According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 55% of the Dutch land surface is at risk of flooding – 26% of the country is below sea level, and 29% is potentially susceptible to river flooding.[1] If since 1900 sea level rise of the North Sea near the Dutch coast has been 19 cm, which is comparable with the global average,^[2] over the last decades, sea level rise near the Dutch coast has increased to 3 mm per year, an increase by 50% compared with the average rate of sea level rise over the 20th century.

In acknowledging the challenges caused by climate change, different educational initiatives have recently taken place across the country to investigate urban and architectural solutions. Among those, is “Resilience by Design”, a pedagogic model implemented at TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture, within the Public Building Group.

This proposal will illustrate the principles, the tools and the architectural examples of “Resilience-by-Design”. In Resilience-by-Design, climate change is studied and investigated at the scale of architecture – that is, the design of the buildings: how buildings can prepare for climate change, how their structure can adapt to uncertain scenarios, what spatial and material characteristics they need to acquire in order to resist shocks. Students learn concrete principles: adaptability, reuse, modular expansion, disassembly, flexibility. Each of those principles implies different techniques and design decisions – clear spans, generous floor-to-floor heights, flat floors, interior non-load-bearing partitions, raised corridor / circulation, water storage, wet-proofing materials, exposed connections, use of mechanical fasteners. In applying those and other decisions, students acknowledge the importance of designing for and with climate change, and familiarize with innovative design strategies which favor reuse rather new constructions, sustainability rather than land consumption.

[1] Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, https://www.pbl.nl/en/correction-wording-flood-risks

^[2] Platform Communication on Climate Change, 2006. The state of the climate 2006 (text in Dutch), 23 pp.

On Resilience-by-Design as pedagogic model

- Jan Van den Akker, Koeno Gravemeijer, Susan McKenney, Nienke Nieveen. Educational Design Research (London: Routledge, 2006).

- Kees Dorst, Notes On Design, How Creative Practice Works (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2018).

- Ranulph Glanville, ‘Researching Design and Designing Research,’ in Design Issues, Summer, 1999, Vol. 15, No. 2, Design Research (Summer, 1999), pp. 80-91. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1511844

- Alan Lipman, Strategies for Architectural Research: A Comment, in Architectural Research and Teaching, November 1970, Vol. 1, No. 2 (November 1970), pp. 56-57. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24654980

- Jan Silberberger (ed.), Against and For Method. Revisiting Architectural Design as Research (Zurich, GTA Verlag, 2021).

- Henk Slager, (ed). The Postresearch Condition (Utrecht: Metropolis M Books, 2021).

- Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing, Visual Research Methods in Architecture (Bristol: Intellect, 2021).

On Resilient Architecture

- A+T 39-40, RECLAIM Remediate Reuse Recycle. (Spanish and English Edition), 2012.

- AIA (American Institute of Architects), Buildings that last: Design for Adaptability, Deconstruction, and Reuse: https://content.aia.org/sites/default/files/2020-03/ADR-Guide-final_0.pdf

- BNA (The Royal Institute of Dutch Architects), We Are Going Circular. BNA Manifesto (Amsterdam: BNA, 2017).

- Jonas Bäckström, The Adaptable Dwelling. How does the Open Building and flexible design perform in residential architecture? Thesis Report. Umeå School of Architecture, 2022-04-13.

- IKE (Institut Konstruktives Entwerfen), Re-Use in Construction: A Compendium of Circular Architecture (Zurich: Park Books, 2022).

- Kasper Guldager Jensen, John Sommer (eds.), Building A Circular Future (Copenhagen: GXN, 2016).

- Steven Lammersen, How Can We Design for a Remountable and Flexible Open Building? Faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology.

- Yeoryia Manolopoulou, “Open Score Architecture,” in Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice: Curated Works from the P.E.A.R. Journal, edited by Matthew Butcher and Megan O’Shea (Los Angeles: UCL Press, 2020), 214–41.

- OASE 85. Productive Uncertainty: Indeterminacy in Spatial Design, Planning and Management, 2012.

- Robert Schmidt and Simon Austin, Adaptable Architecture. Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2016).

The story of salmon migration in the river Murg in the Northern Black Forest reveals shifting conceptions of aliveness across 200 years of industrial transformation in the Murg Valley, beginning in the 19th century. Rather than portraying the landscape as a passive backdrop, this project investigates it as a living archive of infrastructures, ecological systems, and media technologies. Following the transition from a craft-based to an industrialized fluvial economy, a series of technological thresholds are examined as temporal entry points to explore how infrastructures fundamentally altered biological, ecological, and socio-cultural networks. Cultural perspectives, from Wilhelm Hauff’s tale Das kalte Herz to a contemporary initiative promoting a salmon-themed hiking trail, illustrate how socio-ecological imaginaries of the valley intertwine with its technical and ecological realities.

Central to the investigation is a critique of the persistent romanticization of rural environments through their perceptual division into active, living subjects and passive, objectified matter. Drawing from media studies, philosophy of technology, and ecological humanities, infrastructures are explored as living rejections of such dichotomies.

As the river was restructured for paper production and hydroelectric dams, infrastructures disrupted ecological flows, integrating it into a technical environment and blocking the salmon’s native spawning grounds. Today, however, the relation between technological and biological patterns of life has been reimagined, and the implementation of fish staircases has enabled the salmon’s successful reintroduction to the region. Thus, arriving at a more holistic conception of aliveness is key to moving beyond exclusionary or extractive conceptions of “nature”. The salmon’s return depended not only on ecological restoration but also on cultural and conceptual shifts: infrastructures must be understood as milieu-specific agents, integral to natural environments and capable of enabling and foreclosing existence for a broad range of beings.

Ultimately, the Murg Valley serves as a case study for broader questions of care, remediation, and ecological imagination in the Anthropocene. Integrating scientific and artistic methods, the project contributes to architectural research on how to reconceive the relations between landscapes, nature, and technology. It demonstrates how acknowledging aliveness can cultivate more inclusive strategies of restoration, cohabitation, and the design of livable futures.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Fleischhacker, Thomas. “Wie ein Fluss die industrielle Entwicklung erlebt.” In Industrialisierung im Nordschwarzwald, edited by Ralf Hennl and Klaus Krimm, 177–86. Oberrheinische Studien 34. Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2016.

Frichot, Hélène. Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

Kurlansky, Mark. Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of a Common Fate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Scheifele, Martin, Christian Katz, and Ernst Wolf. Die Murgschifferschaft: Geschichte des Flosshandels, des Waldes und der Holzindustrie im Murgtal. Gernsbach: Casimir Katz Verlag, 1988.

Schweinfurth, Wolfgang. “Geographie anthropogener Einflüsse: Das Murgsystem im Nordschwarzwald.” In Mannheimer Geographische Arbeiten, edited by Irmtraud Dörrer, Peter Frankenberg, Walter Gabe, Gernot Höhl, and Christian Jentsch, vol. 26. Mannheim: Universität Mannheim, Geographisches Institut, 1990.

Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Vol. 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

“Architecture is the daughter of agriculture.”
This phrase reveals an ancient truth: agriculture allowed humans to settle, to build, to shape culture. Through food, we developed a deep relationship with our environment: a direct, bodily understanding of place, season, and material. Food grounds us. Shouldn’t architecture do the same?
Farmers, bakers, and fermenters develop deep knowledge through touch, smell, and time. Their work is shaped by context, not imposed upon it. This is the kind of relational, adaptive intelligence architecture needs.

Fermentation, in particular, embodies this shift. It’s an ancient method of transformation, not through domination, but through collaboration with microorganisms, time, temperature, and material. It cannot be rushed. It resists control. Yet its outcomes are rich, complex, and enduring. What if building were more like fermenting?

We need to rethink the architectural process: the roles, the actions, the hierarchies. Move away from rigid control and toward participation, from acceleration to attunement. Fermentation teaches us to work with what exists, to allow things to evolve, to embrace uncertainty and change. Its slowness is not inefficiency, it’s a kind of care that leads to longevity, quality, and depth.

Like a baker who knows by hand when the dough is ready, architects need tacit knowledge, an intuitive, material understanding built through experience. This is not a return to the past, but a way forward: grounded, responsible, connected.

A fermentative culture of practice redefines architecture as an open, non-linear process. Practices such as studio dreiSt e.g. demonstrate how waste cycles and collective reassembly can carry experimental approaches into first applications. Material, time, and context unfold as feedback loops during the design and construction phase, nourishing the work with knowledge as it emerges. This also means to adapt the design in response to material actual behave, rather than forcing them into predetermined forms. Each process is both continuation and renewal, embedding building within ecological and social metabolisms that regenerate themselves. In this sense, fermentation offers architecture a framework that complements, rather than replaces, conventional approaches: the aim is less to deliver fixed objects than to establish conditions that remain open, adaptive, and relational.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.

Zilber, David, and René Redzepi. 2018. The Noma Guide to Fermentation. New York: Artisan.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Traditional approaches to longevity in the built environment emphasise durability, permanence, resistance to decay, and minimal maintenance. Maintenance is treated as a technical afterthought, removed from the work of planners, and increasingly, also the inhabitants. I challenge that paradigm by advancing multispecies-maintenance as a framework for regenerative longevity. Rather than preserving structures as static fortresses, this means understanding them as living assemblages sustained through continuous transformation of repair, decomposition, and adaptation by humans and non-humans alike.

Drawing on maintenance studies, material cultures, and Morton’s notion of the hyperobject, I argue that maintenance operates as a temporally vast, distributed process that exceeds human control and understanding. Thus, collective maintenance of our built environment by all living organisms must become a fundamental, situated consideration in all stages. Fungi, mosses, microbes, and other organisms already perform maintenance, regulating humidity, repairing soils, and decomposing matter. These are not metaphors but ecological realities that sustain our environment. Multispecies-maintenance offers a paradigm shift by viewing maintenance as active collaboration between humans and non-humans. Instead of positioning architecture as separate from ecological processes, it integrates living organisms as active stakeholders, fostering symbiotic structures that engage with living networks. This perspective challenges existing norms where layers remain rigidly separated and controlled, in contrast to the entanglements found in natural systems. Thus, multispecies-maintenance becomes how buildings participate in life, rather than shield against it. It opens the potential to redistribute labour across species, countering the commodification and rigid separations that define current practices and ownership.

Unfortunately, fetishisation of novelty, “purity”, and capital neglects the behavioural shifts necessary for implementation and currently offers no examples. Thus, my argumentations sit in a space of critical theory and negative capability. What it offers is a methodology, a new palimpsest vernacular, collaborative, inter-species architecture, rebuilding the relationship between the environment and its inhabitants by reconstituting the genius loci eroded by capitalist commodification.

The necessary shift is examined in two phases: The Now, a messy transitional space for unlearning and interim materiality; and The Future, where maintenance, decay, and biological intelligence are embedded at conception into architectural systems and computational/material logic.

Andréen, David, and Ana Goidea. “Principles of Biological Design as a Model for Biodesign and Biofabrication in Architecture.” Architecture, Structures and Construction 2 (May 11, 2022): 481–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44150-022-00049-6.

Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn. Penguin, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe. Vittorio Klostermann, 2000.

Héléne Frichot. Dirty Theory. Troubling Architecture. Braunach: Deutscher Spurbuchverlag, 2019.

MATERIAL CULTURES. MATERIAL REFORM. MACK, 2022.

Mattern, Shannon. “Maintenance and Care.” Places Journal, no. 2018 (November 20, 2018). https://doi.org/10.22269/181120.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci. Rizzoli, 1980.

Russell, Andrew, and Lee Vinsel. “Hail the Maintainers.” Aeon. Aeon, April 7, 2016. https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more.

Sample, Hilary. Maintenance Architecture. The MIT Press EBooks. The MIT Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9316.001.0001.

Across Amazonia, ancient sites have been discovered whose dark soils demonstrate exceptional fertility. Locally known as terra preta, these sites originate as far back as 2500 BC and exist in stark contrast to common weathered latosols of the tropics. Riddled with bones, ceramic shards, and lithic fragments, these soils are no result of natural phenomena, but rather the formative by-product of ecologically-integrated societies. Attuned to the cycles of decomposition, indigenous societies had developed complex forms of semi-domesticated agroforestry that reworked vegetal and animal refuse back into the earth. Their soil was not merely a forum for extraction, but rather a terrestrial legacy that was actively cultivated. At the heart of this relationship is the employment of pyrolysis, a form of anaerobic ‘fire’ that thermally decomposes organic matter into stable forms of carbon that persist in the soil for millenia . Edifical Dark Earth is the architectural translation of terra preta. Imbued within ceramics, biogenic carbon builds upon a rich legacy of earthen structures to create a novel hybrid of ancient materials. These carbonaceous structures utilise carbon’s microscopic properties to absorb atmospheric pollution, filter contaminated water, and increase soil fertility. Carbon becomes an architectural material, whose intricate porosities reflect an intra-scalar approach to space making. Not only does this represent a durable, scalable method of carbon sequestration, it also harnesses the intrinsic properties of biological matter into ecologically active buildings. Perhaps most significantly, these materials can be inoculated and therefore, microbially active. Their interconnected porosities enable water retention and efficient nutrient adsorption, allowing bacteria, mycorhizzal funghi, and other microorganisms to flourish deep within them. Architecture becomes substrate, where microbial inoculations can even be tailored towards medical or agricultural receptions (i.e. using nitrogen-fixing diazotrophs to reinforce soil fertility in agrarian contexts). Inert materials suddenly become mediums of fecundity, upheaving traditional conceptions of the city as a place of non-nature. These architectures are not only made of biological matter, they cultivate living ecologies within architectural terroirs that resituate humans into multispecies urbanities.

References:

Bezerra, Joana. The Brazilian Amazon: Politics, Science and International Relations In the History of the Forest. Springer, 2015.

Glaser, B, and William I Woods. Amazonian Dark Earths: Explorations In Space and Time. Springer, 2004.

Keefe, Laurence. Earth Building: Methods and Materials, Repair and Conservation. Taylor & Francis, 2005.

Lehmann, Johannes et al., Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin Properties Management. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.

Lehmann, Johannes; Gaunt, John; and Rondon, Marco. Bio-Char Sequestration In Terrestrial Ecosystems - A Review. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change. Springer, 2006.

Lehmann, Johannes; Joseph, Stephen. Biochar for Environmental Management. Earthscan, 2009

Schmidt, Hans-Peter, and Taylor, Paul. “Kon-Tiki - The Democratization of Biochar Production.” The Biochar Journal. November 29, 2014. www.biochar-journal.org/en/ct/39

Schmidt, Hans-Peter, and Wilson, Kelpie. “The 55 Uses of Biochar.” The Biochar Journal. May 12, 2014. https://www.biochar-journal.org/en/ct/2

Woods, Williams et al., Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision. Springer, 2008.

Image References:

Microscopy in collaboration with Julian Rodriguez Jirau