Klaske Havik
Klaske is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft and is internationally active at the intersection of architecture and literature. In addition to her research and teaching activities, she is an author, editor, and chair of the European network Writing Urban Places.
Klaske studied architecture in Delft and Helsinki, and literary writing in Amsterdam. In 2012 she earned her doctorate at TU Delft with the dissertation Urban Literacy. A Scriptive Approach to the Experience, Use and Imagination of Place, on which her book Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (nai010, 2014) is based.
Havik was editor of the Dutch architecture magazine de Architect and of the Dutch-Belgian professional journal OASE, for which she compiled, among others, the issues 'Building Atmosphere' (2013), 'Productive Uncertainty' (2011), and 'Architecture and Literature' (2007). She initiated the platform Writingplace and organized the conference Writingplace. Literary Methods in Architectural Research and Design in 2013, which resulted in the book Writingplace. Investigations in Architecture and Literature (2016). In 2017 she founded the Writingplace Journal for Architecture and Literature. Together with Tom Avermaete and Hans Teerds, she previously edited the anthology Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (2009).
For her contribution to the architectural debate, Havik received the Dutch Architect of the Year Award in 2014. She currently leads the European COST network Writing Urban Places.
In addition to her academic work, Havik is also a literary author: her poems and stories have appeared in DWB, Terras, De Revisor, and Vanuit de Lucht, and have been translated into English (Way and Further, 2021) and Estonian (Tee Edasine, 2026). Her Dutch-language poetry collection Benader was published by Van Oorschot.
From 2015 to 2017 she was Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Tampere University of Technology in Finland. Since 2021 she has been Professor of Methods of Analysis and Imagination at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft, where on 1 October of that year she delivered her inaugural lecture, 'Poetics of the Possible: Methods of Architectural Analysis and Imagination'. In 2022 she received an honorary doctorate from Tampere University.