Practitioners Interview Series | Esther Stevelink

Esther Stevelink studied at the Technical University of Delft from 1992 to 1997, where she successfully graduated as an architect. She gained professional experience in leading Dutch architectural offices in Amsterdam and The Hague, working on a variety of projects ranging from urban planning to the design of schools and residential buildings.

In 2006 she founded GAAGA together with Arie Bergsma. Her work has received several awards and nominations. In addition to her architectural practice, she focuses on research and teaching as a guest lecturer at TU Delft. From 2007 to 2010 she was a member of the Building Aesthetics Committee of the Municipality of The Hague. In 2015 she was a jury member of the biennial European ideas competition Europan 13 for architecture, urbanism and landscape, for which she and Arie Bergsma won the second prize in 2001 and the first prize in 2010. She joined the OpenBuilding.co network as a founding partner in 2021.

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Photos by Melchior Overdevest, courtesy of GAAGA Architects

Author

Julia Gospodinova
Julia Gospodinova
Architect

Ir. Julia Gospodinova holds an M.Sc. in Architecture, Urbanism, and Building Sciences from TU Delft. Specializing in Building Technology, she graduated cum laude in 2023. Being passionate about circularity and humanitarian architecture, she combined those topics in her thesis, titled: “Circular Transitional Housing for Displaced People in Extreme Conditions: The Case of Pakistan.” The project won the Circularity in the Built Environment Graduation Award in the category of Buildings & Neighborhoods. Currently, she is the secretary at Project Safe Refuge, a foundation dedicated to providing architectural aid to displaced communities.

Circularity for Educators

The platform is intended to provide with content on either circularity or pedagogy for and about circularity. It is one of the outcomes of the Circular Impulse Initiative (CII), a project intending to enhance the integration of circularity in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment education. The platform mainly aims to help tutors get better acquainted with circularity in the built environment by providing a series of resources on this subject that they can either view to get better informed or directly share with their students in class or online. A large number of the Faculty's professors and researchers have contributed substantially both in creating a coherent narrative for circularity in the built environment as well as further elaborating on different aspects of it. Besides this one, a new platform for interaction and direct exchange was also established in parallel that we call ‘Educators for Circularity‘. This one offers the opportunity for all of us to meet and share our experiences and learn from one another.

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