Master Thesis
Arkitektskolen Aarhus Flensburg 2022
Supervisor: Urszula Koźmińska
How can we use obsolete port facilities for their economic existence and how can local communities play a leading role in their transformation?
The project area is the Flensburg business port, whose activities will be relocated in the near future and a “Kleine Hafen City” is being developed. By repurposing an old warehouse, the project is a proposal on how to create inclusive and accessible spaces in an urban development area, developed from the local population.
The proposed transformation provides for a place of community-building that links social and productive uses. Thus, a colorful mixture of different uses find space under one roof. Both professional and public workshops, self-build studio spaces, as well as social and cultural areas.
Maritime activities are connected with the urban and economic past of the port with future-oriented municipal uses.
siteplan 1:1500
The overdimensioned concrete structure is largely to be preserved for historical, economic, and ecological reasons. Only the floor panels are selectively removed to create double room heights. The facade is deliberately opened and connects indoor and outdoor areas. This makes the hall more accessible, creates a connection to the harbour promenade and gives the building a new identity.
In addition, the roof is provided with a new roof structure that creates suitable lighting conditions for the various uses.
In order to make the transformation of the place affordable for the actors with limited economic means, the conversion of the warehouse is carried out successively from south to north.
First, the building is prepared for the professional workshop & the recycling lab. The establishment of public workshops and artelier spaces gradually leads to the creation of social/cultural spaces.
A recreation park intertwines the café, promenade, and water access. Activities from the building are literally trans-ported to the outside, with the cut-out slabs from the first-floor being used as a elements in the park.
The warehouse consists of a solid concrete structure. Even if the architectural value is very limited, the design wants to emphasize the existing qualities. The concrete structure of the warehouse is complemented by cores containing the main uses, and the negative spaces between the cores are flexible. They function both as motion surfaces and surfaces that can be activated by expanding the core functions.
Arkitektskolen Aarhus
Copenhagen 2021
Supervisor: Urszula Koźmińska
Food activist Alice Waters argues that through unsustainable and unethical agriculture and food production, we have lost a fundamental understanding of the origin of our food and thus also the connection to nature. It is crucial to examine the food we consume and gain a deeper understanding of its origin. (Connectedness: an incomplete encyclopedia of anthropocene, 2020)
The project “Hjskole for urban agriculture” is a proposal on how to break the distinction between the production and consumption of food and how to bring the urban community closer to the cultivation of food. It combines the productive and educational elements of urban gardening with the possibilities to create social interactions through collaborative work.
The design aims to revitalize and green an abandoned industrial area in Copenhagen, facilitating access and activating it. Through community uses, the place invites neighbors from the lively and diverse district of Amagerbro, as well as creatives and start-ups to participate and shape the place.
section aa (summer) 1:250
section aa (winter) 1:250
The project consists of two elements: the garden and the building. The garden is located on Prags-Boulevard, the longest green space in Copenhagen.
The traffic is diverted and the roundabout, which cuts through the green strip, is converted into a public square.
The garden is divided into social and productive areas, and it grows into the building, which has a greenhouse at its central space. In addition to the horticultural areas, the greenhouse also features traffic and teaching areas, as well as meeting spaces for social interactions. The greenhouse is south-facing to let in as much sunlight as possible.
On the north side it is surrounded by residential units for students and teachers, which are also accessible through the greenhouse.
The ground floor can be opened to the public and contains a restaurant, a communal kitchen, a garden, work areas and flexible spaces that can be activated in different ways.
8th semester
Arkitektskolen Aarhus
Aarhus | 2021
Supervisor: Naime Esra Akin
Public space has the potential to bring people from different social and cultural groups together. But how can we design the space to utilize this potential?
The project deals with this question and is located in a park area that connects the social housing estate “Bispehaven” with the villa district “Klokkerparken”.
The idea is to locate the headquarters of MUNDU, an association for global education in the park and set public classrooms along the park axis. The pavilions can be activated for teaching and function in the “inactive” state as an informal meeting place for the adjacent neighborhood. Depending on the location and function, the pavilions are shaped differently and equipped with special features. The connecting element of all pavilions is a space-frame roof structure, which enables a flexible and open floor plan and thus unlimited accessibility.
The heart is the “Global Plaza” a place for events and performances. Adjacent to “Global Plaza” is the main building of Mundu with a heated classroom and administration.
The project was developed in close cooperation with the NGO “MUNDU”. In addition to a detailed interview, a workshop was developed and carried out for the design. The workshop was used to determine needs and possible activities and what spatial demands are attached to them.
Bachelor Thesis
Arkitektskolen Aarhus
Cuba | 2019
Supervisor: Urszula Koźmińska
The Cuban town of Camilo Cienfuegos (Hershey) was created for the workers of an American sugar mill of the last century. Since the closure of the mill in 2002, people have been struggling with poverty, unemployment and prospects. This is due to a lack of alternative job opportunities and essential urban facilities.
The design, a “exchange market”, was developed with the approach of understanding the problems as potential. The interior of old ruins of a hotel gets a new use as a marketplace and community center.
From the outside, new structures are established that serve as public workshops on the ground floor of the market in the center of the building. Local residents can produce goods or offer services themselves and then offer them on the market for exchange. The market place is furnished with large umbrellas that provide shade and collect rain.
The project is based on dialogues with local residents and analyses of the Cuban way of renovating buildings. In the context of a disintegrated Americanized city, the draft is an attempt to create liberal working conditions in one of the last socialist systems.
Studio Kuur Erlangen | 2022
In addition to research and science, the city of Erlangen is known as the “Siemens City”. By moving the company to a new campus, Erlangen is confronted with vacancy of many centrally located office complexes.
The so-called “banana” is one of them. The task of the competition was to design a Quatier that connects to existing buildings and at the same time forms a prelude to the “axis of science”.
The challenge was above all to create a connection to the idiosyncratic banana and at the same time to include the reference points of the city. To ensure this, the designed block edge is provided with projections, which simultaneously provide for variation and address formation.
To the west, the structure bends and creates a space situation towards the raspberry palace and at the same time cleanly adjoins the banana. The grid facade has a simple appearance that is back opposite the raspberry palace. Features are set by facade greenery, blinds and recessed loggias.
The design is characterized by climate-friendly aspects, such as the use of environmentally friendly materials, a mobility concept that completely dispenses with a parking garage and the provision of urban wilderness in the existing lowlands.
Competition finalist site plan
Through the encounter of nature‘s unruly structures, expressed through the rawness of wool, and the staging of natural events and contextual phenomena, alongside the strict grid of construction, Framing Softly aims to delineate the relationship between the cultivated and the natural. Industrial elements such as a steel grid and timber beams are enveloped by the wool‘s elongated tendrils. The wool expands and compresses in varying densities, shielding and closing off some areas while filtering in others.
Openings in ceilings and decks create small interventions with light and ambiance, sharpening the experience of place and space. The exhibited works stand alongside spatial negotiations and are thus interpreted within the context of contemporary discussions. Rainwater, light and organic materials are present within the pavilion as we see and feel them, awakening the awareness that should shape the neo nordic. Human and place are felted together with the artwork, opening up for reflection within soft confines.
Glücksburg
Germany | 2024
Client: Andreas Schlatterer
With the function as a retirement home celebrates harmony with nature and adaptable living spaces tailored to the diverse daily routines of the client. Despite of being with 80m2 larger than a tiny house, the project optimizes space usage to foster an open and flexible environment. The first floor appears to float within the structure, creating a spacious double-height area on the southeast facade.
Service rooms and the staircase are strategically positioned on the northwest side. Elevated on point foundations due to a significant slope, the entrance from the street is via a bridge to the first floor, offering picturesque views of the garden to the south and east.
The CO2 footprint is minimized through a wood frame construction with a 2 on 1 cladding, reflecting sustainability principles.
MPS+S Architectura
Montecrestese
Italy | 2023
relearning traditional building methods as a sustainable practice
During a recidency in Montecrestese, a rural area in the alps in the north of Italy, I was involved in projects that aimed to refocus one the disappearing heritage of local construction technology as modern houses replace traditional ones and which fall into ruins and are in risk to get forgotten. The relearning of ancient practices partly took place on the construction side working with drystone walls as loadbearing facades, but also landscapewalls.
By being slower and much more demanding of skills the traditional constructions have a very efficient use of local ressources, that conceives a beautiful and balanced relation between the nature and the building environemnt.
Another aspect of the restaurantion work was to create a documentation of the existing structures.
To adapt the old constructions to todays demands of habitation each project had to be designed with an individual floorplan solution that fit to the needs of the client.
The great challenge consisted in to value the tradtional placement of elements and simultaneously use them with a new purpose.
In the summer of 2022, Galleri Flyvsk gave artists and other project creators a new-thinking platform to exhibit their works in the city of Flensburg.
Galerie Flyvsk is not an ordinary White Cube gallery, but a space that deforms and moves, that connects & includes, that discovers places, enlivens and makes them part of the project.
The four elements of the gallery have already transformed squares, fallow parking lots & other public urban spaces into temporary galleries. As a result, the unused urban space was temporarily activated and its potential demonstrated. Due to the many different variations, the gallery can adapt to any individual room and the many different uses.
1) SONGS BY THE CREEK
By Benjamin Pompe & Martyna Pekala2) MARÉ / FLUT
By Gabriela da Cunha3) SACRED PLACES
By Ana Kostova4)EXTREME WELLNESS By Frida Retz and Didde Borup Larsen
5) DRÔLE / LUCUBRATIONES By Mel Sönnichsen & Rylskov
6) ZUKUNFT GEMEINSAM GESTALTEN
Stadtentwicklungs Workshop by PrePlan
Summer & self-construction were the narratives for the entrance pavilion of Grobunds Byggefestival 2023. The generous gate welcomes the visitors with a self-built aesthetic that represents the identity of the festival.
The shape of the construction is highly defined by the qualities of the leftover wood-cladding, wich was the avalable material. The 20 mm thin woodboards are gaining more strengh by beeing screwed together into shifting frames, which creates sunshaped arcs. The construction was executed with the help international volunteers.
