Interiors Buildings Cities
Interiors Buildings Cities focuses on buildings and interiors that accommodate the different scales and gradations of public life within the city, from the street to the public interior. It addresses the ways in which the accommodation of people within the scenes made by architecture can be situated in relation to place and time and to social and material culture.
Each course in the programme refers to a particular building or interior type, whose evocations acknowledge both its past significance and its capacity for adjustment, adaptation or transformation in response to present and future needs.
Focus and approach
Investigated through iterative processes of drawing and large-scale modelling and supported by lectures and seminars, students design architecture across these different spatial scales and types, creating coherent places that respond to carefully observed situations that exist between interior and exterior.
Each course and project places emphasis on different aspects and components of this larger endeavour, and whilst they can be taken individually, they together establish a continuous field of investigation, allowing students to develop and refine ideas within a rich and rigorous architectural framework, defined through experience and underpinned by a cohesive historical and theoretical discourse. The projects that result are ambitious in their detailed consideration of the rooms and spaces we collectively inhabit, as contiguous parts of both the larger spatial and tectonic order of a building, and the urban condition in which it is set.
Programme
The MSc1 studio 'House' explores buildings that both inform and are informed by the physical and social fabric of their immediate locality, accommodating the rooms and spaces that structure and draw a community into dialogue with itself. The emphasis within this studio is on the synthetic design of a building at each scale, from the urban through to the constructional detail.
Programme MSc 1 fall semester 2024 (pdf)
The MSc2 studio 'Salon' refers to the tradition of the large public room that receives and shapes the society of people that it gathers, offering opportunities for both intimacy and publicness in engagement with the building and the city in which it is set. Students of this studio design the structure and fabric of such an interior in response to an existing building and a specific community and site. This includes consideration of its furnishing, material and finishes, along with possibilities of its inhabitation.
Programme MSc 2 spring semester 2025 (pdf)
Two separate graduation studios are offered: the graduation studio ‘Palace’ starts in the Fall semester and the Independent Group in the Spring semester.
MSc3/4 Palace
The MSc 3/4 graduation studio 'Palace' refers to the forms and histories of such representative public buildings, while acknowledging that their roles and responsibilities to society and culture have been constantly reinterpreted over time. The inherent spatial complexity of the palace, with its hierarchies, infrastructures and intricate sequences of rooms and spaces, encompasses and extends the themes and issues raised within the other courses. Transformed to meet contemporary needs, it is offered as a framework or scaffold for collective public life.
Programme MSc 3 Palace fall semester 2024 (pdf)
MSc3/4 Independent Group
The Independent Group is a studio in which individual students’ proposals for graduation projects may be pursued within a framework of discourse, research and design thinking. The studio, directed by Daniel Rosbottom and Amy Thomas, consists of a small group of participants (ideally, 8) who will meet regularly in seminars and tutorials in order to develop their design and research into a project that embodies their thesis in buildable forms.
Programme MSc 3 Independent Group spring semester 2025 (pdf)
Staff
Prof. Daniel Rosbottom, Sereh Mandias, ir. Susanne Pietsch, Mark Pimlott, ir. Dirk Somers, dr. Amy Thomas, Sam De Vocht, ir. Leontine de Wit, Dr. ir. Jurjen Zeinstra.
Additional information
Additional information about the projects and student work can be found here.
For detailed course descriptions, please visit the study guide:
MSc 1 (only in fall semester)
MSc 2* (only in spring semester)
MSc 3/4
* The MSc2 semester of the Architecture track consists of a 5 EC compulsory course and 10 EC of track-specific Architecture electives in the third quarter, followed by a 15 EC (intra)disciplinary elective in the fourth quarter, which can be an intensive architectural research and design project or an intradisciplinary elective in which you are challenged to work together with students from other tracks on overarching themes.