For several decades, architectural theorists have argued that there is a loss of meaning in architecture, caused by an over-emphasis on scientific thinking and the devaluing of poetic practices. Some theorists have presented ways to return meaning to architecture: Juhani Pallasmaa has called for empathic imagination and Alberto Perez-Gomez for attuned architecture. However, neither has offered methods for how to achieve those ends.

This research aims to bridge theory and practice by developing methods for attuning to a location and its inhabitants. It focuses on ways to become attuned to a place and people, in order to imagine spaces empathically and tailor architecture to the affective qualities of a place.

To best develop methods that identify these qualities, this research looks at familiar places, that is, places we assume to know well and therefore may overlook distinctive features. Accordingly, I have focussed on Brigflatts, my childhood neighbourhood in rural England.

I develop methods for attuning in two ways. First, by drawing upon three fields and their related methods: cognitive science and sensory mapping; anthropology and collaborative design ethnography; and architecture and reflections on atmospheres. Second, by creating physical objects that translate qualities and experiences of place into an interactive form.

My exploration of Brigflatts culminates in four large-format paintings that express what I became attuned to. I deconstruct and analyse these paintings to indicate how the on-site activities provided insights into the affective qualities of the location.

While this research looked at a familiar, rural location, I show how the methods elaborated at Brigflatts can be adapted to less familiar and urban environments. I discuss their broader application through a set of guiding principles for methods of attunement.

The research findings feed into a design project set at Brigflatts. “The Quaker Project at Brigflatts” seeks to re-activate a historically and spiritually significant site while balancing the needs of the faith group, the national park planning authority, and the locals living nearby.

Through this project, I explore how architecture can be attuned to a place and a people – how social behaviours, material bodies, and affective qualities can inform the design of new spaces and new experiences of the site and the protected landscape. I ground this project in a real-life scenario, responding to the Quaker testimonies and the National Park’s development requirements. In doing so, I envision a future of development in the Yorkshire Dales that protects cultural heritage, progresses building techniques, and offers a contemporary architecture attuned to its locality.

This thesis explores ways of architectural production that do not conform to typical representational techniques. It begins with analysing how image production has shaped contemporary architectural labour and explores the networks it is entangled in. This resulted in an online performative repository: https://pkirilov9.github.io/renderillas-and-oraxontans/. The "design" part of this thesis has been approached as a way of figuring out how I want to define myself as a future practitioner. In that sense, it is an exploration of modes of performative production and archiving. I did not focus on end products or final results, instead, I wanted to show that I am capable of doing, of figuring things out on the ground, thinking on my feet, immersed in my environment, rather than detached from it.

The proposal incites the collectivisation of maintenance and organisation of the electricity grid in Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam Zuid.

In times of unproductive polarisation along a ‚Political Spectrum’ and the proliferation of a reactive subjectivity that lacks contextual attunement, the citizen appears to become incrementally more a consumer of politics rather than a productive participant in the organisation of our togetherness.

As the progressive automation of our lives intensifies the general proletarianisation of the citizen, the capacity to productively participate in politics turns quite literally forgotten and invites for determinate governmentality to continue its recursion.

Drawing from Schizoanalysis, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, and care ethics, the research focuses on the exploration of libidinal, political, and energetic engagement with the formulation of individual and collective desires, beliefs, futures, and values through our environments.

Questioning the degree and value of the automations that surround us in our daily lives, the project aims to integrate the subject with (locally to globally) outsourced problems that it has progressively been alienated from and turn the paranoid architecture of electricity into a convivial tool that allows for the experience of collectivity, work as leisure, and political participation on a daily basis.

Through the necessity that is electricity as a collective (political) problem individuals can learn about parts-to-whole relations and dependencies. Via participatory spatial production, immediate material engagement, and the making sense-able of day-to-day automations, the project turns the inaccessible and intangible local electricity grid and transformer station of Afrikaanderwijk into a didactic environment to learn to care and to problematise desire as well as the coming together of individual and collective. It is a plea for an architectural process rather than product that is assisting in the emergence of literate, active subjects that can productively inform local and global collective efforts and challenges via a politics of transindividuation.

The relationship between sex work and the city centre of Amsterdam ‘the Wallen’ area, also known as the ‘Red Light District’, already dates back towards 1350 (Majoor 2020, 46). While sex work in most cities happens on the periphery, in Amsterdam it traditionally exist in the heart of the city center. Despite the historical connection between sex workers and the district, they now fear being displaced by the municipality to towards the outskirts of the city into the Erotic Center. Several years ago I became resident of the Wallen area and while living above the sex working spaces I have become familiar with the ways how sex work is part of everyday life. While observing the interactions between sex workers and clients below my window the complexity of the relationship between the profession and the urban structure of Amsterdam fascinated me. It also revealed why spatial interventions in the area should be treated with delicacy. Since I believe sex workers to be essential care givers, who contribute to the diversity and safety of this neighborhood, the intention for this research is to examine how they could remain part of it in the future and to counter the plans that will lead to the gentrification of this neighborhood.
To the plans of the municipality the sex workers out of the area have reacted with the message: “don’t save us, save our windows”, a note that is revealing how the area is dealing with a material and social problem at once. This message is also very relatable to this research, since I will be approaching it through the window. The architectural element of the window has an high symbolic value and reveals a lot about societal norms and values. Therefore, to explain a wide range of developments that took place over the last two centuries, this research begins with examanining historical photographs that display the windows of sex workers and are carefully analyzed through hand drawings. These studies will be supported by theoretical resources which elaborate on prevailing societal norms and values that concerned sexuality.
What this research will illustrate is how sex work is often concerned with moral questions, like the issue of (female) body determination. As a result, sex work became a familiar topic within histocial feminist debates, having either a liberative or oppressive effect on the profession. Since the goal for this research is to imagine the future of sex work spaces in the Wallen area, it will navigate through these debates in order to take a position in the contemporary feminist debate myself. Hoping to find a appropriate design approach which will challenge the strategy of the municipality.

Architecture as a discipline is deeply involved in a constant material entanglement with a large number of entities. Yet across the discipline, nature-culture, subject- object distinctions are still being forcefully being held up, with the consequence of invasion of many territories, inhabited by other species and the destruction of their environments. In order to overcome such damaging differentiations, it is necessary to reconsider tour concepts of ontological hierarchies and their outcomes in architecture. This may allow us to create new affective environments, considerate of the constant set of relations that we find ourselves entangled in.

The research of the thesis explores to what extent a multi-species design practice in architecture based on affordances informed by the act of human and non-human space-making in abandoned ruins helps to achieve a symbiotic relation between architecture and biodiversity. For this purpose, a theoretical framework triangulating affordances, multi-species design and architecture was developed. This was done throughout different exploratory methods such as reviewing literature, as well as an on-field studies of the abandoned ruin “Palácio Ford” in Porto, Portugal. The architectural project is about the design of a multi-species residency consisting of different kinds of towers that contribute to the growth of an urban forest by interaction with the environment. The interventions were developed as Baubotanik structures which combine living trees and technical construction methods in one object. Thus, the project explores new ways of living in a growing architecture which forms an urban forest within the city of Porto.

Hoewel ik tijdens mijn opleiding leerde ontwerpen, voelde ik dat ik maar weinig grip kreeg op de dynamiek waarmee we dingen beleven. We ontwerpen gebouwen van steen en hout, die stilstaan; toch lijkt alles wat zich tussen de muren van onze huizen en steden afspeelt bewegelijk en tijdelijk. We nemen de materiële wereld allemaal ongeveer hetzelfde waar met onze zintuigen, toch beleven we alles anders. Soms beweeg ik me vluchtig en onverschillig en soms langzaam en aandachtig. Soms brengt een geluid of geur me in vervoering en vergeet ik voor even de wereld om me heen. Soms verdwaal ik in een dagdroom; en terwijl mijn lichaam zich nog altijd begeeft in dezelfde wereld, reis ik in gedachten door verschillende plekken en tijden tegelijk.

Ik stelde aan het begin van dit jaar de vraag: wat is de geleefde ruimte? Een ruimte die gekleurd lijkt door onze herinneringen, associaties, verbeelding en onderbewustzijn. Ik richtte me in mijn onderzoek op film, omdat filmmakers - meer dan architecten - een taal hebben ontwikkeld die op expliciete manier uitdrukking geeft aan de belevingswereld van de toeschouwer. Filmmakers zijn zich ervan bewust, hoe je met montage - een nauwkeurige samenstelling van licht, geluid, schaal, beweging en ritme - de emotie van de toeschouwer kan sturen. Door het scheppen van relaties en met behulp van suggesties en associaties ontstaat nieuwe betekenis.
Aan de hand van drie cinematografische ordeningsprincipes, bestudeerde ik de effecten van een architectonische montage op de belevingswereld van de gebruiker. Ik zocht naar een nieuwe taal om de dynamiek van licht, geluid, geur en beweging op een expliciete manier te integreren in het ontwerpproces.

This project deals with spaces for a historically neglected collective: sex workers. It aims to destigmatize the practice by representing the workers and the material conditions that determine their safety and well-being every day, of which architecture is part.
Articulated from an intersectional feminist point of view, the research evaluates how the design of these spaces has been and continues to be a technology to control the workers. At the same time, it visualizes the workers and how they construct processes of emancipation within their (legally and spatially) subjugated position.
The design offers a working space that houses these emancipatory practices, in the context of the recent decriminalisation of sex work in Belgium. In order to do so, it draws from feminist and queer theories to construct an understanding of space that materializes the emancipation from the scale of the neighbourhood and urban block, until the detailing and use of material.

In our effort to control it, water in our cities has progressively been confined between lines, canalised or culverted underground, resulting in its gradual isolation and erasure from our sight and collective imagination. As freshwater availability and water-related hazards are brought to the forefront of sustainable development goals, the long-neglected role of urban rivers and their watershed needs to be addressed. Tiber Waterscapes is an attempt to re-imagine the complex relationship between Rome and its primary river, the River Tiber, at the point along its course where it historically intersected River Almone, within the Gasholder park "Ostiense". This polluted post-industrial area is transformed into a wastewater treatment park and thermal bath complex, with ecological, cultural and social value.

The greatest of all arts, music, can evoke deep emotions and memories. It has the power to transfer the listener to a different world. The first few notes of Brahms allegro amabile (op.120) instantly brings one in a state of presence, whereas Mahler’s fifth symphony’s adagietto or Wagner’s Lohengrin prelude slowly invites the audience in a trance of reverie. It’s something that touches and engulfs the soul each time it enters the inner ear. Pieces that are an assemblage of rhythms, tensions and proportions form a certain expression. To listen to and be embossed by such expressions of life is something that we do every day. We listen to music, read books, watch movies, go to museums and immerse ourselves with culture from all over the world. All of these things combined make us who and what we are. They serve as incubators for new ideas. When you work in the creative field, everything you do is connected to who you are, therefore making you a part of the past. A thread of cultural life populated by objects, things or human activities that explain us where we came from and how we can move forward. Culture is thinking about the world, looking closely, asking questions, listening and comprehending.

From a personal fascination that grounded itself during a working period in Switzerland in 20’-21’ the idea arose to observe the villages in the valley of the Lower Engadine in Switzerland. A specific fascination and deep love for these organic but simultaneously traditional places manifested itself focussing on the perspectives of craft, material and an overall attitude towards life. This research intends to identify which values are embedded in these rural Alpine settlements, understand how they were formed and fathom how the local architectural typology works in order to find out why the presence embedded in these places is so strong.

My personal experiences with these places made me realise that architecture has the power to arouse deep emotions and feelings. It might not be on the same level as music can be, but by investigating and describing the qualities of these place I believe that it can give us an insight into the hidden poetical side of these places. This physical journey accompanied by personal anecdotes, drawings and models allows one to travel into a physical place hidden away deep within the Swiss Alps to introduce new feelings and emotions to our personal world. This work is a translation of a fascination throughout new experiences, personal conversations, insights and knowledge that formed the basis for my graduation design.

This research booklet can be read along the film: In Transit: An Exploration into Subway Space, as an experimental study into the everyday experience of architecture. The film, story and essays are an attempt to better understand the relationship between architecture and human life and to question the way the subject of architecture can be studied. The triadic work is a layered study that combines actual footage of subway systems and stations, which is edited into a narrative. This narrative is structured and accompanied by a written account of a fictional figure, who starts as an outsider and slowly progresses into an everyday commuter of subway space. Lastly, each chapter is accompanied by an academic essay about the nature of the architectural phenomena and the observed phenomena through exploring a number of theories about perception, atmosphere, materials, semiotics, habits, space, time, rhythms, the everyday, and public space.

Overall, this work is an attempt to study architecture by actually participating, to experience lived space while also observing and writing about the abstract processes that produce it. In the words of Anne Buttimer and Henri Lefebvre, it is an attempt to be both an insider and an outsider, and to situate oneself in the seam, between
practice and theory, ordinary and special. In doing so this study linger on the edges of the architectural discipline that touches upon subjects such as philosophy, sociology, biology, anthropology, geology, urbanism, storytelling and filmmaking.

The design is an attempt to put use these lessons into practice and to design a transformation with simple interventions.