Lehre - Semesterprogramm

UNDER THE OPEN SKY. STUDENT HOUSING IN AMSTERDAM

Student housing has become a new frontier in the financialization of housing. Across many university cities in Europe, new forms of student accommodation are emerging in response to growing demand. Yet while student housing was once associated with the welfare state and public intervention, private developers have increasingly tapped into the sector, revealing it as a highly lucrative real-estate investment. For many students, however, these new housing complexes do little to resolve their housing problems. They are often expensive, rigidly organized, governed by extensive rules, segregative from within and far from university campuses.

The Netherlands is no exception. Over the past decades, Dutch universities have become increasingly attractive to students from across Europe and beyond. Generally highly ranked, well equipped, with relatively affordable tuition fees, and offering a growing number of programmes in English, they have become a favourite destination for an international student population. Yet if admission to a Dutch university was once the primary challenge, today being admitted is often easier than finding adequate accommodation. It can take months to find even a floor where to sleep. In the meantime, students are pushed into precarious arrangements that can involve sudden evictions, problematic relationships with landlords, and informal agreements rather than secure contracts. These conditions extend far beyond the question of housing: they directly affect students’ ability to study, participate in university life, and establish a stable everyday life.

The studio approaches this condition as both a housing and an architectural question. On the one hand, it will explore the possibility of a large-scale, self-administered student housing block, in which students can access affordable rents in exchange for participating in the management of their building and performing small services for the community. Rather than treating students as passive tenants, the project asks how housing might become a collective institution in which forms of cooperation, responsibility, and self-governance are embedded within the architecture itself.

On the other hand, the studio will confront these questions within the Dutch city where the pressures on student housing are particularly acute: Amsterdam. Students will develop a student housing intervention on a large vacant site in the proximity of the University of Amsterdam’s Roeterseiland Campus. The project will establish a critical and thoughtful confrontation with the seriality, repetition, and infrastructural character of the large blocks and storage facilities that traditionally define this part of the city.

The studio therefore asks how an alternative model of student housing might operate simultaneously as a building, a collective institution, and a piece of the city. How can architecture challenge the increasingly commodified model of student accommodation? And what spatial, organizational, and architectural forms might emerge when affordability is exchanged not simply for less space, but for participation, responsibility, and self-administration?

FIRST MEETING
14 OCT 26, 1PM – 4PM, FG EUW (L301 | 550)

FIELD TRIP TO AMSTERDAM
26 OCT 26 – 29 OCT 26

DATES
11 NOV 26, 9AM – 6PM, FIRST REVIEW
09 DEC 26, 9AM – 6PM, SECOND REVIEW
13 JAN 26, 9AM – 6PM, THIRD REVIEW

SUBMISSION
02 FEB 27, 2PM – 5PM

FINAL REVIEW
03 FEB 27, 9AM – 6PM

TEACHING STAFF
Martino Tattara, Andrea Migotto, Nathalia Nehm, Guillem Pons

RADICAL HOUSING EXPERIMENTS IN BRAZIL

The seminar explores a number of radical housing experiments in Brazil that sought to translate utopian ideals into built form—and, ultimately, succeeded in doing so. These projects challenged conventional ideas and assumptions about housing in multiple ways: through models of social and racial coexistence; through their scale, number of inhabitants, and relationship to the city and the environment; through innovative construction techniques, materials, and processes of realization; and through alternative models of ownership and new articulations of the public–private relationship. While many of these ideas remained unrealized in the Western world, or failed, a number of Brazilian projects demonstrate that aspects of these utopian visions could survive and, in some cases, achieve the social and architectural ambitions for which they were conceived.

The seminar will use these case studies to critically examine what makes a housing utopia possible, and what allows it to endure over time. Rather than treating utopia as a purely speculative or unrealizable condition, we will investigate the architectural, social, political, and material conditions that enable utopian ideas to become concrete forms of collective life.

The central activity of the seminar is a 10-day excursion to Brazil in March 2027. Students will visit housing projects in Brasília, including Lúcio Costa’s Superquadras; in São Paulo, including Oscar Niemeyer’s Copan Building; and in Rio de Janeiro, including Affonso Eduardo Reidy’s Pedregulho housing complex.

The excursion will be preceded by an organizational and introductory meeting, and students will actively contribute to the preparation of the trip. Upon their return, students will reflect on one of the visited projects through a short-written assignment, using the experience of the excursion as a basis for critical analysis.

The excursion is open to 10–15 students and is organized in collaboration with the institutes of Prof. Elke Reichel (EUG) and Prof. Meyer-Grohbrügge (EUR).

FIRST MEETING
22 OCT 26, 11:30AM – 1PM, FG EUW (L301 | 550)

EXCURSION TO BRAZIL
MARCH 27

TEACHING STAFF
Martino Tattara, Andrea Migotto, Nathalia Nehm, Guillem Pons

THE IMAGE BEFORE THE BUILDING

Records of European building practices from the early twentieth century show that demolition was not always viewed as a loss. In some cases, contractors would generate income by carefully dismantling buildings and salvaging materials for reuse. As architectural historians have demonstrated, the extraction and reintegration of building components was once a common and cost-effective practice. Indeed, the reuse of materials is deeply embedded in the history of construction where economy of means and resourcefulness have long shaped the act of building.

With the rise of industrialisation, building materials increasingly became commodified products within linear systems of production and consumption. As a result, new construction came to depend on newly manufactured materials, while demolition was reduced to a clearance process preceding reconstruction. The potential value of materials found on site was largely lost. Today, the environmental consequences of this model are evident, with the construction sector accounting for almost 40% of global CO₂ emissions.

However, emerging architectural and cultural practices are challenging this status quo. Grassroots movements are advocating the reuse of materials as an ecological and social necessity, while industry-driven frameworks such as circularity and upcycling are changing how resources, waste and materials are understood and valued within the built environment.

This seminar will examine these contemporary practices through critical analysis and design experimentation. Students will investigate architectural approaches to material recovery and adaptive reuse. They will closely examine a few buildings in Darmstadt that were built in the 70s and are now approaching the end of their life cycle and/or earmarked for demolition. Drawing on a “salvage ethos,” students will learn to carefully assess the potential resourcefulness of each building's materials and engage in a design exercise focused on a domestic project, for which they must use salvaged materials. The course encourages students to question prevailing construction logics and to explore the architectural, environmental, and cultural potential of existing structures.

The seminar is structured in two parts: an analytical phase, in which students will investigate and dissect building systems and available materials of a selected case; and a workshop, in which students will practice material mining and construction using material resources from the building itself.

FIRST MEETING
12 NOV 26, 11AM – 1PM, FG EUW (L301 | 550)

SECOND MEETING
14 JAN 27, 10AM – 11AM, FG EUW (L301 | 550)

PRODUCTION WEEK
15 FEB – 18 FEB 27

PRESENTATION
19 FEB 27

TEACHING STAFF
Martino Tattara, Andrea Migotto, Nathalia Nehm, Guillem Pons

THE USE OF TYPOLOGY: REASSESSING THE LEGACY OF AN ARCHITECTURAL IDEA

The course explores the notion of typology, the revival of which has recently shaped the architectural discourse. It seeks to examine how typological thinking and knowledge can inform and enrich contemporary architectural and urban design practices and demonstrate their usefulness to today's architecture students. The course consists of a series of lectures and a practical assignment. The lectures will first introduce students to the origins of typology and the most relevant theoretical contributions to the concept. Second, they will discuss the application of typology in various disciplinary subfields, such as architectural design, housing, urban design and planning, and transformation and reuse.

The practical assignment, which will be carried out in small groups, consists in a typological analysis through drawings and physical models of an assigned case study. This year's theme is student housing.

FIRST LECTURE
15 OCT 26, 9:50AM – 11:30AM, L3/01 91

TEACHING STAFF
Martino Tattara, Andrea Migotto, Nathalia Nehm, Guillem Pons