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ARCHITECTURE
CITIES
LANSCAPES
ARCHITECTURE
CITIES
LANDSCAPES
Recent Activities.
Our programme goes beyond the classroom, offering a wide range of activities that bring research and theory to life. Through workshops, site visits, fieldwork, and collaborative projects, students actively explore the intersections of architecture, heritage, urbanism, and landscapes. These experiences foster critical thinking, creativity, and interdisciplinary collaboration, allowing students to engage directly with contemporary challenges and diverse communities while building practical skills that complement their academic learning.
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 Aprial 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 ...
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Archives of Space, Sounds and Materials
Traces of sight, sound, smell and touch; notions of space and material and immaterial heritage; built and natural environments as sites of memory: These are some of the central throughlines of recent research across humanities disciplines. How do we apply them to navigate complex pasts and address the pressing issues of the present? This event marks the launch of four ...
AISU 2025 Conference
In this paper, we will give an overview of military architecture in the Netherlands, which is very much connected to urban development. Since the late medieval period Holland is the most urbanized region in Europe, with the northern part of Italy. This development started quite recently compared to other European regions, with the construction of earthen walls and wooden palisades around cities...
Inauguration Speech, prof. Freek Schmidt
In his inaugural lecture Architectuur als bewijs, Freek Schmidt argues for understanding architecture not merely as aesthetic object or isolated artefact, but as a historically grounded, culturally mediated practice that both shapes and reflects the lived environment. Drawing on case studies such as the VU Main Building and broader debates about obsolescence ...
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