Railway station projects in European cities, and namely the ones related to HST, are embracing greater areas than the building itself. They are becoming urban (re)developments, anchored on the potentials of their coincidence with mobility infrastructure. This wider approach is redefining what used to be just a station in the city. This research aims to explore this phenomenon and its implications on the space of station areas.

Because these projects bring together many actors and different disciplines with highly complex planning procedures, they present a lot of opportunities but also many challenges. The interdisciplinary character of these processes could contribute to the development of better (sustainable) spaces. However, they seem instead to be relegating architecture to a marginal role in the field of spatial design, where it should be the main knowledge provider.

Station area (re)developments have already been studied from different perspectives. As a result, there is available knowledge on the subject, developed by other sciences. However, the information is dispersed throughout various fields. As a result, this architectural study incorporates social, economic and environmental dimensions on an integral spatial approach to the problem.


 

In Hidden Stories, the horizontal layer of our contemporary public spaces is explored through the study of pavements. This written piece ‘looks down’: calling attention to the arguably unnoticed role played by the concrete ground underneath us, in opening up potential processes of place-making and -knowing. By considering the pavement as more than just a built-form, the text presents it as an artefact and cultural construct, literally uncovering how its processes of making are intertwined with its related processes of knowing (i.e. construction of meaning, “placeness” and identity).

The enquiry “on groundscapes and pavements” entails two new positions: firstly, the role of the ground and paving design practices within the dynamic crossings among street furniture design, landscape design, public art, architecture and urban studies; and secondly, the possibility of considering ‘pavements’ as vehicles for conveying meaning and/or acting as prompts to construct meaning, thus as embodiments of “placeness” through the exploration of their visual, spatial and perceptual qualities.

By means of a brief historical account of the site-specific traditional mosaic systems of the Portuguese sidewalks among a few others, particular paving design schemes will be examined as social and urban constructs, culturally weaved within conceptions of national identity, pictorial language and publicness. This journey through several art, architectural and urban paving projects will take us in the end to a possible collection of themes (for example, craft, scale, topography, narrative, to mention a few), in which to construct a theoretical framework for the study of urban public groundscapes.

This thesis concentrates on the formation of urban fragments in areas that today are consolidated into compact cities, and more specifically on the interventions carried out in relation to the creation of public space associated with public housing projects in Galicia (Spain). The theme of the study is to understand and analyze how these urban spaces fit in spatial and morphological terms, and the systems that have been generated in the formation of public space. 

It will analyze how the creation of new fragments of the city affect the continuity of an urban project, based on such factors as the existence of a previous history in a territory subject to transformation, and the city’s position at the beginning of the twentieth century in a rural area on the outskirts of the city center, which was subsequently consolidated into neighborhoods. The research is aimed at comprehending both the organization of a structure of public spaces for the global intervention area, and the three-dimensional organization of the units in the urban design project. 

The question of fitting housing into urban spaces means that the study must focus on the less exceptional spaces, those that bear most similarity to the logics of formation behind the compact city.

This research focuses on the façade of the collective residential building in the Dutch city. The high complexity of functions of the façade makes it a very sensitive element of the house. The façade is the dwelling’s functional skin, a boundary between inside and outside, as well as the representational element, the “face” of the residence. Here, the resident can react between a minimum and a maximum of contact with the world around the dwelling. The interrelation between the building façade as a representational element and as a filter between outside and inside will be researched within the urban context.

The aim of this research is to show the development of the representational and the filtering functions of the façade in Dutch residential buildings of the last century in relation to society and the various attitudes. The development will be set in an international perspective. Tendencies in design and ideas about the meaning of the façade will be traced as well as the relation between the floor plans of the residential building and the façade. The intention is to obtain more insight into the various meanings of the residential façade, while focusing on aspects of use-value and aesthetics. The research should develop a method to analyze the façade of the collective dwelling in a more profound way than has thus far been done.

This research departs from the hypothesis that while public interiors of hospitals might be conceptually simple, they are in reality complex constructions interwoven with multiple meanings and possible interpretations. The public interiors of hospitals are not merely concerned with healing and treatment, but contain amongst others political issues, economical interests, social and cultural values and psychological dramas, which directly or indirectly inform the architectural design of the interior.

The nature of the investigation will be descriptive and analytical and aims at a historical and socio-cultural contextualization of the public interior of a Danish hospital designed and built between 1963 and 1975. It is an object-based examination of how concepts and ideas have informed the architectural means by which the hospital environment was constructed. The objective of the research is to investigate and discuss the relation between these concepts and ideas and the built environment in their historical development and to compare this with the current healthcare situation.

The study is a combination of interpretative historical analysis and case study analysis (archival studies, formal analysis and oral history).

 “The Added Value” investigates the relation between architecture and everyday work processes in hospitals. Added value is measured from the perspective of the patient, medical results and client experience. The main focus is how to translate the strategy into the floor plan and physical environment of the hospital and how this affects value. The privatization of healthcare forces hospitals to increase quality, while decreasing costs. Therefore, the role of architecture as an instrument to add value by innovating work processes is of increasing significance.

The importance of attracting clients with high-quality healthcare is growing. Quality is the most important factor for hospitals to excel in and it needs to be transparent for clients to be enabled to make educated choices. Patients have a special position in hospital care, because they are the consumer, part of the production process and the end product. Therefore, they experience and judge quality from a number of entirely different perspectives. For this reason, optimizing medical results by implementing superior logistical systems and improving the client experience are essential for hospitals to win the struggle for clients. Not only is architecture important in the esthetical and spatial aspects of a structure, but also for the infrastructure and work processes inside the building. When all these elements of the architectural composition are integrated into the operational management of hospitals, it will be apparent that architecture indeed plays a role in adding value.

The main objectives of this study are: to test the advantages and disadvantages of housing policy and building regulation on urban design; to document their effect on the home environment; to understand and describe the aspects which motivate people to adopt and refine the internal and external elements of their home environment according to urban design; and to propose a conceptual model of urban space for an urban Saudi neighborhood of the future.

It is important to provide the designers with the ability to understand the urban design with its continued socio-cultural values in order to respect them and create a high-quality sustainable environment in their future design.

This dissertation addresses the relationship between architecture and territory, by both investigating theoretical sources and analyzing projects. When the criticism of modernism gradually took center stage in the post-war architectural debate, something we could call ‘the problem of the whole’ became collateral damage of the fate suffered by modernism: the large dimension of the territory as an inherently architectural project is more often than not dismissed as anachronistic dogma. Instead the territory has become the proverbial multitude of which the ever-increasing complexity simply needs to be described, involving further specialization of the division of labor among the various design disciplines. Although generally a planning and landscape concern, this research investigates the possibility of the territory not simply as a largely abandoned modernist concept, but as an inherent part of a specific architectural discourse that emerged after World War II. The interrogation towards an architectural definition of territory was raised explicitly in the 1960s not so much during as immediately after the Città-Territorio/ nuova dimensione debate in Italy, with the publication of Vittorio Gregotti’s Il Territorio dell’architettura in 1966, and in the issue “La Forma del Territorio” of Edilizia Moderna (1965). Starting from that particular moment in architecture culture, the legitimacy of looking at territory through an architectural lens is questioned both in its historical context and as a horizon for practice.

This study investigates the parallel themes in the architectural
research of the Italian group of architects Tendenza and the
architectural studies conducted by students and staff of the
Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology.
The Dutch development of architectural discourse on the city is
presented in the context of the urbanization process in the Delta
Metropolis (Randstad Holland).

The meaning of the most important concepts of Neorationalism
in architecture is investigated and compared with Modernism in
the 1920s and the 1930s and with (Mega) Structuralism in the
1960s. These concepts include autonomous architecture, urban
architecture, morphology of the city and typology of buildings.

Founded on the imperative to understand, evaluate and consciously decide about the use of digital media in architecture, this research not only analyzes and critically assesses computer-based systems in architecture, but also proposes evaluation and classification of digitally driven architecture through procedural and object-oriented studies. Furthermore, it introduces methodologies of digital design, which incorporate intelligent computer-based systems proposing development of prototypical tools to support the design process.

This research attempts to answer questions regarding how aspects of intelligence are incorporated into design systems and how these influence the design process and the design itself.  Generative Design, for instance, has been the focus of current design research and practice, largely due to the phenomenon of emergence explored within self-organizing systems, generative grammars and evolutionary techniques. In this context, system-embedded intelligence has often been reduced to the mechanics of working with these systems.

This research, in response, not only critically reveals what these techniques offer architectural design, but also addresses challenges in their application and development. Its relevance as reference for developing an understanding for computer-based systems in relation to their incorporated aspects of intelligence meanwhile has been confirmed in projects implemented internationally. Furthermore, intelligent software-prototypes developed within this research have been tested in practice and in design studios and will be further developed in prospective design and research projects undertaken at TU Delft.

Methodologically seen, observations, assumptions and theories have been verified in practical experiments implemented in international workshops; whereas, software-prototypes have mostly been developed and tested at TU Delft.

full dissertation available

After working in Le Corbusier’s office, where they both arrived in 1948, the respective work of architects Rogelio Salmona and Shadrach Woods seems to have taken divergent paths. Nonetheless, when seen from a perspective other than the conventional, historic approach, in which the latter is regarded as a very active member of Team 10, and the former is generally grouped with fellow Latin American colleagues under a label of otherness, their buildings seem to coincide in important aspects.

Based on Stanford Anderson’s essay, entitled “Architectural Design as a Series of Research Programs,” this dissertation aims to stress the existence of underlying procedures and inquiries common to the architecture of Salmona and Woods.

The focus on the architectural project and its creative process as essential sources of information should allow for the construction of relations between Salmona’s and Woods’ work that seem to dilute the commonplace categories of center and periphery in a Post-War cultural scenario, and instead bring interesting and useful strategies and operations, common to the work of these and several other architects working in a post CIAM environment, to the fore.

This dissertation addresses the misconstrued reading of Georges Bataille’s work done within the field of architectural criticism and theory, which tends to set aside the fundamental “broken” totality of Bataille’s oeuvre as well as to narrowly interpret it as a mere critique of architectural form. As a consequence, Bataille’s work is presented either as the negation of all form of architecture or as the critique of “classical” architectural forms.

In contrast to this reading, this dissertation argues that Bataille’s oeuvre forms a “whole” which should be considered in its entirety in order to address its relevance to architectural criticism and theory. Subsequently, it investigates Bataille’s critique of architecture within the 'context' of his 'paradoxical philosophy' or dualist thought. Bataille’s texts on architecture, then, appear as a discussion of the political, social and economic function of architecture.  This research will demonstrate that for Bataille, architecture is a means of “exchange” between what he sketches as the heterogeneous and homogeneous realms. As argued in this study, architecture is, for Bataille, a form of expenditure either real or symbolic, and either productive or in pure loss, which functions according to two different modes. One is imperative - it serves the hegemony of the “high” heterogeneous elements while it structures and preserves the homogeneous realm and its order. The other mode is “impure” - it allows a disturbing leakage of the “low” heterogeneous elements back into the profane.

This research focuses on the creative use of computers in architectural practices in order to assess to what degree digital techniques have influenced the formal language of architecture in the 1990-2000 time span. The thesis sets out to show whether the implementation of computers in design was set off or initiated by ideas and concepts that can be looked upon as fundamental to digital design and if so, what they entail. Digital-design processes developed during that era are listed, analyzed and evaluated with regard to the experimentation and exploration of the creative potential of existing software programs.

The subject matter of curved-surface geometry raises the question: why is this type of formal expression so prominent in digitally designed projects?  The study of curved-surface geometry not only looks into the theoretical ‘why’ and the practical ‘how’ of this phenomenon, but also into which digital techniques and software might have strengthened this formal outcome. Its implementation is also related to the physical reality, by way of sound and acoustic reflection, on which curvature has a direct influence and to the way the link between both sound and acoustics, and curved surfaces can be made instrumental to digital-design processes.

This research project focuses on the functional and morphological development of the nine most important historic cities in the Randstad area. These cities were founded in the 13th and 14th centuries and have since had, in varying degress prominent positions within the Randstad-Holland. In this research the Randstad is defined as a group of cities that are mutually related by their respective water infrastructures and sand ridges. This infrastructure was initially formed by nature; but in the late middle ages they were further developed by land reclamations, drainage and canals; in the sixteenth century by the market-boats; in the seventeenth century with the advent of ship-canals; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the introduction of railways and motorways as well as additional canals. This infrastructure became the so-called traffic motor between the cities. The topography of the cities is determined by this heavily interwoven network of watercourses.

The basis of this comparative-historical research into the topography of the city is formed by the analysis of urban maps, which will be supplemented by secondary literature. The focus will be on the transition of the inner cities’ main points.  The question is whether there is a relation between the transitions and the Randstad-Holland. A relation is presumed between the transformation of the infrastructure and the exchange of goods and transition in the forms of the cities.

This research project presents a view on the reading of places and proposes a re-reading of design methods. It discusses how literary techniques offer valuable ways to become aware of how people use, experience, imagine and remember places. The researcher argues that Lefebvre’s concept of lived space, experienced and lived through by characters, evoking memories and imaginations, is the space that we encounter in the evocative descriptions of places and spaces by literary writers. The use of literary instruments to understand and engage spatial qualities in architecture provides a means for various disciplines to work together.

Description focuses on a reading of architectural and urban experience, and theorizes around Lefebvre’s notion of lived experience and the discourse of phenomenology, discussing works of Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard. Transcription brings into play the social dimension of architecture, and connects the role of activities, movements and events in the experience of architecture to the literary concept of the narrative. Here, De Certeau, Lefebvre and Ricoeur offer the key theoretical positions. Prescription highlights the position of the architect designing for an unknown future. A connection is made to surrealist practices in literature. The literary concept of chronotope, as introduced by Bakhtin, serves as a starting point for a theoretical exploration on the “time-places” that architects construct through imagination.

This research discusses “Mapping” as a specific technique for fabricating small-scale readings of urban conditions and as an operative tool for the methodological development of an architectural design intervention. This relationship is a result of at least two important features that constitute the overlap between the map(ping) and the design: namely that both produce a spatial ordering system and that both are developed by a highly specific and personal notation technique. Rather than attempting to develop an all-encompassing method of analysis, mapping takes the fragmentary nature of contemporary knowledge about the city as a starting point. The act of mapping is considered a spatial ordering of the territory within a particular framework, a ‘measuring of space’ through the act of collecting information.

The central research question is how cartographic means and techniques enable architects to chart characteristics of space and how mapping potentially informs architectural design. The proposed chapters will discuss (1) the Map as a Form of Spatial Representation [keyword: notating]; (2) the Map as a Form of Knowledge [keyword: ordering]; (3) the Map as a Form of Architectural Design Practice [keyword: mapping/spacing]; and (4) the Map as a Form of ‘Space and Time Constructions’ [keyword: framing].

The very large, extensive interior is a distinct typology, used in designs of buildings for a mass public. Its manifestations, in shopping malls and casinos, airports, museums and even urban centers, are presented as worlds in themselves, aspiring to the condition of environments. Extensive large pedestrian networks, “rich” contents, porous boundaries and seamless connections to local infrastructures are emblematic of the type, which achieves its objective (the processing of its users to various ends) at the expense of everything exterior to it, offering unhindered, “free” movement, in sheltered, tempered and artificial environments.

The intention of this research is to link the development of the typology with ideological intentions toward place, inscribed in legislation and in architectural projections for spaces for the mass public. Characteristically, the type is deployed in order to condition the behavior of its users. It projects, however, an atmosphere of freedom. It has proliferated globally, and exercises a profound effect on the treatment of the public interior within contemporary architectural production. Furthermore, the type’s topological characteristics attract the ongoing attentions of avant-garde architects, whose rhetoric dissociates its topological attributes from its latent ideology.

The study consists of an examination of the typology itself; an exposition of its ideological foundations; and demonstrations of its influence upon contemporary architectural discourse and production.

This research initiative addressed the issue of Design in relation to Virtual Context. Central to this study are the innovative potentials and instrumental opportunities of computer-based media techniques, capable of generating interactive models and changing perspectives for the benefit of urban and architectural design. The ambition was not only to make a contribution to the existing body of knowledge concerning digital technologies and their applications, but also to explore theoretical conditions, which might help define and stimulate further study.

From the outset, the focus was on furthering the opportunities for computer based representation media in creative design. On the basis of a series of explorative studies the subject of this research was targeted: the issue of Design in Context, or more specifically: Design(ing) in a Virtual Context.

During the process there was a marked shift in the conception of the subject from – more or less immersive – VR technologies in the direction of approaches, which might be expected to become readily available in practice and education and could be effective in actual design processes. This insight also brought about a shift in emphasis from realism per se towards creating a sense of “situatedness.”

Full dissertation available

The research object is to define the concept of “type” by integrating a double perspective in theory and practice: the foundation of an architectural language and the relation between Architecture and the City, according to space and time.

The main goal is to demonstrate that the concept of “type” expresses the specific perspective through which reality has been differently represented and investigated. The research also demonstrates that the decreasing effectiveness of the “typological discourse” during the last two decades is due to a lack of significant interest paid to spatial issues, having been sacrificed to time-span implosion, and to the relation between architecture and the city, the two becoming ever more independent research fields.

This research also stresses the importance of the architectural language and its autonomy. Nevertheless, to exploit its full potential, architecture needs a context to legitimize itself, the city morphology being that frame.

To investigate the changing definition of “type,” according to different theoretical and practical positions, requires a thematic method. Therefore, specific key words and themes have been selected: the Spatial Syntax of Architecture, its Function and relation within the Urban Context, the Meaning addressed to Architecture by the Society and the expressive quality of its Materialization.
 
Even though a continuous cross-reference has to be made between past and present, focus from the Enlightenment onward deserves preference in order to forecast new approaches.

The role of the architectural type on criticism and design is expected to be the main outcome of the research program. In the background, the research intends to demonstrate the capacity of the architectural types to describe and transmit the identity of the social subjects, being the living memory of their changing expectations.


 

This interdisciplinary research-driven design initiative focuses upon developing a real-time interactive architectural (spatial and informational) solution for contemporary corporate offices. Rather than creating conventional inert structural shells, which typically neglect the appropriation of their ambient, spatial and informational compositions to rightfully address the dynamic nature of tasks being performed within them, the development of a meta-system, or in other words creating a “soft” computationally enriched, open-systemic framework (informational) which interfaces with the “hard,” material component and the users of the corporate space formulates the core agenda of the research work. This soft space/meta system serves as a platform for providing the users with a democratic framework, within which they can manifest their own programmatic (activity-oriented) combinations in order to create self-designed spatial alternatives. The otherwise static/inert, hard architectural counterpart, enhanced with contemporary technology thus becomes a physical interface prone to real-time spatial/structural and ambient augmentation to optimally serve its users.

A synergistic merger of the expertise offered through the fields of Rule-based computation, Modular programming and Swarm behavior for data processing, structuring/re-structuring, information storage and retrieval, Control systems for developing sensing, actuating properties and for implementing space-allocation sequences (Java-based) and Kinetic systems for developing a dynamic, skeletal framework, is henceforth adopted as a combinatorial approach towards achieving intelligent structural control of the architectural body and developing a real-time updating database, which will be useful for maintaining and monitoring the body. A fully customizable, performance-driven, interactive architectural solution is thus envisioned.

 full dissertation available

The aim of Absolute Architecture is to sharpen Architecture’s
formal stream of consciousness as a precondition for engagement
with the city. The notion of Architecture as form-object
represents the critical and polemic fulcrum of this hypothesis of
research. There is no escape from form (and today Architecture
is usually a gratuitous formalism in spite of all functional and
sociological arguments), thus, in order to consciously perform
Architecture, the awareness of its formal expression is crucial.
The absoluteness of architecture is in the literality of formal
expression: while clearly referring to its social, political and
economic milieu, it also offers its own absolute formal syntax as a
primary means for projecting a different urban scenario.

The thesis tests this general hypothesis, by setting forth a series
of project and theoretical propositions that focus on the
architectural object as primary and absolute constituency of the
built urban environment. From Pope Sixtus V Rome Renovatio
Urbis to Ungers Berlin Archipelago, from Rossi’s notion of Urban
Artifact to Robert Smithson’s notion of New Monuments, from
Dan Graham’s City as Museum to Mies’ Toronto Dominion Centre,
these projects have theorized the unity between Urbanism and
Architecture, and thus establishing that the city can be built through architecture’sformal conventions. The fact that design can only be implemented
through a punctual intervention within the urban environment
can be accepted. Thus, the conceptual framework in which these projects
have been formulated, is the idea of the Archipelago city: a discrete
concentration of specific objects which are not totalizing the urban fabric
into one urban narrative but are evoking the meaning of the city
through a constellation of architectural singularities.

Architectural design today can be characterized as the production of a codification system that is centered on the notion of apparatus. The codification system refers to a differentiation regime of not only clearly managing the desirable and the undesirable, but also implementing an interface that represents the value of a product or a situation. The discipline’s relationship to contemporary culture and the logic of technological advances is embodied in the code-apparatus combination. This codification system and its apparatus necessarily create a new class of highly specialized knowledge and skills and create the regime of new class of specialist-experts. This new apparatus-centric regime has resulted in a fundamental disciplinary shift toward a new codification system of composition and production in architecture. Therefore, the notion of codification and its apparatus also points to wider, more pervasive changes in the composition and making of architecture than the reflexive models of historical conventions would suggest. The core of this research is to investigate and assess the apparatus-centric process in architecture and eventually to draw propositions on how episteme and techné could be viewed in the context of today’s code-apparatus regime.

This research aims not only to recover the lost relation between infrastructure and territory, but mostly to find design tools and methods for reducing the destructive power that these urban constituents, especially road systems, are able to present when conceived as alienated elements, detached from the environment.  By employing different theoretical positions that are in ‘civilized collision’ the study offers a complex and a dynamic description of the road networks seen as ‘joined public elements’ within the territory.

The research’s hypothesis on Infrastructural Architecture rises as a critical idea treating the contemporary, fragmented territory. It is reconsidering the basic elements related to its characterization: the openness (conditions related to their fruition, unveiling new opportunities, installing new spatial policies), the sensuous experience (welding dimension, connecting the static and dynamic, providing inputs for the design), the flexibility (of size or of offered activities stimulating relationships and exchange).

Differing from the compositional strategies based on balance between full and voids, this approach relies strongly on the relational component defining complex urbanity. By highlighting these salient principles that aim towards changed views of road facilities, the research finally indicates how through architectural intervention the infrastructure could become sustainable, not only in ecological, but also in an economical, social and cultural sense.

This research aims to reaffirm the centrality of the drawing within the architectural project, and its theory, in a moment in which this relationship is undergoing radical and irreversible transformations regarding both techniques and practices. More specifically, the research argues that drawing nowadays seems to have lost its finality and its theoretical poignancy, being suspended between a condition of objectivity and instrumentality, as image and information, as communication and as science.

The architectural drawing is neither understood as only a tool or as an instrument nor as an illustration of an architectural object nor as a representation of a design process, but rather in its primary character of being a specific form of architectural thought.

Central to this research is the discussion of the writings and works (both theoretical drawing series and projects) of the Italian architect Franco Purini; a body of work which is theoretically founded and, more precisely, theoretically founded through drawing. An extensive analysis and elaboration of this work is considered as pivotal to single out and convey a number of theoretical aspects of the contemporary architectural project within a well-established idea of “drawing.”

This thesis deals with the design guidelines as defined in the field of architectural conservation by focusing on the problem of the conversion of industrial buildings.

It is generally agreed upon that the best way to secure the future life of industrial heritage is through their re-use. In the 1980s, industrial buildings gained historic importance as a result of industrial archaeological research and were consequently protected. Industrial buildings are buildings that are protected because of their historic, rather than their architectural value. Nevertheless, conservation requires minimal change of the ‘aesthetic integrity’ of an industrial building through conversion. The main aim of this thesis is thus to investigate how the concept of “aesthetic integrity,” defined in formal terms in the conservation charters, can be interpreted in relation to industrial buildings in order for it to serve as a design guideline for the conversion of this class of buildings.

For this purpose this thesis draws upon the concept of nineteenth-century “organicism,” interpreted by Van Eck as a rhetorical strategy that led design as well as interpretation of nineteenth-century architecture in general. Drawing upon this concept and the recent architectural historical research on the nineteenth century, this thesis argues that industrial buildings from the eighteenth century onwards were designed with aesthetic considerations in mind. Consequently they do posses an architectural value which can be described in formal terms. The study concludes that, when “organicism” describes the “aesthetic integrity” of industrial buildings and consequently is used as a design guideline for the conversion of industrial buildings, the past and present can live in formal unity.

Full dissertation available

Closed communities are less and less a taboo. Shelter, safety and dwelling in congenial groups are generally acknowledged social norms. Nonetheless, the appearance of walled and gated environments, withdrawn from the world, is still “not done.” Within the historic Dutch city a tradition of closed communities par excellence is in existence, generally appreciated by everyone: hofjes [courtyard dwellings]. The original ‘hofje’ consists of a group of houses – typically almshouses - built around a rectangular, enclosed garden or yard. Buildings and their courtyards are united in an architectural whole. Of course, a new hof cannot be a copy of a historical example. However, it is a legitimate problem to explore which clues, conditions and knowledge for this future, design assignment can be derived from the fine Dutch hof tradition.

The aim of this research is to investigate the conditions for the design of closed communities, based on a typology and analysis of the hof in the historical Dutch City. Which ideas for a closed community and collectivity are defined? How do the courtyards form a part of the urban system on diminishing urban scales - the city, the neighborhood, the block? What about size, proportion and density? Which ideas are represented in the courtyard and on the street, and by which architectural means is this achieved?