ARCHITECTURE
CITIES
LANSCAPES
ARCHITECTURE
CITIES
LANDSCAPES
Dive Into the Past, Present, and Future of the Built Environment
Based in Amsterdam, a World Heritage city with a vibrant everyday urban life, Architecture, Cities, Landscapes: History and Heritage offers a distinctive combination of architectural history and heritage studies. Our group and programme examine the ways in which spatial environments have been shaped over time and how meanings and values are created around buildings, cities, and landscapes in the present. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we focus on developing critical and analytical skills to address pressing societal challenges, including climate change, urban diversity, sustainable reuse, socio-political transformations, and market-led development. Our programme equips students to understand and engage with spatial transformation in ways that are historically grounded and socially relevant.
Themes in Architecture, Cities, and Landscapes
This course introduces key ideas and current conversations about architecture, cities, and landscapes. Students explore some of today’s most pressing global challenges, such as diversity, climate change, digital transformation, environmental thinking, and decolonisation, and discuss how they shape the world around us. The course also shows how these issues connect to the wider fields of design and planning, and to the focus of our master’s programme ...
(De)Constructing Architectural & Town Planning Heritage
This is one of the introductory courses of the Master's Architecture, Cities, Landscapes: History and Heritage. In this course, we critically examine central concepts such as architecture, history, heritage, monument, identity, adaptive reuse, and spatial transformation. As the group of students is as interdisciplinary as the academic field of ACL in which we operate, we will analyze and discuss these concepts based on literature ...
Challenges in the Living Environment
This course addresses the relationship between spatial heritage and environmental and social crises of our times as a point of departure. We will start by assessing a real-life pressing challenge and discuss how we can approach it with heritage, landscape, and architectural history research methodologies. In this course, we will thus simultaneously get acquainted with socio-environmental challenges ...
2025-26 Openning Excursion
Each academic year begins with a shared opening excursion in Amsterdam, offering students a first opportunity to get to know one another, the teaching staff, and the intellectual spirit of the programme. On 5 September, this year’s excursion took us through the Marineterrein and the nearby historic and redeveloping neighbourhoods of Kattenburg, Wittenburg, and Oostenburg, areas where layered histories, everyday life, and large-scale...
ROME 2025
In September 2025, as part of our Planning Heritage course, students from the Master’s programme Architecture, Cities, Landscapes: History and Heritage visited Rome in collaboration with Sapienza University. This immersive excursion offered a unique opportunity to explore the layers of history and contemporary urban life in one of the world’s most historically rich cities. Students worked in interdisciplinary groups, combining insights from architectural...
PhD Writing Workshop, Florence
While publishing is essential for shaping a scholarly profile, the craft of writing often remains under-explored in formal academic training. NWIB Visiting Professor, Gabriel Schwake (VU Amsterdam), recently led a writing workshop for PhD candidates in planning history at the NIKI in Florence—helping to open up that very process. Through individual feedback, peer exchange, and collective discussion, Through individual feedback, peer exchange, and ...
Architecture, Cities, Landscapes: History and Heritage, is based on an interdisciplinary team of professors, researchers, and PhD candidates with strong international profiles in architecture, heritage, urban, and landscape studies. Our team combines expertise in architectural and urban history, heritage theory, spatial planning, landscape research, and cultural analysis, with a shared commitment to understanding how the built environment is shaped by historical processes and contemporary societal challenges. Aligned with our programme's interdisciplinary focus, our research addresses a wide range of themes, including urbanisation, energy transitions, climate adaptation, memory and conflict, landscape change, and participation in heritage planning.
Collateral Spaces
This project introduces the concept of collateral space to describe how housing is conceived not only as homes but also as assets backing debt. It redefines residential landscapes by showing how large-scale mortgage schemes shaped architectural forms, layouts, and urban expansion. Focusing on Amsterdam’s postwar expansion neighbourhoods, the project links building permits with mortgage registrations in a digital database, enabling systematic analysis...
The Architecture of Gas
This project explores how gas has shaped the Dutch built environment over more than two centuries. The project examines the spatial and architectural consequences of successive energy transitions to gas, from nineteenth-century urban gasworks and domestic gas use to the post–World War II shift to natural gas following the discovery of the Slochteren gas field in 1959. Focusing on gas production ...
Making the Archipelago
This study travels to four archipelagoes—the Wadden Islands in the Netherlands, the Cyclades in Greece, Shetland in Scotland, and the Aeolian islands in Italy—to examine links between collective pasts and imagined futures as expressed in energy and sustainability projects. It is the result of a four-year PhD research, funded by the European project HERILAND that explored the relationships between heritage and spatial planning...
Assembling the Archipelago
This book explores the potential of heritage to enact sustainable human–environment relationships across geographical differences. It does so by travelling to four archipelagoes: the Wadden Islands in the Netherlands, the Cyclades in Greece, Shetland in Scotland, and the Aeolian Islands in Italy. In the face of planetary socioenvironmental crises, the reliance on sustainable development strategies, including the energy transition...
Towards a Spatial History of Debt
This paper focuses on the multifaceted role of debt within urban development and planning. Drawing on David Graeber's conceptualization of debt as an integral part of human history, this paper first identifies debt as a key catalyst for economic development, speculation, and accumulation within the capitalist paradigm. Accordingly, we challenge the concept of the spatial fix...
Post 65: Inspirerende Bouwkunst
Nederland heeft een belangwekkende architectuurcultuur, die ook in de recente, naoorlogse geschiedenis bijzondere gebouwen heeft opgeleverd – deels in bezit van het Rijksvastgoedbedrijf. Inspirerende bouwkunst, gaat in op de tijdgeest, ideeën en totstandkoming van de zogenoemde Post 65-gebouwen. Het gaat veelal om doelmatige gebouwen, vaak bijzonder in hun architectonische opzet...
De 'Dutch' in Superdutch.
Isa Walvoort
Isa Walvoort’s thesis explores the construction of Dutch architectural identity through a critical analysis of Bart Lootsma’s influential book, Superdutch: New Architecture in the Netherlands (2000). The study seeks to define the "typically Dutch qualities" Lootsma attributed to the twelve featured firms—including OMA, MVRDV, and West 8—and investigates how this publication shaped the international discourse ...
Identity & Resilience.
Michaela Simeckova
Post-industrial landscapes shape today´s world topography more than one could generally admit or acknowledge. They surround and interfere not only in urban areas, oftentimes being left abandoned and misused, practically at the mercy of destiny. Thus, now the time has come to address the industrial legacy, reclaim it back and, preferably, set it going. The master thesis engages in the global paradigm of revitalising, re-using and ...
Ontworpen Spontaniteit.
Hilde Bloemers
This thesis, titled Ontworpen Spontaniteit (Designed Spontaneity), investigates the integration of ecology within Dutch landscape architecture during the 1970s and 1980s. The research addresses a central tension: whether ecology can truly be "designed" or if the concept remains a professional myth. By adopting an architectural history perspective, Bloemers examines how the "ecological worldview"—fueled ...