Staff

In 2014 Kees Kaan founded KAAN Architecten together with partners Vincent Panhuysen and Dikkie Scipio, after collaborating with Felix Claus for 25 years as Claus en Kaan Architecten. 

He has built up a national and international range of projects, urban planning, architecture and interior design, among which in the last five years the won competitions for the master plan El Prat de Llobregat in Barcelona, the Chambre des Métiers et de l’Artisanat in Lille, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and the Pharmacy building on the campus of the University of Granada. 

Realized projects include the Supreme Court of The Netherlands, Provinciehuis Noord-Brabant and the multiple awards winning the Crematorium Heimolen in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, the Netherlands Forensic Institute in The Hague, awarded with the Lensvelt De Architect Interior Prize, and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. Various books and exhibitions have been dedicated to his body of work. 

Kees Kaan has been a practice professor of Architectural Design (Chair of Materialization) at the Delft University of Technology since 2006. In 2012 he founded a new Chair ‘Complex Projects’. The ambition of this program is to develop analytical and critical thinking skills on any scale projects in the city, merging knowledge from the different fields of architecture and urbanism.  

As well as taking on a range of peripheral activities, he is an international lecturer and member of various juries and boards both in the Netherlands and abroad, in cities like Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Madrid, Mexico City, Paris, Split, São Paulo, Brasilia, Novosibirsk and Tokyo. 

Henri van Bennekom (1964) graduated cum laude from TU Delft faculty of Architecture, and graduated from the Amsterdamse Technische Hogeschool. He has worked primarily as a designer/project leader on large public buildings, such as the headquarters of ‘De Nederlandsche Bank’ in Amsterdam, The European Patent Office in The Hague (at A+D+P Architecten), the Netherlands Forensic Institute in the Hague (with Claus en Kaan Architecten), and the Courts of Justice in Zwolle (for the Governmental Building Agency). Henri van Bennekom is founding partner of the architectural firm ‘VBVP Architecten’, mainly designing private residences in The Netherlands and The United States. Together with Kees Kaan he is responsible for the Chair of complex projects. 

After graduating in architecture (1998) from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, Henriette Bier has worked with Morphosis (1999-2001) on internationally relevant projects in the US and Europe. She has taught digitally-driven architectural design (2002-2003) at universities in Austria, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and since 2004 she mainly teaches and researches at Technical University Delft (TUD) with focus on Robotic Building. She initiated and coordinated (2005-06) the workshop and lecture series on Digital Design and Fabrication with invited guests from MIT and ETHZ and finalized (2008) her PhD on System-embedded Intelligence in Architecture. She coordinated EU projects E-Archidoct and F2F Continuum (2007-10) and led 4TU projects RDCB and Adaptive Joints (2015-18). 2017-19, she has been appointed professor at Dessau Institute of Architecture. Results of her research are internationally published in books, journals and conference proceedings and she regularly lectures and leads workshops internationally.

Olindo Caso graduated at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ (1988, with honourable mention). In 1990 he began collaborating with the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands, where in 1999 he achieved his Ph.D. defending a dissertation about the impact of ICT applications for the design of spatial settings. Presently he is part of the ‘Complex Projects’ Group at the Department of Architecture of the TU Delft, and a member of the research group ‘Architecture and the City’. At TU Delft Olindo is engaged in master education and research activities. In doing this, Urban Architectre and Hybrid Buildings are the guiding theme’s. Main specific research interests relate to the architecture of the infrastructure, in particular the cultural infrastructure and the infrastructure of mobility. Olindo Caso is a specialist in multidisciplinary research. He is the author of (international) publications and research reports, among which Architettura contemporanea: Olanda (Milan:Motta, 2009) and ATLAS. Makerspaces in Public Libraries in the Netherlands (Delft: TU Open, 2019).

Esther Gramsbergen has a degree in architecture from TU Delft and worked as an architect in various offices, among which Karelse van der Meer Architecten (Groningen, Rotterdam) and the Architecten Cie. (Amsterdam). She has been teaching and researching at the TU Delft since 1999 and is co-author of Zakboek voor de woonomgeving (2001). She has further publications on urban morphology of Amsterdam and Dordrecht. In 2009 she became editor of OverHolland, a series of books dedicated to the study of the Dutch Town, published on behalf of Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture. In 2011 she was awarded the title of dottore di ricerca at the IUAV University of Venice for her study Inner fringe belts and the formationof the knowledge infrastructure in Amsterdam, 1578-1880.

Negar Sanaan Bensi is an architect, educator, and researcher. She holds a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from TU Delft and she is a UKNA fellow.She received an honorable mention in the National Archiprix 2011 in the Netherlands for her graduation project ' Space of the Voids: Space of Remembrance and Forgetfulness'. Her research focuses on the relation between architecture and territory, infrastructure, and inhabitation, specifically in the context of the Iranian Plateau and the Middle East. She has taught at TU Delft, Tilburg Fontys and Rotterdam Academy, Syracuse University NYC, and lectured at the University of Antwerp and IIAS in Leiden. She is part of the editorial board of the Footprint Journal and together with dr. Francesco Marullo, the co-editor of the Issue of Footprint #23: The Architecture of Logistics. Her recent publication is “The Qanat System: A Reflection on the Heritage of the Extraction of Hidden Waters” in Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage edited by Carola Hein. She is part of the research group "Borders & Territories" in the Architecture Department at TU Delft.  She has experience in practice individually and in collaboration with several offices such as ZUS [Zone Urbaine Sensible], Import. Export Architecture, VOF Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten, and GFC.

Hrvoje Smidihen is a project architect in KAAN Architecten, and lecturer at TU Delft. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb and worked for Studio Up in Croatia. He received a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urban Planning (with honours) from the Technical University in Delft and garnered an Archi Prix nomination with his final graduation project. Soon after graduation, in 2015, he joined KAAN Architecten, where he has been involved in numerous projects in different phases. After leading the winning team for the New Schiphol Terminal competition in 2017, he continued his involvement in the development of the terminal design. Active as a teacher and researcher, Hrvoje leads a graduation studio lab in the Chair of Complex projects since 2017, where he is investigating the future of large-scale urban developments. In 2019, he collaborated with AMS institute on ‘Future of Amsterdam, AMS 2050’. 

Yang Zhang is a Rotterdam based architect. She graduated as post-master on Architecture and Urban Design from The Berlage in 2015. She works as project leader in KAAN Architecten, projects scale from interior to urban planning, mainly in Europe and Asia.

She is also involved in curation and design for exhibitions and magazines, like “FLOWCITY” in Shenzhen Biennale, WA magazine <non-Super Dutch>, etc (as main responsible). Since 2017, she has been teaching the architecture master program in Complex Projects.

Marija Mateljan is a PhD researcher at the chair of Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture, and a teacher in the Complex Projects graduation lab at TU Delft. At the intersection of Architecture, Computer Vision and Media Studies, her PhD research explores interfaces between design representation and description, visual reasoning, design methods, and the digitalisation of cultural techniques. Considering the importance of architectural representation for design and communication, she investigates if and how architectural visual data, e.g. drawings, diagrams, renders, photos, could be re-used by state-of-the-art technologies to develop new building design methods employing data circularity. Between 2015 and 2021, Marija worked at KAAN Architecten on various Dutch and international projects, including Museum Paleis het Loo, currently under construction, and the New Schiphol Airport Terminal. Marija is experienced in design development and interdisciplinary coordination in various project phases. Her experience in practice made her interested in Computer Vision, specifically its potential to recognize patterns in architectural visual data, connecting to a more conceptual level of building design by utilizing domain-specific knowledge and visual cognitive capabilities. Before joining KAAN, she worked as a freelance architect in Rotterdam. In 2014 she obtained her MSc degree in Architecture with honours at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft. Prior to her studies in Delft, she completed her undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb.

Jelmer van Zalingen completed his Masters of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology in 2017 with honours. His graduation work was nominated for the ArchiPrix. He has been working since at the chair of Complex Projects and teaching in the graduation lab. Jelmer has organized a series of events and exhibitions for the chair of Complex Projects including working as an editor for the AMS 2050 future catalogue publication. Jelmer is currently a practicing architect at the office of KAAN Architecten in Rotterdam, where he has been involved as an architect on multiple projects, including the New Schiphol Terminal project.