Robin van Vemde

In a world that is becoming increasingly rational, efficient and controlled, our mental richness is at risk of diminishing. Our reality is increasingly shaped by functional logic and cognitive efficiency, placing mental enrichment, imagination and meaning under pressure. This “disenchantment of the world,” as Max Weber described it, leads to mental poverty, alienation and a collective longing for meaning and escape.

In much contemporary architecture, this is reflected in the nightmare of the suspended ceiling: the symbol of a suffocated, constructed reality in which space is approached solely as an instrument, rather than as a mental or sensory experience.

From this urgency, the graduation project asks the following question:
Can architecture, through narrative and fiction, contribute to the mental enrichment of the human being and offer a counterbalance to an over-constructed reality?

This project emerged from personal experience and a fascination with dreams and the power of magical realism. It combines philosophical and psychological reflection with experimental design strategies and narrative architecture. Through poetic drawings, fictional interventions and small intermediary design studies, the project searches for spaces that are not only functional, but also meaningful, mysterious and transformative.

The guiding concept “Form is Fiction follows Form” overturns the classic modernist dogma “form follows function.” Instead, architectural form is understood as a carrier of fiction, experience and mental exploration. Architecture becomes a medium for probing alternative realities in which the inexplicable, the playful and the symbolic are granted a full and legitimate role.

The project materialises in the design of a Cabinet of Curiosities: an architectural experience in which reality and fiction merge. It functions as both a physical and metaphorical translation of the central research question. The European Parliament and its surroundings serve as a case study: a place that embodies bureaucratic order and cognitive logic is reinterpreted through fictional interventions and magical-realist sequences.

Think of spaces such as:

• Pluxor, a square based on Freud’s iceberg theory, where emotions are felt beneath the surface;
• The Ministry of Timelessness, where fluid time makes room for dreams and creativity;
• The Dissonance Colonnade and Breakout Cells, which invite introspection, wonder and the release of mental blockages.

By literally breaking open the grid of the existing order, a new narrative emerges: a spatial exploration of “what if.” The visitor becomes a dreamer, a participant in a physical tale in which architecture is not merely a building, but an invitation to inner movement.

This manifesto asserts that architecture must be more than a response to a functional question. It should provoke, unsettle, enchant and inspire. It should open a mental space in which we relearn how to dream, to lose ourselves, and to find meaning beyond the logic of utility and control.

Rather than offering ready-made answers, this project invites imagination — a different way of seeing, a search for the magical in-between within ourselves and in the world beyond the familiar.