Research

Ongoing and completed research projects from the Lex te Loo Architects think tank.

  • The Subtractive City (2026). Lagos read as the city that converts every withdrawn guarantee into a private substitute. Six subtractions, and why the formal city is the exception, not the rule.
  • The Future Village: Learning from the Village to Design the City (2023). A Dutch-Russian research project documenting 39 villages around Nekrasovka, Moscow. Satellite analysis, field observation, and design proposals for learning from the village to design the city.
  • AM5: Amsterdam, multiplied (2020). A studio of fifty asks what happens if Amsterdam takes responsibility for the five million Dutch arriving by 2050. Six times itself. Denser than Paris. Walkable like Amsterdam. Layered like Tokyo.
  • The New Old: Envisioning the Future of Our Growing Past (2019). Heritage keeps growing and it will never stop. The New Old develops the Time Machine — a computational tool for visualizing heritage growth — and asks how we will deal with the past that has yet to come. With Stacked Venice published in Domus, a 730-page booklet, and an exhibition at Cable Gallery in Shenzhen.
  • Le Grand Puzzle: Manifesta 13 Marseille (2018). Pre-biennial urban research for Manifesta 13 Marseille, with MVRDV and The Why Factory, 2018 to 2020. Three instruments — Maps, Model, Manifesto — applied to a city of 111 villages.
  • Planet Maker (2018). A Why Factory simulator that runs any policy through four coupled planetary systems, Climate, Food, Migration and Mobility, over forty years and scores the result. Run a policy alone and the planet answers one way; couple the four and the combined run diverges from the sum of its parts.
  • Tokyo House (2017). A kinetic live/work house for Tokyo: a field of motorized beams between two slabs that reconfigures itself for performance, work, and rest. Entered as 'Moving Tokyo' in the Living and Working in Tokyo competition (2017).
  • MixingCity: Can I Have What I Want, Right Next to Me? (2015). A computational tool that translates urban activity data into three-dimensional mixed-use building geometry using sphere packing and 3D Voronoi tessellation. Lex te Loo's MSc graduation project at The Why Factory, TU Delft, completed cum laude in 2016. Moscow serves as the case study for the Mono City analysis.
  • PoroCity: Opening up Solidity (2011). A five-year research project by The Why Factory developing the Voxel Tool to measure, compare, and design urban porosity — from the building to the planet. Published by nai010 (2018), exhibited at Mori Art Museum Tokyo and Centre Pompidou Paris.
  • Barba: Life in the Fully Adaptable Environment (2008). A speculative research project by The Why Factory at TU Delft imagining a fictional nanomaterial capable of real-time shape-shifting to create fully adaptive architecture. Developed through five years of design studios, the research culminated in a 400-page book and was featured on Dutch national television.