This thesis proposes a framework to address the design process in design education. Building upon the assumption that teachers, being professional designers, do not discuss the design process in the architectural design studio and do not have a vocabulary to do so, five generic elements or anchor points are defined which represent the basic design skills. The validity of the framework and the assumption is tested respectively in interviews with a variety of designers and in observations of di...

The housing stock in Vietnam has boomed in the last few decades, especially in urbanised areas. However, the increasing number of housing units did not go along with housing quality, a healthy living environment or a sustainable building stock. Recent legislation only applies to public buildings but not the private housing sector, which accounts for the majority of the building stock. Therefore, this research aimed to contribute to a more sustainable building stock in Vietnam by improving the...

Numerous actors have been involved in the planning of the port and city of Naples. National and local authorities—namely central government, the Region, the Municipality of Naples, and the Port Authority—act upon the port at different scales, according to diverging interest and by using different planning tools. Each entity has different spatial claims and contrastive views on what port city integration can be. Their diverse goals have led port and city to develop into separate entities, ...

Leftover spaces are neglected and obsolete spaces within the city. As they are temporarily unoccupied by defined urban functions, leftover spaces provide unique “interstitial conditions” that open for wild species as well as different informal social activities, offering crucial complements to the formal and defined urban spaces. In this context, the design of leftover spaces poses a paradox between the practice of design that projects a set of definitions onto the site, and the indeter...

Shell structures carry loads with their thin yet curved shapes. Being thin means shells require little material, which is desirable for minimizing embodied carbon footprints. However, the feature of being curved implies shells require immense effort to design and fabricate. To address the challenges, this dissertation consists of three parts: developing a design algorithm based on radial basis functions (RBFs), inventing a fabrication technique based on reconfigurable mechanisms, and producin...

Indoor navigation applications are actively investigated and developed due to their capacity to provide users with essential information in the modern extensive building complexes. Therefore, many researchers have developed a range of indoor navigation applications, which have focused on aspects such as localization, indoor route computation, and human spatial cognition. Unfortunately, current indoor navigation systems do not consider the user's access rights when it comes to navigating safel...

The section Heritage & Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology deals with the built environment in terms of conservation, refurbishment and re-use. Reflecting the department philosophy, this book focuses on the durability and sustainability of existing buildings (heritage in a broad sense, from historic buildings to listed monuments), considered in terms of material and building techniques, form and function, and part of the wider context of sites and...

What physical and morphological conditions need to be in place within an urban environment in order for Complex Adaptive Systems dynamics arise - such that the physical components (or ‘building blocks') of the urban environment have an enhanced capacity to discover functional configurations in space and time as a response to unfolding contextual conditions?

This thesis looks at how cities operate as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It focuses on how certain characteristics of urban form can ...