Canal du Midi, a revolutionary man-made waterway and trading route from the XVII century, is one of the oldest canals of Europe and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since when 1996 (UNESCO, May 12, 2022). The waterway was initially created to strengthen the king’s power and to stimulate the economy, by creating a connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic. In the second half of the 19th, the competition from the railway, followed by the impacts of WWⅠ and WWⅡ caused the decline of the trading role of the canal. Finally, at the end of the 1980s, the freight transport on the canal definitively stopped.
“The South Canal is clearly an exceptional example of a designed landscape” (Heritage, 2022), says UNESCO World Heritage, this grant water system shows the most innovative water management achievement of the time. The construction of the canal combines ingenuity and aesthetics by taking advantage of the natural water flow and the geographical and architectural elements of the land it crossed. Next to that, a wide range of specialized knowledge from Roman tradition to the latest scientific development was used in its construction. The project had brought enormous benefit for the region and the whole country of France. Today, the canal provides a unique perspective to review the relationship between artificiality and nature, modernity and the past.
However, the canal faces difficulties to adapt to its role of a landscape icon that attracts worldwide tourism and has difficulties to keep its role as a source for irrigation. In fact, the Canal du Midi is a rigid, long, quite narrow water structure, with many waterworks that need constant maintenance and have limited accessibility. Therefore, to overcome marginalization, it is essential to identify its values; “aspects of culture which are inherited by the present and which will be preserved for the future” (Upen, Oct 18, 2018).
The thesis proposes a discussion from the perspective of landscape architecture, if and in what way a large-scale historical site can become the spill of a sustainable landscape transformation. Central to the research is the use of the concept of the landscape narrative: Narratives are there in landscapes, intersect with sites, accumulate as layers of history, organize sequences, and inhere in the materials and process of the landscape (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998). And to envision the canal as an element, that can create a more adaptive and robust network to stimulate the sustainable development of the region by using three narratives: water as culture, water as infrastructure, water as nature.

By translating the Maghreb mosque type to the Dutch urban context the design provides an appropriate and recognisable building for the Moroccan community in Bloemhof, a neighbourhood in the south of Rotterdam.

Over the last couple of decades, climate change and energy crises have led to an increased interest in reducing the building energy consumption. To reduce the energy consumption buildings are designed airtight. This leads to the accumulation of indoor air pollutants, which are associated with multiple health and discomfort problems. Poor indoor air quality has been linked to a number of health symptoms, like headache, nausea, dizziness, irritation of eyes and breathing problems, also known as the Sick Building Syndrome. In some metropolitan areas, indoor air has been found up to 100 times more polluted than outdoor air. The negative effects of indoor air pollution are major, also given that people in industrialized nations spend an average of 80-90% of their time indoors. Air pollution is also causing an increase in the number of lung patients. Research even shows that in Europe 99,000 premature deaths were attributed to household air pollution.
The negative health effects of the indoor environment have contributed to a renewed interest in green building practices. A couple of decades ago, NASA conducted a research where they found that plants could reduce indoor air pollution and have a positive effect on the indoor environment. More recent research has shown that plants also have a positive mental effect. The objective of the project is to create a healthy indoor environment for a Lung Rehabilitation Center, with the use of an active living wall.

The aim of this thesis project is to address a highly problematic landscape in an alternative conceptual way. Instead of following a problem-solving approach, I will try to see how the way a specific site works in space and time can be related to a number of concepts. Furthermore, how do these concepts become part of wider, both theoretical and practical discussions about the role and the limits of planned and designed human interventions on the natural and the urban landscape.
The landscape in question is Kifissos, a heavily abused urban river in Athens, Greece. Kifissos used to be a river. As the city evolved it became part of the city’s infrastructural network, functioning as a highway, a sewage and drainage collector. The river is strictly contained within heavy concrete boundaries. This condition is a result and expression of the conceived necessity to dominate and control nature, in order to guarantee for the safety and functionality of the urban world. The binary division between urbanity and nature is in our case expressed by the opposition of the two identities of the river and the highway as well as by the spatial isolation of the two systems from their surrounding environment.
The opposition between the over-controlled elements of the landscape and their unpredictable, uncontrolled dynamics is also reflected in the urban tissue, in the tension between the designed/formal and spontaneous/informal patterns of urbanization. By studying how the urban landscape of Athens has evolved through the years, we can see that the development of these opposing patterns is closely related to the underlying structure of the landscape and the introduced element of the highway.
Within this wider theoretical framework that describes the case of Kifissos not only as an urbanized river, but also as an over-controlled landscape and a ground for conceived oppositions, the design will not depart from the imposition of external forms and structures. It will rather be born out of an excavation on the site that will investigate the common ground between things conceived as opposites. Reading the existing landscape will result in a number of design tools, compatible with the identity of the city and the landscape, that will guide the design process.
The resulting designed landscape works as an experiment of how a concept driven design does not necessarily consists of distanced ideas. Rather it can result in a flexible landscape architectural framework able to incorporate social, environmental and technical aspects closely related to the realities of the existing milieu.
Furthermore, it explores and indicates how landscape architecture, as a discipline, has the capacity to work as an integrative common ground, bringing together conflicting notions such as natural and engineered, formal and informal, concept and reality, process and form, the designed landscape and the practices of everyday life.