Projects

The end of the Cold War and the fall of state Socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989-1991 inspired a lot of reactions in Western European societies. More specifically, the opening of the East attracted hundreds of Western European NGOs, development workers, and experts to Central and Eastern Europe. This research project seeks to analyze how social movements and NGOs in Western Europe interacted with these dramatic and unforeseen changes in the ...

In various social and economic sectors we observe an emerging demand for temporary infrastructure, such as pop-up co-working initiatives, festival pavilions, and exhibition stands. Modular and reusable building systems provide a solution to deal with this phenomenon in a sustainable way by supporting the transition to a more circular economy. Modular structures consist of components that are integrated in a system which allows users to design ...

Material Culture investigates the interwoven and often dialectical relations between people and objects. The field extends across various academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, art history and archeology. Although their approach differs, they focus on the perspective of the user or consumer. This PhD research starts from the 'producer' side and studies how architects produce material culture in the process from material to ...

The research project aims at developing new prefab concrete building components with a high material efficiency, by combining structural optimization techniques with modern fabrication methods. This should improve the sustainability of the building industry, which is responsible for a large share of the total consumption of natural resources.

Three types of building components will be developed: pre-slabs with weight-saving elements ...

The practice of durability design of concrete based on deemed-to-satisfy rules hinders innovation and leads to uneconomic and far from ecological concrete mixtures. In the current project, the deemed-to-satisfy approach is abandoned and a performance-based concept to design concrete mixes based on particle packing modelling is elaborated. Besides a reduction of the paste content, also further incorporation of secondary raw materials as cement ...

“The way text is used visually in comics seems to me to be so incredibly limited. It’s the one avenue in comics that seems to have been more or less completely untouched.”

This statement from 1997, made by the acclaimed comic artist Chris Ware, is key to understand the intentions of WRITE ME A PANEL. Despite the fact that most comics have text, the comic is regarded as a medium of visual storytelling, with words taking ...

Water management in delta cities has been widely discussed. Strategies have shifted from relying on engineered-based solutions alone, to more resilient approaches that integrate water management and urban design. There is considerable international scientific research on this regard to achieve less vulnerable, more resilient and adaptive delta cities. Much of these strategies have been successfully implemented in rich countries such as the ...

This research project focuses on the place of playing children in the urban public domain ('childhood urbanisms'). Children are often considered as 'out of place' on city streets. On the one hand, children belong in the city, on the other their presence in the public domain of the city is often considered as dangerous, undesirable or unsafe. Because of this ambivalent status, a wide spectrum of urban policies and practices has since the 19th ...