

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Design At the Ridge Top View of the Botanical Treasure Chambers - Hidden within the Forest

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TUSSEN HEMEL EN AARDE Our Western society is strongly focused on horizontal growth: a relentless expansion in which everything must become bigger, faster and better. Within this context, Tussen hemel en aarde (Between heaven and earth) emerges as an architectural challenge: designing a home for people struggling with addiction. It addresses both those with a formal addiction diagnosis and those who habitually seek fulfilment outside themselves. In Leven en werken met het ritme van de seizoenen (2008), Jaap Voigt offers an alternative perspective. He argues that periods of withdrawal, consolidation and stillness are always necessary for further development. Continuous horizontal expansion leads to hollowing out, stagnation, implosion and fragmentation. Research shows that reducing addictive urges requires addressing inner emptiness and fostering spiritual healing. This implies a shift from the horizontal axis – focused on the external world – to a revaluation of the vertical axis: a place between heaven and earth. This axis invites stillness, self-inquiry and awareness, forming the foundation for recovery where people reconnect with their deeper selves. From this inner connection, a healthier relationship with the outside world can emerge. According to Tjaden (En nu U: Mindfulness en creativiteit in de ver-

slavingszorg, 2011), clients in a clinic go through five phases of recovery: � pausing and awakening, � grief and compassion, � shifting awareness, � experimenting and moving, and � fulfillment and connection. These phases clearly parallel the seasonal rhythm described by Voigt. By comparing the two, we gain insight into the importance of living in harmony with natural cycles. For this project, three reference projects were analyzed: Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Tomb, Dom Hans van der Laan’s Mariavall Monastery, and Matteo Thun’s Vigilius Mountain Resort. The design principles derived from these, combined with the Axis Mundi (the revaluation of the vertical axis), the seasonal rhythm and building with earth (rammed earth), form the basis for the research question: How can architecture contribute to liberation from addiction and the filling of inner emptiness?

Name student: Babs Hofland Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 28 January 2026

Graduation committee: Milad Pallesh (mentor), Fiona Kydd, Michael Cerrone Additional members for the exam: Dingeman Deijs, Hedwig van der Linden

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1 Between Heaven and Earth 2 The Square symbolizes the earthly, the material, and the human order

3 The horizon -the perspective through which the world can be seen- changes

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4 Late Summer, phase � Reflection and awakening. Late summer is the time to turn inward again

5 Autumn, phase � Grief and compassion. The monastery typology, in which spaces are positioned peripherally around the

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courtyard, revalues the vertical axis and offers protection to the horizontal The circle symbolizes heaven, the infinite,

and the spiritual dimension

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(HI)STORIES OF BEING AT HOME IN THE FOREST Set within the boreal forest of northeastern Canada, on the ancestral lands of First Nation Cree communities, the project proposes the transformation of an abandoned industrial sawmill into a regenerative landscape where timber production, forest ecology research, and artist residencies coexist. It is an invitation to think beyond extractive forestry and to weave Indigenous values of reciprocity, responsibility, and seasonality into architectural discourse. At the heart of the research lies a rupture between two ways of relating to the forest: as home, shaped by the knowledge, practices, and lived experience of the Cree; and as commodity, measured, managed, and extracted through the governmental and commercial structures of contemporary forestry. Between them lies a question of belonging: how might a landscape of production also remain a place of dwelling, reciprocity, and care? Rather than treating these as opposing conditions, the project inhabits the tension between them, seeking to bring home and production back into relation. The proposal takes the form of four buildings – a sawmill, canteen, workshop, and residence – rooted within the remnants of the post-industrial site. Existing slabs, foundations, and industrial structures are reclaimed as the ground for new forms of occupation, while timber produc-

tion for local/regional construction is intertwined with scientific and cultural forms of knowledge and making. Unfolding through the six Cree seasons, the activities of the sawmill and residence expand, contract, overlap, and give way to one another throughout the year. Architecture becomes less a self-contained object than a framework for these shifting relationships: between old and new, production and dwelling, people and other beings, forest and time.

Name student: Maëlle Turgeon Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 25 August 2026 Graduation committee: Machiel Spaan

(mentor), Anna Fink, Philippe Champagne Additional members for the exam: Jarrik Ouburg, Anna Zań

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The abandoned infrastructure of an industrial sawmill destroyed by a fire

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Forest as Home Forest as Commodity

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Winter — pipun — seasonal honorable harvest and continuous-cover forestry practices

Break-up — siikun — opening preparations of the sawmill by the seasonal workers

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ENCOUNTERS OF CARE Making Kin in Arcadian Mountain Forests. Set on Mount Mainalo in Arcadia, a mountainous region of the Peloponnese historically shaped by forestry, pastoralism, craft production, and migration this project investigates how architecture can support the reconstruction of a commons-based mountain economy. Administrative centralisation, economic decline, depopulation and the weakening of local industries have progressively reduced communities’ capacity to manage the mountain. This is most visible in the forest, where limited infrastructure and staffing have led to severe under-management, biomass accumulation and growing wildfire vulnerability. At the same time, parts of this peripheral landscape are being reconsidered as sites for large-scale renewable-energy infrastructure. Rather than treating Mainalo as isolated or depopulated, the project reads it as a landscape of return, shaped by recurring migration, seasonal labour and reconnection. It asks how a network of small-scale productive infrastructures can reconnect communities, forest resources and pastoral production while rebuilding collective stewardship. The project combines situated research with speculative scenarios: historical, territorial, ecological and economic research traces existing systems of labour, resources and

production, while speculative scenarios explore how they might be reorganised. Design becomes a tool for moving between what exists and what could emerge, constructing possible relationships between architecture, governance, resources and collective life. Three interventions, a sawmill, a communal house and a cheese vault, form a distributed productive network across the mountain. Reviving vernacular economies under contemporary conditions, they reorganise labour, reshape resource flows and redefine how living and working coexist: the sawmill supports collective timber processing, the communal house accommodates shared living around seasonal labour, and the cheese vault anchors the slow, climate-dependent process of pastoral production. Together, these structures form a taxonomy of shared systems where architecture, resource management and governance converge. Central to the project is the question of time itself: the design syncs with the slow ecology of forest growth, absorbs the intensity of seasonal use, and holds space for the patience that aging and maturation demand. Tracing the parallel flows of wood, milk, labour and people, architecture becomes both container and cadence, anchoring the return to the land as a collective, sustainable and deeply rooted act of production.

Name student: Zoë Papadopoulos Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 25 August 2026 Graduation committee: Benjamin Groothuijse

(mentor), Laura van Santen, Berte Daan Additional members for the exam: Ana Luisa Moura, Tobias Kumkar

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Mainalo’s territory Section through the cheese vault

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Site model cheese vault Site plan cheese vault Structural axonometry communal house

Site model communal house

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Render new sawmill Site model former and new sawmills Forest distribution

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MATRIX A Machine for Drowning In. Matrix is an immersive extended reality installation that approaches the North Sea as a protagonist: a living entity rather than an abstract landscape. It investigates a relational approach, framing her as a conversation partner we can listen to, engage with, and get to know. The project uses immersive technologies to explore alternative ways of relating to natural environments, integrating landscape architecture, spatial narratives, and research-based fieldwork. Structured as a rite of passage across physical and virtual space, participants encounter the North Sea through a 15-minute interactive VR experience. This experience does not aim to replicate or replace nature; rather, it acts as a lens, filtering the environment through technology, and highlighting specific qualities. The North Sea is not depicted but encountered as a living being. Rather than representing a specific site, Matrix approaches her as an interconnected ecosystem, unfolding through a sequence of landscapes, from dunes and forest to tidal zones and submerged environments. The virtual environment is structured around bodily interaction, allowing participants to navigate through movement and balance. Soft and intentionally ambiguous shapes and textures invite interpretation rather than representation, shifting

attention toward sound, touch, and embodied perception as alternative modes of engagement. Emerging within the context of sea level rise in the Netherlands, Matrix reflects on the cultural and existential implications of living with water. It frames the climate crisis not as a technical problem to be solved, but as a condition that exposes the separation between the human and the nonhuman world, calling for a shift in how we perceive and inhabit our environment. Through immersive and sensory experience, the project explores how states of playfulness and curiosity can cultivate a sense of belonging with the North Sea, positioning this as a necessary condition for rethinking human-nonhuman relations in the context of climate change.

Name student: Anna Hering Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 28 January 2026

Graduation committee: Ricky Rijkenberg (mentor), Kuba Jekiel, Ronald Boer Additional members for the exam: Ira Koers, Pietro Scarpa

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Introduction Tea Ceremony Transition

Immersion

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Immersion Temple Temple Detail

Temple Drawing

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9 Presentation 10 Book 11 Untitled

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GOTLAND’S MEADOWS Scenarios for the survival of a smart system from the past in the landscape of tomorrow. My project focuses on the tree- and shrub-covered hay meadows of Gotland, Sweden, called änge: a smart, pre-fossil agricultural system set within a unique natural environment. These meadows possess significant cultural and natural value and rank among the most biodiverse sites in Sweden. However, they no longer serve a purpose in today’s land use, placing their existence at risk. I set myself the assignment to design different scenarios for the future use of these meadows. Solsänget is part of Bosärve Lövskog nature reserve and traditionally maintained by its owners. Other parts of the nature reserve are maintained by the province as natural forest. The natural values of Solsänget won’t sustain in the future if maintained as nature. Its biodiversity relies on care. A landscape lab is developed for education and research on the semi-open deciduous landscape. The lab will be an interplay of open and planted structures as a patch in a larger mosaic landscape. Kruse gård lies in the agricultural landscape south of Hemse. With poor soils and a low soil depth, it’s a challenge to produce food in a changing climate. The principles of the meadow can be beneficial for growing crops. The meadow was an early form of agroforestry! Multiple forms

of hedges will create microclimates. The connected structures bring the landscape down to a human scale. In the suburban areas of Visby, the former meadows have a function as a forested cycle network. In these forests substantial soil depth is present to retain water. On top of their systemic value, the meadows are also beautiful places and spaces. Gråbo forest will be transformed into (bio) diverse community gardens where one can connect with their environment and each other.

Name student: Bregt Balk Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 27 August 2026 Graduation committee: Mirjam Koevoet

(mentor), Léa Soret, Jean-François Gauthier Additional members for the exam: Berdie Olthof, Philippe Allignet

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Solsänget September 2025 The meadows were a pre-fossil agricultural system and provided winter feed for the animals

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The challenges in today’s landscape are related to the disappearance of the semi-open landscape.

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Principle landscape lab Visualisation of the ‘graze lane’ and possible yield Principle agroforestry farm: multiple forms of

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hedges create microclimates Present and future Kruse gård Principle community gardens

Sequence of different spaces and atmospheres

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THE BATTLE OF SEA AND LAND Protecting or Adapting Northeast Scotland’s Coastline. Coastal erosion is no longer an abstract issue. It is visible, tangible and increasingly urgent. Along the coastlines around the world, we try to fix, protect and control the land. But what if fighting erosion is not always the right response? What if design starts by working with natural change instead of against it? In my graduation project, I explore how to design with coastal erosion rather than constantly resisting it. I ask whether long-term and sustainable solutions are possible beyond short-term emergency measures, and where we may need to accept that retreat is unavoidable. The northeast coast of Scotland is the setting for this research. It is a region that receives little attention, yet coastal erosion is becoming more urgent in many places. The project focuses on three bays: Gardenstown, Sandend and the Moray area. Each bay behaves differently. In Gardenstown, erosion happens slowly and mostly on a geological timescale. In Sandend, action is needed now, but with the right measures the damage can remain limited. In the Moray bay, natural processes and human vulnerability come together. Here, coastal and river erosion already have clear effects on people, infrastructure, and the local economy.

For this reason, the Moray bay is the focus of the design. It is a place where safety, liveability and natural processes are closely connected and cannot be separated. The design follows a phased strategy in four steps: 2025, 2057, 2075 and 2100. A mix of hard and soft measures guides the erosion process in a safe and controlled way, without fixing the landscape in place. After 2100, the design shifts to a geological timescale, and human intervention is deliberately reduced. This project shows that designing with erosion requires time, patience and acceptance of change. Not everything can be protected, but not everything needs to be abandoned. In this balance, a new and dynamic coastal landscape can emerge, shaped by nature itself.

Name student: Isabel Huis in ‘t Veld Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 22 January 2026

Graduation committee: Yttje Feddes (mentor), Sjaak Punt, Jelmer Cleveringa Additional members for the exam: Mirjam Koevoet, Charlotte van der Woude

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Coastal erosion + rising sea levels + storm Panic in 2100

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Kingston, summer 2025 Kingston, summer 2057 Kingston, summer 2075

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Kingston, summer 2100 Kingston, winter 2100

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Interventions for 2057 Model

RE PLAY

RE PLAY The following section of the graduation show is based on the necessity to rethink existing heritage - both physical and abstract. Guided by a strong sense of cultural playfulness, the projects are rooted in a context specific approach, and use existing structures as a base line for reinterpretation. Replay responds to an urgency of our time: an urgency to rethink, reinterpret, reimagine, renovate, restore, repair, reuse what came before. Through deep research on multiple spatio-temporal scales, and through evolving political and cultural contexts, the projects cleverly address current day challenges. The spectrum of design attitudes ranges far and wide: from restoring pride in local heritage, to historical & cultural reconnection, revitalisation of scarred landscapes, responding to current housing crises, and revitalising contexts. Players envision several methods to incorporate the practice of spatial reinterpretation with new ideas, needs and techniques. Cultural belonging, reconnection and attachment plays an important role in the design process of the players. Re Play guides us to reimagine what is possible within the structures of the existing.

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WITHIN THE RING An exploration of Amsterdam’s potential to unite its makers, materials, and waste streams into one continuous cycle. Amsterdam has set ambitious goals to reduce its use of raw materials and become a circular city. Yet much of what the city consumes is still produced elsewhere, while the knowledge and infrastructure needed to maintain, repair, and reuse objects have gradually disappeared from everyday urban life. Products arrive without revealing where they come from or how they are made, and leave just as invisibly when they are discarded. The central question guiding the project is: How can the city support the return of repair, reuse, and production to everyday urban life, while making circular material processes visible and accessible to the public? As an urban strategy, the project proposes a network that reconnects Amsterdam’s residents, makers, and material flows. Its main architectural intervention transforms the Amsterdam Food Centre into a restoration campus for bulky furniture. Here, discarded objects are collected, assessed, dismantled, repaired, and returned to use. These processes are not hidden behind an industrial façade, but made visible in architectural identities and accessible so that the public can witness, understand, and participate in the work of restoration.

This is not a nostalgic return to a past defined by manual craft. Instead, it asks how the knowledge and practices lost through the disappearance of urban manufacturing can respond to a contemporary necessity: reducing consumption while preserving the value of the objects and materials already around us.

Name student: Mindy Li Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 27 August 2026 Graduation committee: Bruno Vermeersch

(mentor), Machiel Spaan, Bernardina Borra Additional members for the exam: Freyke Hartemink, Valentina Fantini

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Axonometric drawing, part of the circular campus Axonometric drawing, part of the circular

campus

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Visualisation, Intake/sanitising hall Visualisation, overlooking the centre area of the circular campus from the market

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Visualisation, Material bank inside Visualisation, Up-cycling Hub exhibition space Axonometric drawing, zoom in into the hard

material workshop

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BANGKOK WAKES TO RAIN Enchanting the watermachine. In Bangkok wakes to rain I explore how water, culture and urban transformation intertwine within Bangkok’s amphibious landscapes. The central question guiding my work is whether a city can relearn to live with water. I propose a regenerative framework that slows down the water cycle and draws on traditional ecological knowledge and community practices. Rather than offering a mere strategy for climate resilience, the project reimagines how intimacy with water, heritage and collective futures can be restored. The project originates from the contrast between my mother’s migration to the Netherlands and the Bangkok she left behind. Historical photographs show how deeply amphibious life once shaped the city. Today, many of its remnants survive mostly as tourist decorum, yet I see them as carriers of cultural knowledge embedded in the way landscape architecture, urbanism and architecture choreograph our relations with the environment. My background in water management taught me to think in terms of efficiency, control, and resistance. Through this project, I shift toward understanding water as cultural, relational and spiritual. A defining moment occurred during interviews in Bangkok: while I was researching relationships between residents and the canals, people instead shared the

story of Mae Phra Khanong, a spiritual wetland that remains porous and culturally alive despite modern water strategies. This revealed how deep-rooted communal belief can be stronger than institutional planning.

Name student: Jeffrey van der Sluijs Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 3 November 2025

Graduation committee: Mirte van Laarhoven (mentor), Rens Wijnakker, Lada Hrašk Additional members for the exam: Roel Wolters, Ziega van den Berk

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1 Hydro-cultural panorama across the Thai landscape and through time 2 Flood map of Thailand and water manage-

ment strategies/institutions 3 Diagram of a water-based city transitioning into a land-based city

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4 Urban and landscape layer analysis of Bangkok 5 Conceptual approach

6 Water system intervention of the final wetland 7 Planmap of final wetland

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8 Sections of interventions for living with water 9 Inventory of geo-choreographies

10 Maquette 11 Reinterpretation of Escher’s Three Worlds

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REACTIVATING INDUSTRIAL MEMORY The Corradini Factory Reimagined. Urban peripheries are often described as degraded and static territories, overlooking their capacity for transformation. This project explores San Giovanni a Teduccio, a neighborhood on the eastern periphery of Naples shaped by a strong industrial past and a prolonged phase of decline. Through the investigation of its agricultural origins, industrial heritage, and contemporary residential condition, the project reads abandoned industrial spaces as latent resources rather than residual voids. Focusing on the former Corradini metallurgical complex, a site with roots in Swiss-founded industry and now protected as municipal industrial archaeology, the design process proposes a progressive and inclusive approach to regeneration, where industrial heritage becomes a catalyst for social, spatial, and economic reactivation. The project frames transformation as a gradual process rooted in local identity, adaptability, and the everyday life of the neighborhood. At the core of the project is a material analysis grounded in the volcanic geology of the Campi Flegrei region, treating the building’s material fabric as a direct expression of local history rather than a neutral construction problem. Materials such as tufo giallo napoletano, pozzolana, and basalt were studied for their

chemistry, degradation patterns, and conservation needs, leading to the development of a custom lime-basalt repair mortar tested through physical samples. Posidonia oceanica, a Mediterranean seagrass tied to the region’s coastal ecology, is explored as a natural insulation material, while phytoremediation strategies address soil contamination left behind by the site’s metallurgical past. Reading materials as carriers of place-specific memory, rather than as generic resources, becomes the project’s central design method. Urban analysis extends to the broader Naples East context, including the Pietrarsa Museum and Forte Vigliena, situating Corradini within a wider conversation about how the city’s post-industrial waterfront should evolve. Beyond Naples, the project proposes this materialled, history-embedded approach as a transferable strategy for other industrial cities with rich material heritage, offering a way to treat abandoned industrial buildings elsewhere not through generic reuse models, but through close attention to the specific materials, geology, and history each site carries.

Name student: Nancy Dantese Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 7 July 2026 Graduation committee: Marcel Lok (mentor),

Jessica Hammerlund Bergmann, Silvia Naldini Additional members for the exam: Jarrik Ouburg, Valentina Fantini

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Masterplan Model Model

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A Contemporary Application The proposal reinforces existing walls with a composite of volcanic ash, black volcanic sand, and pozzolana a dark grey-to-black concrete that speaks to both the site’s industrial heritage and the region’s volcanic substrate. The darker aggregates don’t merely pigment; they reflect the material reality of the Neapolitan landscape. This pozzolanic reinforcement offers structural consolidation while establishing continuity with Naples’ ancient building culture and the specific conditions of San Giovanni a Teduccio’s waterfront. It is simultaneously conservative honoring proven local materials and progressive, rejecting modern concrete’s failed promises in favor of long-term durability and environmental responsibility.

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A Contemporary Application Materials

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WOONERF VAN DE TOEKOMST Design-based research into transforming bloemkoolwijken into future-proof neighbourhoods that respond to demographic change. Het woonerf van de toekomst (Neighbourhood of the future) shows how bloemkoolwijken in the Netherlands can be transformed into future-proof neighbourhoods that respond to the current and future composition of Dutch households. The bloemkoolwijk highlighted in this project is De Maten in Apeldoorn, the largest bloemkoolwijk in the Netherlands. Bloemkoolwijken, also known as Woonerfwijken, are 1970s–1980s suburban neighbourhoods with branching street patterns and shared residential streets. More than one million homes are located within these neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Over the past fifty years, much has changed. Now single-person householders or adults live in the single-family homes where before young families lived. This is the case in De Maten, the current housing typologies no longer match the current household composition. This leads to limited residential movement and housing shortages for specific target groups. There is a clear mismatch between the houses in De Maten and its residents. This project builds on the inherent qualities embedded in the original design of the bloemkoolwijk and gives them new meaning to meet

contemporary demands. The hierarchical road structure provides a strong foundation for creating more car-reduced areas. The existing green structure offers opportunities to add green, enhance public space, and improve the sustainability of homes. These interventions also strengthen social safety and create room for the residentials aereas to once again function as a shared, collective living space where residents can meet and interact. Through measures such as housing subdivision and vertical extensions, combined with the addition of new housing at a larger scale aimed for young adults and elderly, the neighbourhood can become more inclusive and adaptable. My design for De Maten demonstrates how a combination of large- and small-scale interventions – using the qualities of the bloemkoolwijk – can prepare this type of neighbourhood for the future.

Name student: Liselot Buurman Discipline: Urbanism Graduation date: 6 January 2026 Graduation committee: Jessica Tjon Atsoi

(mentor), Herman Zonderland, Michelle Provoost Additional members for the exam: Martin Probst, Iruma Rodriguez

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Applying the toolbox at neighborhood level Cross-section of the new shopping center Mismatch in De Maten

Master plan

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Housing association courtyard Family courtyard

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7 Transformation into a single-person housing courtyard 8 Model

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BAZM O BAZAR This graduation project explores how architectural heritage can become relevant to everyday life again. It focuses on Saryazd Fort, a historic fortified structure near Yazd in central Iran. Once a system of storage and protection along the Silk Road, the fort today risks disappearing through neglect and loss of daily presence. The project addresses this problem through two complementary architectural approaches. The first works with the fort’s own logic. My architectural analysis showed that the ground floor is a maze-like system shaped by storage, defense, and climate. I reused this structure by giving the repetitive storage chambers a new role as a bazaar. The same spatial qualities that once protected grain also support trade and everyday economic activity. For the second approach, I studied the daily routines and spatial preferences of Yazd residents, together with Iranian architectural traditions from the Sasanian era onward. From this research, I designed a new passage in front of the fort, inspired by Iranian ways of living. It forms an in-between zone between the city and the fort: a place to walk, pause, talk, gather, and have tea. It allows the fort to become part of daily life, rather than coming alive only three times a year during festivals. The deeper origin of this project is personal. I grew up in Iran in the shadow of the 1979 Islamic Revolu-

tion, where education, culture, and history were shaped by ideological control. Large parts of Iran’s pre-Islamic identity were pushed aside, and curiosity was replaced by obedience. After emigrating, the freedom to question made one thing clear: our identity has long been reshaped by force, and much of it has been made invisible. The aim of this project is to make that invisible layer visible again. To give Saryazd Fort a purpose for its future. At its core, this graduation project is a personal journey and an architectural statement: that Iran’s Pre-Islamic heritage is a living resource that can still shape how we build, live, and belong today.

Name student: Nigora Atta Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 16 December 2025

Graduation committee: Hans van der Heijden (mentor), Milad Pallesh, Yonca Erkan Additional members for the exam: Ira Koers, Dana Behrman

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Forced identity after Islam Non religious herritage vs religious buildings Architectural elements of Iran

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4 Architectural analysis from Sassaninan Era onward 5 Analysis of Saryazd village

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Fort Existing situation Section of Saryazd Fort and Newpassage

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8 Section of Saryazd Fort and Newpassage 9 Visualization of new passage 10 Model of Newpassage

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VERWOUDING A Nemoretum in the Gelderse Vallei. The Dutch Climate Agreement set a 37,000-hectare ambition for new bos. The Landelijke Bossenstrategie and Beleidsagenda 2030 translate it into hectare delivery, ecological targets, and added tree cover. Less clear is what the large-scale return of wooded landscapes might mean for landscape experience – spatially, culturally, and imaginatively – in a country shaped by cultivation, reclamation, and management. The disappearance of woud as an autonomous landscape form has not erased it from Dutch culture. Fairy tales, sagas, place names, and landscape memory retain it as a threshold space of danger and refuge, encounter and transformation. Bos denotes planted or managed woodland; woud denotes self-established woodland shaped by spontaneous growth, ecological succession, and increasing ecological autonomy. Treating new woodland only as bos overlooks its spatial, cultural, and imaginative meaning. Verwouding asks how reforestation might become a transition towards woud. It creates conditions for autonomous woodland, rather than prescribing a finished forest. Francis Hallé’s distinction between managed and primary forest informs verwouding’s 800-year horizon: an ecological timeframe of recovery beyond design’s reach. Recognition, attachment, and ritual form the cul-

tural ground on which verwouding takes root. Through research, the Gelderse Vallei became the setting for this speculative what-if scenario. Nemoretum de Gelderse Vallei gives this emerging woud a cultural beginning. Formed by analogy with an arboretum, the neologism combines the Latin nemus (nemoris) – a grove or wooded place perceived as set apart, sacred, or spiritually charged – with the suffix -etum, denoting a planted place or collection associated with a particular kind of vegetation. It also resonates with the Celtic nemeton, a sacred grove or ritual sanctuary. A Nemoretum evokes woud archetypes through planting, objects, space, and landscape structure. Its nemoreta – the spring, forest edge, glade, tower, and heart of the forest – prefigure the woud, creating places where atmospheres, stories, and rituals may emerge.

Name student: Timo Banning Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 13 May 2026 Graduation committee: Mirjam Koevoet

(mentor), Thijs de Zeeuw, Jean-FrançoisGauthier Additional members for the exam: Berdie Olthof, Remco van der Togt

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1 Nemoreta — the forest edge: entering the woud 2 Nemoreta — the forest edge: from within

the woud

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3 Proposed area for verwouding in the Gelderse Vallei 4 Predicted forest communities after 100

years of succession Nemoreta — the glade

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6 Hydrological restoration as a basis for verwouding 7 Verwouding — mother trees, applied

nucleation and succession Nemoreta — the heart of the forest

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OPERATION PAPAVERVELD Circular architecture in Amsterdam Noord. This graduation project is an architectural exercise in circularity. Circular architecture is a recent term for an old practice: the reuse of building components or materials to construct or repair other buildings. This intervention responds to the currently rapid process of demolition and construction taking place in the Buiksloterham and NDSM areas of Amsterdam Noord. The building materials that are now being demolished could instead be dismantled and harvested. Based on this premise, a catalogue of reused materials has been compiled. This catalogue supports a mixed-use intervention that reconciles uses facing imminent displacement, and that are part of the area’s identity. Through a process that balances a circular catalogue with authorial design, the project puts forward an architectural language that reinterprets themes such as the tensions of post-industrial space, the social function of public space, and circular design as an urgent response to the climate crisis.

Name student: Fernanda Bittencourt Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 29 April 2026

Graduation committee: Ira Koers (mentor), Machiel Spaan, Jos de Krieger Additional members for the exam: Elsbeth Falk, Anna Zán

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1 Context map of housing, green spaces, public art, and mobility 2 Combination of spatial strategies: added

value by removal and balanced interaction of old and new

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Entrance sequence illustrating changing patterns of occupation Interior sequence showing adaptable and

phased occupation

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5 Café design interpreting the industrial hall through circular principles 6 Superimposed historical layers showing the

site’s evolution since the 1930s

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LANDSCHAP VOL BEDRIJVIGHEID How business parks can contribute to a future-proof water system for Brabant. The province of Noord-Brabant faces major challenges in making its water system future-proof. Over time, the system has been designed to drain water away as quickly as possible. This system no longer works due to climate change. The rivers and rainwater supply the province with enough water, but because the system is designed to drain water to the sea as quickly as possible, too little water is given the chance infiltrate and restore the groundwater level. Especially in urban areas, where much of the space has been built on and paved over, there are major opportunities to allow more water to infiltrate the soil. In my plan, I focus on areas that are almost entirely paved: business parks. Noord-Brabant has more than 550 business parks. These areas currently serve primarily as an economic function and contribute little to addressing the challenges of our time. Whilst ambitions for agriculture, residential areas and city centres are constantly being raised, business parks remain overlooked. With my project, I want to inspire others to raise the bar for these areas as well. For my design research, I used Hoogeind in Helmond as a test case. Nearly all the rainwater here enters the sewer system. I explore alternative approaches: how can we make

space within the limited public space to collect rainwater and allow it to infiltrate the sandy soil. This space for water infiltration can also be used during dry periods to replenish the groundwater by allowing water from the canal to flow into the area. The design I created for Hoogeind features a new water and green infrastructure running through the area. This new blue-green infrastructure not only contributes to water infiltration and the restoration of the groundwater level but also adds green to the business park. This not only makes it a more pleasant environment for a walk during the lunch break but also helps to reduce heat stress and improve biodiversity.

Name student: Thyra Bakker Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 30 March 2026

Graduation committee: Remco van der Togt (mentor), Merten Nefs, Kim Kool Additional members for the exam: Sjaak Punt, Ziega van den Berk

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Plan Hoogeind in 2030 Vlierdensedijk, future situation

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3 Havenkop, future situation 4 Side street, future situation 5 By creating space for rainwater, it can

infiltrate into the soil 6 Opportunity for more water infiltration in business parks

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7 Cross-section of current and future situation 8 Cross-section of current and future situation 9 Analyses of Hoogeind

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THE ENCOUNTER Neighbours by nature. In a world where human actions leave traces everywhere, the concept of nature is becoming increasingly complex. In the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activity and natural processes are deeply intertwined, the boundaries between nature and culture are fading. Can we still coexist harmoniously with others? How can we, as landscape architects, respond to this blurring of boundaries? Especially in the Netherlands, where everything has been carefully planned and human influence is present everywhere. Instead of maintaining a strict separation between city and landscape, perhaps we can use these new insights to develop a more symbiotic relationship. For some time now, a lively debate has been taking place about post-war residential neighbourhoods, in light of the housing shortage and the need for sustainability in the Netherlands. Some advocate demolishing these neighbourhoods and constructing new, sustainable ones that meet modern standards. Others argue for renovation and possibly densification, while building on what already exists. The Anthropocene emphasises that our human actions have significant consequences. Can we mitigate or even reverse these effects, so that habitats are not merely lost, but might actually begin to comple-

ment one another? This graduation project explores whether solutions for biodiversity and water management can be integrated into these neighbourhoods, using the adjacent landscape as a foundation. For hidden within many post-war neighbourhoods lies a beautiful underlying structure, a network of green spaces connecting to the surrounding landscape. Yet in much of this greenery, that landscape connection remains barely visible. Welcome to Banne Buiksloot, a residential neighbourhood on the edge of Amsterdam-Noord. Here, the peat meadow landscape and its inhabitants lie just a stone’s throw away, yet little of it can be seen, heard or felt. My graduation project focuses on facilitating that encounter across multiple scales, drawing on the DNA of the neighbourhood itself.

Name student: Lesley Thoen Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 15 September 2025

Graduation committee: Hanneke Kijne (mentor), Roel van Gerwen Additional members for the exam: Mirjam Koevoet, Willemijn van Manen

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Green areas in and around Amsterdam Nature types in and around Amsterdam

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Conceptual masterplan XL Principle axonometric elaboration Two distinct identities of masterplan M

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Principle profiles: courtyard meander Visual

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Masterplan L site plan including plan layers Masterplan M site plan including plan layers

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AMBALEMA’S ART HAVEN Heritage reborn through creativity. Ambalema’s Art Haven proposes a cultural and educational sanctuary for the rural municipality of Ambalema, Colombia, a town shaped by the Magdalena River, a tobacco-driven architectural legacy, and decades of socio-economic decline. The project responds to a central question: How can architecture reactivate local heritage while expanding children’s access to arts education in communities where creative development is often considered a luxury? Using the abandoned 19th-century train station as its point of departure, the design embraces adaptive reuse without physically touching the heritage structure. The station becomes a protective envelope, framing a new interior world while preserving its material and historical identity. This duality between old and new allows the project to honour Ambalema’s traditions, while introducing contemporary spatial tools to support learning and community gathering. At the heart of the proposal is a network of modular bamboo learning pods, flexible in scale and use. These units support instruction, play, individual exploration, and collaborative work. High, softly daylit volumes evoke a sense of monumentality, while lower roofs and intimate galleries reflect the town’s characteristic street patterns. Circulation echoes Ambalema’s vernacular grid, creat-

ing an environment where children navigate space as they navigate their own curiosity. Colour, texture, and materiality are used deliberately: local pigments, patterns and bamboo connect the architecture to the landscape and to the emotional memory of Ambalema. The project’s envelopes, soft fabrics, filtered light, and open-air roofs seek not only to shelter but to trigger sensory engagement, grounding learning in everyday experience. More than a building, Ambalema’s Art Haven is conceived as a cultural catalyst. By providing children with creative tools, welcoming external artists, and re-activating a central public space, the project positions arts education as a driver for longterm social growth. It aims to restore pride in local heritage, create new routines of community life, and demonstrate how architecture in rural contexts can bridge the past and the future, quietly but fundamentally reshaping the possibilities of a place.

Name student: Henry Pulido Garzon Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 10 September 2025

Graduation committee: Wouter Kroeze (mentor), Peter Defesche, Raul Correa Smith Additional members for the exam: Jo Barnett, Jan Richard Kikkert

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Above and aware Collective ground Inner streets

Led by curiosity

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Rooted progress The logic behind The shell and the secret

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Theirs now Under the giant

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HET HOUTBARE LANDSCHAP Having grown up on a pig farm in Belgium, I have witnessed the agricultural landscape change before my eyes: mega-stables and feed crops increasingly dominate the landscape, while valuable landscape elements disappear as a result of intensive livestock farming. Driven by the growing nitrogen crisis and my interest in the future of the rural landscape, I asked myself: What role can I, as a landscape architect, play in the agricultural transition? The Noorderkempen is an extensive, sandy region in northern Belgium and one of the five regions that together form the Kempen. Choosing this region as the basis for my graduation project is not coincidental: I grew up here and have always enjoyed living in the area. At the same time, the region is a nitrogen hotspot strongly associated with intensive livestock farming. In addition to nitrogen deposition, animal welfare is under pressure, while the direct consequences of climate change are making the current economic model increasingly difficult to sustain. The landscape vision focuses on the municipality of Ravels, where I grew up. The municipality was selected because nitrogen is an important issue here and the area is characteristic of the broader sandy landscapes of the Kempen. At the same time, its landscape is characterised by a diversity of landscape types and cul-

tural-historical elements, including religious heritage and ribbon development. The design challenge: a houtbaar perspective for farmers and the landscape. Houtbaar is a Dutch neologism combining hout (wood) with houdbaar (sustainable, viable or able to endure). The aim of the project is to develop a long-term vision based on a landscape framework that offers farmers a new economic model, rooted in the qualities and identity of the landscape. By using the landscape itself as a productive landscape through hedgerows, agroforestry, small-scale woodland expansion and other landscape elements, a framework emerges that can provide farmers with a viable economic model. The concept builds on the diversity and qualities of the different landscape types present in the region. This results in a landscape vision in which new forms of agriculture are introduced for each landscape type. Although each farmer works according to the conditions of their soil, all farmers collaborate through a coupling strategy. Ultimately, a phased development towards 2050 emerges, in which the landscape gradually changes without undermining the livelihoods of farmers. Instead, it works towards a landscape that generates value itself, allowing farmers and society to benefit together from a houtbaar future.

Name student: Thijs Klein Ovink Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 24 August 2026 Graduation committee: Bieke van Hees

(mentor), Remco van der Togt, Merten Nefs Additional members for the exam: Yttje Feddes, Ziega van den Berk

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The abiotic landscape of the Noorderkempen A dystopian image of the Kempen landscape Land reclamation axes’ connecting village

and landscape

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Visualisation of the land reclamation landscape Visualisation of the Kampenlandschap

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VERBORGEN OOGST My graduation project Verborgen oogst (Hidden harvest) originates from the existing condition. Hoeve Caestert bears the traces of centuries within its marl stone, its walls, and the silence of what has been left behind. The history of the site reaches back to the Ice Age and to its earliest known occupation in 57 BC. Multiple historical layers remain legible within the built fabric, yet they are gradually obscured by the building’s state of decay. Here, preservation is not an end in itself, but a prerequisite. The new intervention builds upon what already exists, engaging in dialogue rather than opposition. The site is deeply embedded within its landscape. For centuries, the Sint-Pietersberg has determined how construction took place here: which materials were used, how buildings were oriented, and where they were positioned within the terrain. The design follows this same logic. What emerges above ground is intrinsically connected to what lies beneath: the history of the marl quarries, the underground tunnel network, and the geological substratum that supports the landscape. Architecture and nature, past and present, are not conceived as opposing forces but as complementary counterparts engaged in an ongoing dialogue. The existing farmstead and the new winery speak a shared architectural language, yet each belongs unmistakably to its own time. One re-

inforces the other without resorting to imitation. Concealment is an essential quality of this place. What exists here does not reveal itself immediately. The approach to the farmstead is indirect, the landscape unfolds gradually, and the buildings remain hidden behind walls and trees. This sense of concealment is not incidental but inherent to the character of the site. The design embraces and intensifies this quality. The project is founded upon extensive research, bringing together landscape, urban, and architectural analyses into a coherent design approach. The outcome is conceptual in nature: a convergence of past and present in which the boundaries between what once existed and what might yet emerge are deliberately left open. Material and construction arise directly from the site itself. What is extracted from the ground returns as architecture.

Name student: Dominique van der Heijden Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 6 July 2026 Graduation committee: Rogier van den Brink

(mentor), Inez Tan, Wouter van Elburg Additional members for the exam: Jolijn Valk, Tobias Kumkar

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Model fragment Model fragment Landscape model

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Site model The aging chambers within the existing tunnel network

The tasting room

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Where winemaking begins Entrance to the underground tunnel network

The barrel cellar

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FORGOTTEN FACTORIES A landscape of former brick factories along the IJssel. Forgotten Factories explores the decommissioned brick manufacturing sites along the IJssel river. This includes the former brick factories Fortmond, Scherpenhof, ‘t Haasje, De Vooruitgang, Randerwaard and Hengforden. The project focuses specifically on the site of the former brick factory at Hengforden. The project reinterprets these historical industrial grounds into resilient, flood-safe ecological habitats, combining ecology, landscape identity and history to grant them a new spatial function. Hengforden was selected for further design in part due to a personal connection: The site once belonged to the author’s grandfather. The site has unique spatial challenges: overgrown, inaccessible ruins that convey perceived neglect. To restore accessibility without losing ecological value, the proposal applies subtle interventions termed “cues of care.” Through tiered maintenance regimes – ranging from intensive garden care to minimal or zero intervention – the plan establishes distinct plant communities (thickets, wild grasslands, and mown path borders) that signal active management while enhancing biodiversity.

Hengforden’s industrial artifacts are repurposed into specialized ecological micro-habitats and visitor entry points: RING OVENS: Preserved and enhanced as bat roosting habitats, with select ovens made open and accessible to educate visitors on industrial heritage. DRYING SHEDS: Restored in part to provide nesting shelter for Barn Swallows. CHIMNEYS: Reinterpreted as metal framework markers and high perches for Peregrine Falcons. Unbaked and Baked Brick Stacks: Configured for Stone Martens, Red Mason Bees, and ground-nesting insects. Public access is integrated via a new entrance dock along the river, an elevated path running over the factory for broader site overviews, and two cultivated plant borders situated within former building footprints. Additionally, a designated pattern of dug ditches highlights the river’s dynamic flow, showing how a river is created through time.

Name student: Rogier Hoppenbrouwers Discipline: Landscape Architecture Graduation date: 17 August 2026 Graduation committee: Willemijn van Manen

(mentor), Maike van Stiphout, Johanna van Doorn Additional members for the exam: Jean-François Gauthier, Sjaak Punt

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Site Plan of Hengforden The plan has 4 main layers, maintenance, historical references, infrastructure and

sight lines

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A look through one of the drying sheds from a grass field A view from the factory roof, showing the

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cyclical maintenance on the roof A section of different drying sheds The roof is maintained in a cyclical manner

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throughout the year, creating diversity through maintenance Stacks of reused and unbaked bricks in the

plan provide nesting places for small animals Detail of the drying shed’s wooden framework, sheltering barn swallows and other animals

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BACK TO THE ROOTS A bioregional approach to architecture through landscape, materials and ecology. This graduation project explores how architecture can reconnect with its landscape through the use of local materials, ecology and craftsmanship. It is grounded in the principles of bioregionalism, a framework in which ecological systems – rather than political boundaries – such as soil, water, climate, flora and fauna shape the way we live, build and produce. The research focuses on the bioregion of Bergen op Zoom, where the sandy soils of the Brabantse Wal meet the marine clay landscape of the Oosterschelde. This transition creates a unique landscape with diverse ecosystems, materials and ecological characteristics. The research began with the historical dye plants madder and woad, which reveal how landscape, craftsmanship and culture were once closely intertwined. Fieldwork subsequently identified a third landscape: the marshland that emerged after the construction of the Oesterdam, where salt and freshwater, nature and infrastructure converge. Historical research, fieldwork, expert interviews, and material experiments together formed the basis for three architectural designs, each rooted in a specific landscape. The projects investigate how locally available materials can be reintroduced

into architecture while strengthening the experience of the landscape and revealing its underlying ecological processes. On the steilrand, a viewpoint connects the sandy and clay landscapes while exposing the geological formation of the Brabantse Wal. In the Markiezaatsmeer, an annual reed pavilion creates a temporary lookout that follows the seasonal cycle and provides space for breeding birds. On the Oesterdam, a tidal mill harnesses the energy of the tides to grind oyster shells into material for the restoration of oyster reefs. Together, the designs demonstrate how architecture can emerge from the characteristics, materials, and ecological processes of a place, while actively contributing to its ecological identity. In doing so, they propose a bioregional design practice in which landscape, material and architecture are once again intrinsically connected.

Name student: Jeroen de Rooij Discipline: Architecture Graduation date: 18 May 2026 Graduation committee: Marlies Boterman

(mentor), Ad Kil, Ricky Rijkenberg Additional members for the exam: Jeroen van Mechelen, Dingeman Deijs

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Landscape section of the Oesterdam with the tidal mill Landscape section of the Markiezaats

meer with the reed pavilion Landscape section of the Brabantse Wal with steilrand

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The bioregion of Bergen op Zoom Annual cycle of the Markiezaatsmeer The steilrand viewed from the higher sandy

landscape The steilrand viewed from the lower marine clay landscape

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The reed pavilion, constructed from annually harvested and stacked reed bundles The reed path, where the reed forms a

natural boundary between people and nature 10 The tidal mill with its tidal basin on the Oesterdam

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Colofon Advisory board Madeleine Maaskant David Keuning Janna Bystrykh Anna Gasco Joost Emmerik Curated by Anna Torres Jacopo Grilli Production Sanne Blok Editors Anne Higler Mildred Zomerdijk David Keuning Graphic design Mainstudio (Edwin van Gelder, Max Diemair) Printing Pantheon Drukkers, Velsen-Noord Typeface Plastik regular (Allcaps) Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Waterlooplein 213 1011 PG Amsterdam The Netherlands +31(0)20 531 8218 avb-info@ahk.nl academyofarchitecture.nl © 2026 Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy or any storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions. The Amsterdam Academy of Architecture has endeavoured to trace the copyright holders of all the illustrations. Anyone who claims entitlement to copyright should contact the publisher. ISBN 978-90-832074-6-9

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