23/04/2026
Studio Back to Future?
Wintersemester 25
Flexibility, participation, spatial freedom, long-term adaptability - these are today´s architectural buzz-words. Looking back into architectural history, we realize it was the very same set of promises that drove the discipline half a century ago. Looking back fifty years - from the then imagined self-determined and flexible future – it is our conviction that we cannot just repeat the same mantras. Instead, we need to be aware of the broken promises and understand their inherent contradictions. Our studio focuses on exactly this déjà-vu.
Few architects embodied the above-mentioned ideals as rigorously as Hermann Hertzberger.
His Centraal Beheer project - modular, open, democratic - was imagined as a proto-city, a collective framework for freedom and adaptability. Yet its spatial reality reveals deep paradoxes.
A building designed as a city turns inward and is disconnected from its context; a flexible grid becomes disorienting and rigid. Structural coherence undermines spatial legibility by its users. The non-hierarchical plan, meant to empower, introduces forms of control. The building has been sitting empty for twelve years.
Today, half a century after its realization, the project stands as both promise and paradox.
Our studio neither sought to restore nor to preserve Hertzberger’s project.
Instead, in a first step, the students carefully analysed it. Based on their in-depth understanding, they reformulated its original promises and developed programmatic and architectural strategies for its renewed occupation.
Students:
Christina Albrecht
Ahmad Harre
Dima Abuzaid
Anna G***k
Greta Feldmann
Jimena Chauca
Johannes Doering
Tobias Joksch
Philipp Müller
Mark Neubauer
Christina Giers
Sophia Von Olnhausen
Pia Trenn
Tzu Wei Chang
Xinyue Yu
External Jury Members:
Herman Hertzberger
Laurens Jan ten Kate (HHA)
Marjolein Kuipers (Apeldoorn City Council)
