The development of Casablanca can be understood through two major shifts in its history; colonization and de-colonization. During the first shift, city divided into culture specific urban areas in which new alien urban structures built to control and satisfy the needs of diverse cultural groups. During the second shift, these culture specific habitats became occupied by the same culture, in other words, they became mono-cultured. Due to these radical cultural shifts the implanted urban structures became unattended even though some of them were able to continue their lives in the society by transforming and adapting to the new context. However, the ones that couldn’t transform become isolated and created morphological and programmatic voids in the central and dense areas of the city. Roman Catholic Churches are one of those urban spaces with an exception of a free-standing closed architectural space inside. These churches have been chosen because of their formal repetitive character which is potentially can be used as common resource for the city and, they have been seen as an opportunity to operate on both open and closed spaces together. However, because of its the rigid-ritualistic sacred form, the roman catholic church offers a finite space that does not allow undetermined uses to happen. In other words, the potentiality of these abandoned areas’ in urban scale does not meet what their form offers in architectural scale. In this sense projects tries to answer the questions of;
1- How to re-examine and re-signify the repetitive-rigid forms of Roman-Catholic Churches in the changed reality of the city?
2- How to make these ruins habitable by operating on their formal structure without designating a certain use, while still retaining their un-programmatic nature?
3- How to add another segment to the sequence of church-form typology that is viable for Casablanca?

Over the last century, Casablanca has become the economical capital of Morocco. To deal with this ever congesting metropolis, the French Europeans and later wealthy Moroccans, have established an entire region to escape from Casablanca's everyday. The research investigates this relationship between the escape from the everyday into spaces for the holiday. Spaces wherein the political and economical norm are suspended, resulting in an opportunity for play (in contrast to work, labor and action). In Casablanca, beach club structures barricade the relation between the coastal boulevard and the Atlantic as natural common resource, resulting in a condition wherein one needs to pay to enjoy the ocean and its consequent holiday. Through investigating the characteristic figure of the club, the research unfolds its strategies and motives, to subsequently learn from it for a counter-project.

As a response to the disparity between the everyday and the holiday in Casablanca, to the research on the club and to the investigation on spaces of play, the project proposes a strategy to infiltrate the Casablanca with spaces for the holiday. By exploiting the newly established infrastructure of the tram network, the project taps into many daily routines, claiming territory adjacent to the strategically chosen tram stations. These territories are then reserved for the holiday, accommodated in an urban void, guaranteeing the possibility of refuge in the holiday and the livability of the metropolis.

To offer an alternative to the exclusive figure of the club, the proposed spaces for the holiday must ensure to be inclusive, both socially and architecturally. The absolute architecture of the club is broken open and becoming, transformed into a dual project; a pliant surface and a set of autonomous architectures. Together, they provide a protected holiday space separated from Casablanca’s everyday visually, acoustically, thermally, emotionally. While still providing accessibility from all sides due to its resulting porous nature. Therefore offering a true and pleasant sanctuary in middle of Casablanca’s turmoil. Through the duality of the project, a certain ambiguity is achieved, resulting in a range of conditions wherein citizens can celebrate their holiday.

In order to evoke direct associations of holiday within the interventions, the Casablanca’s collective memory is being exploited through abstractions of the coast in architectural form. The pliant surface is materialized in bright white natural stone, mimicking the tactics of Casablanca’s beach clubs, which imported white beach sand to create paradisaical beaches. The white (artificial) surface offers a first inversion of the everyday on which the autonomous architectural elements are imposed, in turn referencing to the beauty of the natural coast. Each element subtly referencing to phenomena of the Atlantic.

Together resulting in a predefined set of elements and rules which can generate precise architectural interventions when confronted with given urban conditions. The project is therefore designed as a tangram, from the scale of the entire configuration to the detail. In the thesis, three sites are fully developed, as proof of concept, exploring the potential to offer an inclusive form of holiday, inverting Casablanca’s everyday life.

Besides being the fastest growing sector in the Netherlands, and a pioneer in working standards, the creative sector is believed to have a positive effect on economic growth. Multi-tenant buildings occupied by creative sector companies, i.e. creative residencies, are thus assumed to improve the neighborhood’s socio-economic quality. A lack of objective insights however, gives rise to the discussion about whether the creative sector indeed provides added value for it’s location, and if so, what this added value exactly entails.
Therefore, this thesis provides a more objective approach in measuring the added value of creative residencies, by combining theory, emerging data sources and statistical modelling. Using Jane Jacobs’ theory on vibrant neighborhoods and data retrieved from the social media platform Facebook, a vibrancy model is constructed through factor analysis. This model is then applied to the city of Rotterdam, to assess the impact of four different creative residencies.
The results show that these cases are indeed located within vibrant clusters. However, the exact results, in terms of dispersion of the clusters and change over time, differ per case. Based on a cross-case comparison, the distinguishing case characteristics influencing the contrasting results are assessed, leading to a number of hypotheses. These hypotheses however, are still open for interpretation, providing opportunities for further research. Nevertheless, a strong connection between a creative residency and it’s neighborhood, through the presence of diverse hospitality and an open, public character, appears to contribute to a more dispersed vibrant cluster, and thus a higher added value for the neighborhood in terms of vibrancy.

The framework of this work is situated between the typological issue about the epistemological definition of art spaces, and their role as consequence within the city, and a personal interest in the kind of attention art demands in space for a specific engagement. It is in the place where art is displayed that the knowledge about it is produced.

Within the art system, a distortion in the value of art has been staged by the increasing significance of the role of private collectors in investing in contemporary art and legitimating their collections trough the echoes of certain art spaces’ typologies. As consequence, private collectors become the accepted ‘manager of consciousness,’ and the former distance between collectors and museum is confused, and the museum academic capacity is being replaced. Here, the question of how a private collection is presented to the world became particularly urgent.

In response to this context, the construction of two specific narratives embedded in two contemporary art spaces for two private art collections has been delineated not in a deconstruction of values, but contextualised in-culture within the realm of architecture and its position towards the system.

Seeking a condition of nearness to the art world has been necessary in order to trace the encounters, or relationships which would construct the notion of place for contemporary art, and the values of the prelude to it. A certain alertness and respect towards the other and the world can be achieved in the art gallery that is otherwise often elusive, since what the art gallery as site does that ‘real life’ does not is that it forces the issues of attention – towards the space, the place and the other. Especially in this context, “considerations of where implies more than an ontology of position.”

The fiction of the art space started from the definition of the collection as first assemble to relate art to places and spaces, since the structure and identity of it became fundamental. A section through two collections and their collectors tries to trace the ways and rules which define the different spatial implications of art, in order to relate different specificities to the word, to find them a place within the world.

The role of architecture has been a negotiation between narratives, the one of the existing place which I found as connected to the specificity of the two collections I was dealing with, and the one of the artwork within the collection itself. And in measuring the one with the other, a staged uncertainty would lead to a certain awareness of the place one is in, and how does it relate with the collection itself, and with the world. I believe architecture has to offer a framework that should elicit reactions – it cannot be, as consequence, neutral.

I do think that the role of architecture in relation with art it is not so different from the one of storytelling in “establishing the rights of intensity” of encounters. Since eventually, everything become visible through relationships.