Delft — Theo Jansen

Visit to the Strandbeest Mortuarium exhibition with guided tour and talk by Theo Jansen.

Theo Jansen is a local artist from the Hague based in Scheveningen, he studied physics at the Delft University. While at Delft, Jansen was involved in many projects that involved both art and technology, including a paint machine and a flying-saucer machine. Since 1990, Jansen has been creating strandbeesten (Dutch for "beach beasts"), which are moving kinetic structures, sometimes wind-propelled, that resemble walking animals, described by Jansen as ‘artificial life’. All of his models are based on a system of triangles and connecting links which convert the rotation of an axle into a stepping motion of six or more legs. Constructed from PVC piping, wood, fabric airfoils, and zip ties, Jansen's sculptures are constantly being improved and are designed to function in the sandy beach environment in which Jansen releases them.

INSIDE — Hilde Bouchez

Hilde is an art historian, anthropologist, professor of design history, author and freelance journalist. In her book “A wild thing” (2017) she revealed a writing workshop that she did with her students while teaching at Design Academy Eindhoven. The workshop inspires in students the urgency to look at spaces emotionally, find words to tell stories that hide in their corners, take action. In short, she invites the students to write two texts, both describing the same space. One of the texts is supposed to be written in academic style, the second one in emotional, personal tone, as she describes: almost like a love letter. As both 1st and 2nd years are working on writing assignments in this period it was an extraordinary chance for them to step up, unlock their creativity and bridge the academic writing with their personal expression.

Utrecht — Rietveld Schröder House and Rogier Martens Studio

Rietveld Schröder House

Built in 1924 by Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schröder. The house was intended to promote a lifestyle of freedom and simplicity, where the layout is a direct result of the family's actions and needs rather than being predetermined. The act of reconfiguring the house each day, such as opening and closing sliding doors and walls, is a performative aspect of the architecture, making the building itself a tool for a lifestyle. Key performative features include the sliding walls on the upper floor that allow residents to reconfigure the open space throughout the day, the transition from inside to outside created by the large corner window that opens to the elements, and the multi-functional use of spaces like the ground floor, which combines a studio, kitchen, and living areas.

Rogier Martens Studio

Founded in 2006, the studio specializes in product and exhibition design, prioritizing objects and environments with an unmistakable identity. Rogier: “Content is always our guiding principle. Identity, routing, and complex challenges combined with innovative narrative forms. A dedicated design team, tailored to the needs and always in collaboration with the museum”.

Schiedam — Ben Weir

Ben Weir is an architect who rejects the notion of the architect as a neutral service provider. His practice spans drawing, writing, research, and building, through which he seeks to uncover hidden spatial and material potentials. He generates projects through the survey of existing conditions, a process that invents as much as it records. He favours dynamism, the unfinished, and the open-to-change, while rejecting demolition and the logic of tabula rasa. His work dissects, re-presents, and interrogates existing urban artefacts, seeking to express their current condition, situation, and relationship to us.

Visit and lecture by Ben Weir at his intervention in ‘De Hoop’, a former distillery building from 1874 that awaits renovation, having faced decades of neglect. It has spent time as an asbestos factory and a wood workshop, amongst other things. It has been much altered as a result. “The building is in a state of flux, and of this we took advantage, used the opportunity to open the building up. We stripped away everything of no heritage value: defunct cabling and pipework, poorly constructed apartment walls, removed all floorboards to inspect for rot. What was left was an empty shell. The intervention becomes a bridge with a dual function. An access platform for public viewing, plus a structural member pinning together the existing floor joists, now that the flooring is (temporarily) gone”.

Pressure Cooker

During Studio III research is more extensive than usual, easily becoming the comfort zone. Questions multiply, references accumulate, and ideas continue to evolve shaping an endless loop of conceptual speculation that sometimes can detach from the tangible context of the Studio Urban.

Pressure Cooker was conceived as a deliberate interruption to this dynamic. Inherited from previous generations of alumni assistants, the workshop invites students to temporarily step aside from analysis and engage with their projects through making. It is an opportunity to move from speculation to experimentation, from thinking about a project to physically testing it.

The day combines collective brainstorming with rapid prototyping. Ideas are shared, challenged, and expanded through conversation before being translated into material form. Whether working with found objects, construction materials, drawings, systems, or performative actions, students are encouraged to test their assumptions and push their projects beyond the safety of the conceptual realm.

What makes the workshop valuable is not the production of successful outcomes, but the production of knowledge. A prototype that fails can be just as productive as one that succeeds. Both reveal something that could not have been discovered through research alone.

Pressure Cooker is a workshop that reminds us that making is a form of thinking. Sometimes the best way is stop speculating, build, test, and learn from what happens next.

Practice as Identity — Studio Urban

Practice as Identity is a session centred on navigating the transition after graduation - how to shape a professional path and develop a designer identity within spatial design and architecture.

The opening lecture explored how one’s practice can be approached as an extension of personal identity, alongside perspectives drawn from professional and business contexts.

As part of the workshop, we introduced a “handshake” exercise, where students practised clearly presenting themselves and their specialisation. The aim was to emphasise the importance of articulating what you do as a designer - especially in a field where the term can mean many different things.

The session concluded with inspiring contributions from our alumni speakers, who shared their experiences of building independent practices, communities, and networks of collaborators and clients, with the following alumni guests:

Led and developed by Misia Zesławska.

Scaffolding Session

Graduation projects rarely fail because of a lack of ideas. More often, they stall under the weight of their own complexity.

As recently graduated students, we know this uncomfortable moment between clarity and uncertainty all too well: the project is largely defined, yet its realization still feels distant. Tasks accumulate, decisions multiply, and the challenge shifts from imagining possibilities to creating the conditions that allow the work to emerge. Scaffolding Session was conceived as a temporary structure for this moment. A space to discuss, plan, and anchor everything surrounding the project: priorities, timelines, production strategies, fears, doubts, and the practical realities of bringing an ambitious body of work into the world.

Combining collective reflection with one-on-one conversations, we worked together with students to map the invisible structures behind their graduation projects. What needs to happen first? What is essential? What can change? What support is still missing? Gradually, the feeling of overwhelm began to give way to clarity, direction, and a sense of agency.

The workshop understands planning not as a rigid framework, but as a set of tools for reducing noise, making space for decisions, and recovering the mental bandwidth needed to remain creative during this important final push.

Studio Digest — Round Table

Creative practice often moves so quickly from one deadline to the next that there is little time to pause and look back. Studio Digest was conceived as a collective moment of looking back into 1st year experiences, to move forward towards graduation the upcoming year. Within this context, a round table format was proposed, inviting students to revisit their work, processes, methodologies and intuitions and identify the threads connecting months of research, experimentation, doubts, and discoveries.

What made the session particularly meaningful was its reliance on peer feedback. The round table is intentionally designed to move away from traditional models of evaluation and guidance. Instead of seeking approval from tutors, the students were invited to observe, listen, question, and reflect together. Through generous conversations, thoughtful questions, and attentive listening, students helped one another recognize blind spots, recurring themes, and hidden potentials within their work.

Throughout the day, students proved not only capable of offering thoughtful and critical feedback, but also genuinely invested in supporting each other's growth. The round table created a space where reflection became collective, and where feedback was understood not as evaluation, but as a shared effort to help one another see more clearly into what's to come next year.