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 ...

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 rock tombs at Dayr al-Barsha rank among the most important monuments of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1700 BC). However, due to ancient quarrying and looting, this provincial elite cemetery is now in a dilapidated state. Thus making impossible to carry out a physical reconstruction on-site and consequently, a deep study of the tombs is prevented. Therefore, this research aims at digitally reconstructing the remains by using ...

This ADO approaches design not as an aim in itself but as a form of spatial agency that supports and strengthens
particular cultural, physical or social dynamics. Our goal is to tackle socio-cultural challenges through a hybrid
approach at the intersection of research, design and action. As a case in point, this studio will develop scenarios
regarding the future use of the large number of (Roman Catholic) parish churches that ...

India presently faces the onset of rapid development and change in every part of the country. Although the current GDP of 7.9% (Trading Economics 2016) shows positive trends, these indicators are often based on standards and indicators which focus very heavily on only the economic output of the country as per the Neo- Classical model of Economics (Czech 2010). The indicators tend to ignore the significance of the cultural, social and natural ...

The IWT-supported research project INDIGO is an inter- and transdisciplinary project, which puts the discussion about shared land uses, land property and use rights within the interdisciplinary context of ownership regimes and the ‘governance of the Commons’. INDIGO’s partners examine jointly contemporary concepts of land use, ownership and the Commons and ways to govern them. Concurrently they take the history of the Commons, in Flanders and ...

Today, the impact of a growing secularization, the substantial increase of leisure time and the economic transformation based on consumption in a western context redefine the main actors in the contemporary city and affect on how we experience and use collective spaces as part of our daily environment.

The morphological understanding of these collective spaces (Solà-Morales, 2008) as shared areas - that are no longer exclusively ...

Unlike in Europe, the concept of style only entered Chinese people’s vision as a new term when the modern discipline of architecture was established in the early twentieth century. Thereafter, for much of the rest of the century, Chinese architects faced the conundrum: "In what style should we build?" This dissertation examines the discussions of style within architectural discourse, and considers (a) the shifting understandings of style in ...