research-led design studio I 2019-20

Investigated Territory: Randstad Area — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Delft, Westland, Utrecht — Netherlands

Postgraduate COURSE — Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture I University of Edinburgh

Today’s infrastructure has decisive impact on the landscape, the neighbouring urban, the local and global energy landscapes as well as urban climate. The Netherlands, and in particular Randstad, can be read as an agglomeration of infrastructural nodes, machine landscapes, transition zones between the urban and the modern countryside, the contemporary rural, all dispersed on an artificial landscape, recuperated from the sea, undergoing continuous transformation, through excavators and market forces alike.

In order to formulate adequate strategic and architectural proposals which can address these challenges, the first semester focuses on a set of investigations across different scales, magnitudes and contexts. This investigative phase is concentrating on three themes of logistical infrastructures, mobility — of humans, goods and data, and energy landscapes.

Whereas the first semester results in a spatial intervention, the second semester will focus on its  advancement to the development of an independent programmatic formulation for new hybridised architectural typologies, capable of offering an answer to the challenges of the densified, expanding megacity, on the verge of collision with also expanding operational landscapes.