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Platon’s main research interests in architecture and urban design explore architecture in relation to the politics of labour, economy, law and social struggles. Tracing the link between conflict, urban management and architectural form, his research work has been formulated within The City as a Project Research Collective and developed to his PhD dissertation and multiple publications, lectures, seminars, and course material – history/theory and design studios.

His thesis ‘Beyond the Informal City: Athens and the possibility of an Urban Common’ investigated the recent history of planning in Athens and the Greek city, defining an original method of study of urban form through distinct paradigmatic objects, legal frameworks and the politics of urban development. Since, this relation between archetypes and protocols has formulated a new approach into the history of the city and research-by-design practices.

Currently, Platon is working on a book proposal with selected chapters and essays on Athens as a Project (to be published in 2022)

The following book chapters, articles and conference papers emerged from this work:

2020. From asset to debt and dispossession: Housing in the years of economic crisis in Greece.

Paper presentation and lead panel in: Housing and the City, organised by AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association), 19-21 November 2020.

Paper presentation in: PhD Symposium, organised by the City/Architecture PhD Programme of the Architectural Association, London, 26 October 2016.

2019. Designing the Informal – The case of Greece.

Essay and conference transcripts published in: Athens: From Informal to Paradigm. Athens: Futura, 190-205.

2017. Domestic, Production and Debt: for a Theory of the Informal.

Book chapter in: Stoppani, Teresa, Giorgio Ponzo, and George Themistokleous, eds. This Thing Called Theory. London: Routledge, 220-230.

[Link to the book]

2017. From Flat to the City: The construction of Modern Greek Subjectivity.

Essay in: Joelho – Journal of Architecture 8 (2017): Ideas and Practices for the European City: 126-139.

Paper presentation in: Existential Territories: Architecture and Subjectivity, conference organised by the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, 17-18 November 2017) and Hong Kong University, Faculty of Architecture, 26 January 2018.

[Link to the journal]

2015. Language/Diagram/Machine: Dom-ino and the Greek City.

Paper presentation in: Ελ/Le Corbusier: Genealogies, international conference organised by the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 29-31 October 2015.

2015. What the Generic is not: Athens as a case against the informal.

Paper presentation in: Changing Cities II: Spatial Design, Landscape and Socio-economic Dimensions, international conference organized by the Department of Planning and Regional Development, University of Thessaly, under the aegis of the Greek Ministry of Environment, Energy & Climate Change, Porto Heli, Peloponnese, Greece, 22-26 June 2015. Special session: Urban Design as a Creative Tool, organizer: Dr. Thanos Pagonis.

2015. From Archetypes to Protocols: Projects for Athens.

Paper presentation in: Thinking Spatial Practice within and against the Law, conference organised by Birkbeck Institute of Social Research (BISR), University of London, 19 June 2015.

2014. Tout va bien: The Maison Dom-ino and the Social Contract of Modern Greece.

Paper presentation in: the Dom-ino Effect, symposium organised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Thomas Weaver at the Architectural Association, School of Architecture, 14 March 2014.

2013. The Absence of Plan as a Project.

Book chapter in: Aureli, Pier Vittorio, ed. The City as a Project. Berlin: Ruby Press, 292-331.

[Link to the book]

2013. Domestic Nightmares: Social Conflicts and the Production of Residential Space in Interwar Athens, 1922-1936.

Paper presentation in: Plentitudes and Emptiness, symposium of Architectural Research by Design, organised by the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, College of Art – University of Edinburgh, 4-6 October 2013.

2013. Two Buildings and a Movie: Alienation, Conflict and Architectural Form.

Paper presentation in: Athens Symposium, organised by the MArch Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, 27 May 2013.

2012. From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia.

Essay published in: DOMUS 962 (October 2012): 74-87. With Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici.

[Link to the essay]

2012. Labour, City, Architecture.

Essay published in: Dragonas, Panos and Anna Skiada, eds. Made In Athens, catalogue of the Greek Pavilion on the 13^th International Architectural Exhibition – Venice Biennale. Athens: YPEKA, 313-319. With Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici.

Architectures of the Humanitarian Front

16 December 2015

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Categories: Research

Theodossis’s research focuses on a period around WWI when conflict, displacement, and territorial insecurity provoked the reconfiguration of humanitarian operations –their spatial organization and ethical imperatives. Between the 1910s and 1930s, a flurry of humanitarian activity emerged, old institutions were restructured, new institutions were formed, and new methods of action crystalized, entrenching representations, languages, and practices that have stayed with us ever since. His dissertation, “Architectures of the Humanitarian Front, 1915-1930: The American Red Cross and the Refugee Settlement Commission of the League of Nations,” begins with an examination of the American Red Cross (ARC, 1881-), as it transformed from a relatively unknown philanthropic society into the only recognized relief organization responsible for administering foreign aid on the country’s behalf. Contingent on the geopolitical and commercial ambitions of the U.S., these foreign aid programs unfolded over strategic locations around the globe, culminating in the refugee aid and resettlement programs in Europe during WWI. From there, I trace the rise of an international refugee regime and the creation of the League of Nations (1920-1946) in the aftermath of the War by focusing on the League’s Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC) operations in Greece between 1924 and 1930. Objects of study are material traces, plans of settlements, drawings of shelters and construction details, stipulations of housing assistance loans, letters between humanitarian workers, official reports, and publicity campaigns from the archives of the two organizations and the localities of their respective interventions. I posit that spatial production –from institutional headquarters to emergency shelters– was a central concern of these organizations. As soon as they systematized their modes of operation, they sought the knowledge and technical expertise of architects, who, in turn, conscripted to the humanitarian cause. Within a period of two decades, renowned architects –including Chester Aldrich and Fred Forbát– led technical departments, mapped destruction and displacement, and managed the organizations’ building activity, shaping the very notion of humanitarianism. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that modern definitions about space and citizenship emerged from these projects and debates, and, thus, provide a critical window into understanding today’s relation between humanitarianism, displacement, and architecture.

The following book chapters, articles and conference papers emerged from this work:

2021. Architects, Humanitarian Experts, and the American Red Cross, 1910-1920

Paper Presentation in GUD Design Network Experts, Export, and the Entanglements of Global Planning Workshop and conference organized by Filippo De Dominicis and Ines Tolic, University of

[link to proceedings]

2021. Agrarian Hinterlands: The Humanitarian Garden, the Self-Help House, and the Resettlement of Refugees in South Macedonia, 1923-1930.

Paper Presentation in Projective Cities, Architectural Association School of Architecture

2020. Humanitarian Relief and Confinement

Book chapter in States of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War, edited by Sophie Hochhäusl and Erin Sassin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020).

2020. Foregoing Empathy.

Essay in Expansions: 100 Responses to “How Will We Live Together?,” edited by Hashim Sarkis and Ala Tannir. (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2021.)

2020. The American Red Cross Refugee City in Italy, 1918.

Paper Presentation in Divergence in Architecture Conference, Session: Materialization of Space (moderator: Todd Cronan), Atlanta, Georgia Tech, March 4–6, 2020.

[link to proceedings]

2020. Displaced, in Place and in Transit: Refugee Population in Greece and the Formation of Planning Protocols and Domestic Machines. With Platon Issaias.

Book chapter in Transient Spaces, edited by Loukia Tsafoulia and Suzan Wines (New York: City College of New York, The Spitzer School of Architecture, 2020).

2018. Agrarian Visions: The League of Nations Refugee Settlement Commission in Greece (1923–1930). Paper Presentation in Modernism, Politics, Crisis at the Society of Architectural Historians/NE Conference, Boston, April 3, 2018.

2017. Popular Art, Henri Focillon, and the League of Nations.

Paper Presentation in Interdisciplinary Colloquium for Critical Study of the Built Environment, Yale University – School of Architecture, May 1, 2017

2017. Crafting Modernities: The League of Nations Committees and Exhibitions on Popular Arts.

Paper Presentation in Globalized Regionalism and Modernist Aesthetics in the Built Environment (moderators: Susanne Bauer and Eliana Sousa Santos), College Art Association, 105th Conference, February 15–18, 2017.

[link to conference]

2016. Spinning the Globe: League Nations’ Resettlement Experts after WWI

Paper Presentation in Intemezzo at Duke University ‐ Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, February 29, 2016.

Estranging Devices: Architectural Modernism and Strategies of De-alienation

15 December 2011

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Categories: Research

Alexandra’s thesis was concerned with the various ways that architectural modernism of the interwar era functioned against the dominant bourgeois ideology. This complex and historically specific function was explored through the agency of a conceptual pair: (social) alienation and (aesthetic) estrangement, the latter as the avant-garde artistic device of de-alienation. The two terms, associated with the evolution of capitalist economy and the practices of the historical avant-garde respectively, manifested in a concrete way the linguistic and conceptual reworking of the discourse on ideology, which took place during its migration through the disciplines of philosophy and political economy, to the aesthetic practices, and eventually to the spatial production of architecture. The thesis studied by what means alienation, after becoming closely interdependent on the ideological and cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, was perceived by the historical avant-garde and defied in practice by the conception of the homonymous device of alienation or estrangement, but, primarily, how interwar architectural modernism attempted to transform the ‘negative’ function of this device into a ‘positive’ project for a de-alienated restructuring of human production.

The following articles and conference papers emerged from this work:

2020. Destruction and Production: The Dialectic of the Negative and its constructive transformation by Architectural Modernism.

Original in Greek: “Καταστροφή και Δημιουργία: Η αρνητική διαλεκτική της πρωτοπορίας και ο δημιουργικός μετασχηματισμός της στην αρχιτεκτονική του Μοντέρνου,” archetype.gr, 23 November 2020. [Link to the article]

2020. Radical Collectives: Forms of Living in Hanne Meyer’s Freidorf Estate.

Original in Greek: “Ριζοσπαστικές Συλλογικότητες: Μορφές Κατοίκισης στο Freidorf Estate του Hannes Meyer,” archetype.gr, 4 November 2020. [Link to the article]

2020. Thoughts on Architecture and Ideology: a short Historiographical Study of the end of the 20^th century.

Original in Greek: “Σκέψεις για την Αρχιτεκτονική και την Ιδεολογία: μια σύντομη Ιστοριογραφική Έρευνα του τέλους του 20^ου αιώνα,”archetype.gr, 12 October 2020. [Link to the article]

2017. Alienation and Habit.

Paper presentation in: MNYMOsin: Alien Memory, conference organised by Claudia Palma and Emmanouil Zaroukas for the London Festival of Architecture, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, 3 June 2017.

2016. After all, One Red: Unity and Conflict in the case of Freidorf.

Paper presentation in: Contagion, Symposium organized by Godofredo Pereira for the Lisbon Architectural Triennale, 25 November 2016.

2015. Prescribing the Collective Experience: The Hellerhof Housing Estate (1928-1930).

Lecture at: Dis-Locutions: Architecture and the Political, organised by Marina Lathouri, MA History and Critical Thinking Debate Series, Architectural Association, 30 January 2015.

2013. Hannes Meyer and the Co-op Zimmer.

Paper presentation in: Instead – Postgraduate Program, organised by Aristide Antonas,Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly, December 2013.

Leros: Island of Exile

16 December 2014

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Categories: Research

Leros: Island of Exile is an interdisciplinary research project started in early 2014 by Platon Issaias and Beth Hughes. The case of Leros in the Greek Dodecanese has a unique history of securitisation and control in the Mediterranean. It conveys an entire ecosystem of exile, detainment and violent processes of subjectification within which architecture plays a fundamental role.

Leros has been defined by its service under various regimes. This project focuses on the last century, from the Italian occupation of 1912-1943 up until today, covering a neglected example of the Italian Rationalist architecture, namely the plan of the town of Lakki/Portolago. The project follows the transformation of the infrastructure built by the Italian fascist administration, from notorious mental healthcare facilities to camps for political prisoners and violently displaced children from mainland Greece, and current use as detention centres for refugees and displaced individuals.

Displacement, confinement and bodily restriction and incarceration exist within an idealised colonial architecture that celebrated a mystified, fascist pan-Mediterraneanism. It’s a space and an exemplary landscape defined by water, geography and the south-eastern Mediterranean environment, and yet it performs a series of rather different functions. Multiple calculations at play put in place an Italian military apparatus and a set of relations between populations, landscapes, architectures and objects.

All photos by Yannis Drakoulidis. More on his work, here: http://yannisdrakoulidis.com/photographs/islands-of-exile-leros/

[Project Microsite]

The project has been exhibited in MANIFESTA 12 in Palermo (June-November 2018).

The following articles and conference papers emerged from this work:

2019. Paper presentation in: Built to Last? Material Legacies of Italian Colonialism, organised by Instituto Storico Austriaco, Rome, 04-05 November 2019.

2019. Paper presentation in: Mediterranean Fascism(s), organised by University of Basel, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Urban Studies, 04 October 2019.

2018. Article in: Movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, vol. 4, issue 2/2018. [Link to the article]

2018. Article in: The Funambulist, v.19, Sept-Oct 2018. [Link to the article]

Foregoing Empathy

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Categories: Essay

There is a persistent assumption that when we do feel the suffering of others, we are prompted to relieve it. This drift from empathy to good deeds has structured Western moral philosophy and politics since the seventeen-hundreds. Rousseau analyzed it under the rubric of pitié while Adam Smith under sympathy, but both positioned it at the center of ethical judgments and actions.

More urgently, empathic arousal has been the fulcrum of humanitarian reason and its system unidirectional of care. In the humanitarian equation, depictions of suffering mobilize empathy to solicit donations. To use Michel Agier’s term, these depictions of the human present life stripped bare in the degradations of suffering, reifying nothing else or other than absolute and essentialized victimhood. Thus, the problem is not what humanitarians call “compassion fatigue” — the desensitization due to overexposure to stories and spectacles of suffering — but rather, the acceptance of asymmetry that empathy implies. A world is divided between haves and have nots, benefactors and beneficiaries, where rights, desires, and interests are not enacted and negotiated but donated and bestowed at the beholders will.

Territory as a Project

[link to the publication]

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Categories: Essay

In recent years, many architects, urbanists, planners, geographers, political theorists, philosophers, curators, cultural and economic institutions of power, have been occupied, one could say obsessively, with the challenge to ‘redefine the countryside’. It seems that in the context of climate emergency and planetary genocide, and with urgent demands for alternative forms of production and modes of human and non-human existence, social and physical spaces that seem to present a counter-paradigm to the dense, metropolitan environment of continuous growth, have been placed (again) to the centre of our attention. Genuine efforts have been made to dismantle the over-insisting ideological diagram of western modernity that approaches the rural paradigm as a problem.

Since the birth of the modern nation state and the rise of imperialist, colonial powers, the countryside has been treated as an outdated and pre-capitalist, pre-modern ruin, within which, the polarised and polarising schema ‘centre’-’periphery’ has been intensifying the already asymmetrical power relations and never-ending exploitation of rural and indigenous populations. And yet, it seems that this trend is often exhausted into two alternative outcomes: historisation, ie. a quest for a genealogy of the countryside and ‘rurality’ as political forms, or re-conceptualisation, an attempt to revisit the dialectical opposition ‘urban’-’rural’ in favor of the latter as a critical project. There are two problems that emerge with the above, which our short intervention, but also the Polish Pavilion in the 2020 Venice Architectural Biennale as a whole, have tried to address. The first, has to do with the value and instrumentality of a ‘general theory of rurality’. Can we imagine an alternative that allows for a multiplicity of experiences, struggles, differences, historic and contemporary, to emerge?

Here, the importance of diverse case studies is essential. These would not only bring neglected examples to the forefront, but most importantly, would challenge the dominant Eurocentric, western historiography. Secondly, the ‘urban’-’rural’ dichotomy could also lead to a series of confusions that has to do with the way the latter is defined in opposition to the former. It seems to us that quite often spatial and social typologies and diagrams of rural, suburban, peri-urban, remote, indigenous forms of habitations are mixed into one and unified ‘non-city’ modes of living and topologies. When this happens, we end up replicating, if not intensifying, the violent asymmetries that have produced these categorisations in the first place.

Collage with the use of photos by Michał Sierakowski, archive of Trouble in Paradise exhibition in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2020.

Spaces of Education – Care Condensers

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Categories: Article

Η αρχιτεκτονική των χώρων εκπαίδευσης αποτελεί ίσως ένα από τα πιο άκαμπτα και επίμονα χωρικά και κοινωνικά διαγράμματα. Η διδασκαλία και οι χώροι της, ο ρόλος, το είδος και ο τρόπος της μάθησης δηλώνουν τα ιδεολογικά και πολιτικά πλαίσια και βέβαια τις εμμονές της κάθε κοινωνίας που δεν αλλάζουν εύκολα ή με ιδιαίτερη ταχύτητα. Μέσα στους χώρους των σχολείων «κατασκευάζεται» η/ο πολίτης, το υποκείμενο που συγκροτείται εκτός και πέρα από τον κλοιό της οικογένειας, το άτομο που υπάρχει μέσα στο κοινωνικό. Οι χώροι μάθησης είναι γεμάτοι σήματα και νοήματα, ταυτότητες, επιλογές και συγκρούσεις. Εκεί, αναμετριέται με τρόπο ιδιαίτερα τραυματικό, η αυτοδιάθεση και η επιτελεστικότητα με την κανονικότητα της εθνοπατριαρχίας, η επιθυμία για συμβίωση με τον ανταγωνισμό, οι συλλογικές ανάγκες με τις ατομικές προτεραιότητες.

Οι χώροι που κάνουν όλα τα παραπάνω είναι γνωστοί σε όλες/ους και βιωμένοι στα σώματά μας: η μάντρα, η πύλη, η αυλή, το προαύλιο, οι κερκίδες, η μπασκέτα, η είσοδος, τα γραφεία, οι σκάλες, ο διάδρομος, η αίθουσα, η έδρα, το θρανίο, ο πίνακας στη στενή μεριά, οι φεγγίτες στη μακριά, οι τουαλέτες στον πάνω ή τον κάτω όροφο, αριστερά ή δεξιά από τη σκάλα. Η χωρική και τυπολογική ευκρίνεια και η επανάληψή της είναι σχεδόν τρομακτική. Κανονισμοί, κατασκευαστικοί και οικονομικοί περιορισμοί, αλλά και η πολύ μεγάλη διάρκεια ζωής των κτιρίων μάθησης στο χρόνο, συντελούν περαιτέρω στη σχεδόν ακλόνητη λειτουργία τους μέσα στην κοινότητα: το σχολείο είναι πάντα εκεί.

Και κάπου εκεί, «στη ρωγμή του χρόνου» (και του χώρου), οι χώροι μάθησης μπορεί να γίνουν και κάτι άλλο – παραπάνω. Μια πόρτα που ανοίγει αλλιώς, ένας διάδρομος που διευρύνεται, μια πύλη που δεν υπάρχει ή δεν κλείνει, ανοίγματα διαφορετικά, χρώματα, υπόστεγα, κρυφές γωνιές, παγκάκια, αστείες και περίεργες σκάλες, δέντρα, οθόνες, παιχνίδια, και πάνω από όλα, ο τρόπος που τα διαχειρίζεται και τα βιώνει η εκάστοτε κοινότητα. Εάν λοιπόν μπορούμε να διακρίνουμε μια τάση είναι ακριβώς αυτή η ανάγκη το σχολείο να συγκροτεί έναν «πυκνωτή φροντίδας», μια υποδομή για την κοινότητα που ξεπερνά τα τυπικά πλαίσια των ωρολογίων προγραμμάτων και των χωρικών αναγκών του σχολείου. Οι ψηφιακές δυνατότητες, η μετατροπή της αίθουσας σε έναν διευρυμένο εικονικό χώρο συνεύρεσης, τα εργαλεία και οι τεχνολογίες που μας κινούν πέρα από τον παραδοσιακό χώρο και χρόνο του σχολείου και του μαθήματος, επιτρέπουν την ανάπτυξη νέων μορφών συνύπαρξης, συνεργασίας και – μακάρι – ανεκτικότητας. Η επαφή με άλλες κοινότητες και η συγκρότηση νέων, έρχονται να καταστήσουν το σχολείο ξανά χώρο αλληλεγγύης και αλληλοβοήθειας.

Contingency and Possibility

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Categories: Article

Με το έργο της, [η Μαρία Μαυρίδου] μας προτρέπει να αφουγκραστούμε τις συναρθρώσεις των στρατηγικών επιβίωσης, των αυθόρμητων και πολλές φορές ευκαιριακών προταγμάτων και αγώνων της καθημερινότητας. Ίσως ακόμα πιο θεμελιακά, μας ζητά να ανακαλύψουμε το λανθάνον δυναμικό τους –το ενδεχόμενο– και να το καταγράψουμε χωρίς συγκατάβαση ή επιστημονικό πατερναλισμό. Αυτό απαιτεί την αναστολή της επιστημονικής υπεροψίας και κρίσης, ή όπως σκωπτικά γράφει, «τα προϊόντα της επαγγελματικής ιδεολογίας πολεοδόμων και αρχιτεκτόνων.» (Μαυρίδου, 1987:7). […] Καθώς ο κυρίαρχος λόγος, όλο και πιο επίμονα, προβάλλεται με μία σειρά κανονιστικών και ετεροκανονιστικών όρων εξουδετερώνοντας διαφορετικούς τρόπους συνύπαρξης και αλληλεπίδρασης, τα διακυβεύματα πληθαίνουν. Σ’ αυτή την πολυμέτωπη επίθεση, οι προσωρινές και εύθραυστες συναρθρώσεις που περιγράφονται στο ερευνητικό της έργο, δεν είναι μόνο εφικτές αλλά και ριζοσπαστικές. Ως φορείς πολιτικών διεκδικήσεων είναι αυτοκαθοριζόμενες και συγκυριακές. Χωρούν πιο πολλές και πιο πολλούς, δεν απαιτούν την διάπλαση μιας κοινής συνείδησης αλλά την επιτηδειότητα, την αμοιβαιότητα και την αλληλεγγύη.

[link to the journal]

MATI: Necropolitics and coastal Development in Greece

15 December 2020

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Categories: Conference Paper

At 16.41 on July 23, 2018, at a remote location of the peri-urban settlement of Penteli Mountain at the north east of Athens, Greece, a wildfire started. Extreme weather conditions – 40C and wind gusts of up to 80 miles per hour – spread the fire at an incredible speed, reaching the coastal summer house settlement of Mati, three kilometres on a straight line to the east, in less than an hour. At 18.15, the fire reached the beach; 1500 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, and in total 101 people died. Inside their houses, their cars, on the streets, on the beach, in the sea; weeks later, on hospital beds. The Mati wildfire is – so far – the second deadliest of the 21^st century. In its immediate aftermath, various assessments pointed out into potentially different causes. Apart from climate change and the particular weather conditions on the day, lack of civil protection and defence planning, as well as human error were presented and discussed as contributing factors. A criminal investigation was launched against a large number of ministers, mayors and civil servants. Data analysis and evidentiary forensics however suggest a more complex reality.

Telecommunications between key persons suggests that a decision was made at around 5.30pm that significantly altered the progress of the event. The planning of the settlement itself, the type of its architecture and materials, the species of its man-made vegetation, building irregularities, the privatisation and the restricted access to specific parts of the coast trapped hundreds with little chance to safely evacuate and escape the fire. It seems that Mati killed its residents, or more precisely, an array of political and design decisions that drove coastal developments in Greece since the 1950s were significant contributors to the devastating incident. Departing from the July 2018 Attica wildfires and the Mati massacre, the paper presents elements of this urban and architectural history. Private property, irregular and opportunistic planning, small scale building construction, but also tourism, are thought here in relation to climate injustice and the necropolitics of the social, economic and environmental crisis in the European and the Global South.

[link to the conference]

Solidarity

15 December 2019

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Categories: Essay

Any attempt to discuss solidarity within any political, social and cultural context would inevitably have to address power relations and asymmetries, types and levels of commitment, protocols and hierarchies, institutions and practices, collective and/or individual. When we encounter the spaces of social and political struggle, our will to reinvent how we exist, interact, participate, educate, design, build, communicate and write about, for, within and beyond the boundaries of our profession collides with the limited realities and conventions of our disciplinary formation. The reassurances of structure, permanence, order, form, material, and capital that have historically defined architecture, I would argue, have also rendered it incapable to respond to the temporal and material dimensions of contemporary conflicts, the diffused and asymmetrical planetary crisis of climate change, fundamentalist and technoscientific fascisms. A profession complicit like no other to climate and spatial injustice seems unable to confront the realities of structural violence produced by and within it.

[link to AA Files]

Provisionally Together

15 December 2019

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Categories: Journal

For this issue, we brought together stories that not only reveal the entanglements between spaces and bodies but also challenge the normative and normalizing habits of our discipline. We turned to architecture’s queer and feminist archives –to those emancipatory practices and struggles– that have carved possibility not where repression has inscribed it.

From Bob’s bedroom to Paris’ sex clubs and from the factory floor to the floor of the clinic, friends, colleagues, and mentors revisited artistic and architectural practices, located spaces of solidarity and resistance, and reflected on the inner workings and contradictions of our shifting coalitions. The our and we connote here the contingent and fragile alliances we form to help us endure the grinding down of life’s possible genres. Provisionally together we might stand a better chance at sustaining ourselves in these ruthless times.”

[link to issue]

Displaced, in Place, and in Transit

15 December 2019

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Categories: Book Chapter

Violating the provisions of the Versailles (1919) and Sèvres (1920) Treaties that gave regional autonomy and partitioned the collapsing Ottoman Empire expanding European colonial rule towards the east Mediterranean, the Greek Army invaded Ottoman cities of the east Aegean coast and East Thrace, declaring them de facto parts of Greek sovereignty. Greek military forces under the leadership of disillusioned nationalist politicians fuelled by racist ideologies campaigned further to the east, before being forcefully attacked and overwhelmingly defeated by the organized militia of the Turkish National Front. The Greek-Turkish War lasted until October 1922 with massive military and civilian casualties, resulting in about 2 million displaced individuals from both sides. In the few months between September 1922 and January 1923, mainland Greece received 1,2 million refugees, mostly Greek speaking, orthodox Christian subjects of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The Lausanne Treaty (Jan 1923) signed between the two countries suspended the right to return for all displaced and de-naturalised individuals, declaring them re-naturalized citizens of their – unknown and unfamiliar – “motherlands”. This is how the history of modern town planning in Greece begins: as a response to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis provoked in cities, towns, and rural areas with the arrival of the refugee population. The planning of settlements, the building of domestic units, the re-distribution of agricultural land abandoned by its original Greek-speaking Muslim owners, necessitated the organization of complex bureaucratic procedures, all administered by the Refugee Settlement Committee, a humanitarian agency initiated and supervised by the League of Nations. An uprooted population, registered, classified, divided according to profession and class organized and domesticated in place, through a system of property liquidation and exchange of re-territorialised lost capital and estimated property values.

The essay has the ambition to critically compare the 1920s experience and struggles with the current refugee crisis and its effects in Greece, its cities and its in place, in transit and displaced population. The deployment of contemporary machines of international humanitarian aid – mainly detention and processing centres, or so-called hospitality centres, i.e. militarized camps – coexists with activist interventions: squatting of abandoned properties, open facilities, and a network of solidarity and care. How do contemporary conflicts intervene within various asymmetries and power relations? What kind of architecture, knowledge and practice of city design could emerge from this new reality? How to confront state or international bureaucracy and violence through alternative spatial platforms?

Places, Types, Archives and Records: Alvaro Siza and his Legacy

15 August 2018

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Categories: Book Review

Whether it’s an agricultural fair or an art biennale, every national participation in every international exhibition faces an almost impossible challenge, which is a result of a structural problem. The power relations that reside within and define geopolitical asymmetries produce a pattern where culture, politics and ideology suffer both from unconstrained nationalism and the desire to be ‘international’. The fetishisation of everything ‘local’, every ‘original’ place, artefact and product enters a predefined grid that organises it as part of an ‘international’, ‘global’ heritage and production of meaning and value. The very idea of the ‘local’ is not just the residue of colonial practices, it’s colonialism itself: a network of forces that violently produces types, standards, subjects and commodities.

[…]

There is something fascinating in Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli’s curatorial project for the Portuguese Pavilion in the 2016 Architectural Biennale. Grande and Cremascoli decided to organise an exhibition about Alvaro Siza, but instead of just celebrating his legacy and persona, they aimed to push it towards a different direction.

[…]

The curators’ sincere effort to present alternative, less celebratory and inclusive narratives for the four neighborhoods fall into some well-known traps. There is a particular ideological bias that talks of some sort of ‘European-ess’, a remnant of a social-democratic, federalist European dream that even if it did, definitely doesn’t make sense anymore. ‘Fortress Europe’ of extreme securitisation, unapologetic nationalisms and far-right violence, has merged with inter-EU colonization of the sovereign debt crisis. A massive retreat in public spending has made the right to housing sound like an impossible political goal. In ‘Neighborhood: Where Alvaro meets Aldo’ there is a romantic belief that the character of the architect and good, or at least ‘better’, design is enough to sort it out. This is not true; without an uncompromising attack on the complex mechanisms that financialised and de-territorialise land and housing there is no hope. We need compulsory purchase of land, serious control of profit in real estate, the dismantling of oligopolies in the construction industry and the overall rethinking of standards, protocols, comfort, materials and the way we live together and we take care of each other. Alexander Alves Costa’s magnificent testimony on Bairro da Bouça and the SAAL (Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local) shows us the way to do it: neighborhood associations and collectives, citizen initiatives and political organization. As in revolutionary Portugal, we need radical political and design experimentation.

[link to article]

Gender and the production of Space in socialist Yugoslavia

15 June 2018

[link to exhibition and catalogue]

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Categories: Essay

In socialist Yugoslavia’s founding narrative, the woman partisan had won her emancipation with the rifle. The activities of the Women’s Antifascist Front (AFŽ) during World War II, which extended from the armed fight to grassroots political organization, advanced feminist causes and solidified women’s position in the creation of the socialist federation. With the transition to civilian life, Yugoslavia’s first postwar constitution of 1946 unequivocally granted Yugoslav women full citizenship, both by guaranteeing voting rights to all citizens regardless of sex and by providing special protection for women’s place in the production process. It also adhered to one of the fundamental tenets of the socialist-Marxist ideology; that is, women’s emancipation depended on the egalitarian distribution of wealth and vice versa. Nevertheless, this promise of equality was more rhetoric than action.Systemic and structural gender disparities persisted, hindering women’s participation in the labor force and advancement in leadership positions. The architectural profession was no exception. The few women architects who ultimately commanded public profiles did so in spite of, not through the dismantling of, both the region’s and the profession’s male-dominated cultures. Therefore, the contributions of women architects— who have so often been omitted from the histories of socialist Yugoslavia’s architecture — are examined here in relation to the successes and failures of this constitutional promise of equality.

Portions of this work appeared in the following magazines and newspapers:

2018. Article in: “Balkan Brut” in Metropolis Magazine, edited by Samuel Medina and the online platform of Metropolis Magazine under the title “The Women who built Yugoslavia”, June 2018.

2018. Article in: Albanian Journal “Arkitektet femra që ndërtuan në Jugosllavi”, 24 July 2018.

2018. Article in: Arts Section of Kathimerini Newspaper in Greece “Εκείνες που Έχτισαν την Γιουγκοσλαβία», 23 August 2018.

Asyrmatos

15 March 2018

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Categories: Essay

[…]

The building is not a modernist housing block a la manière de international style. It is a meditation on modernity in Greece, a country poor and dependent, living through the traumas of a civil war; a periphery anticipating development to bring a glorious future and a present always under construction. But the scaffoldings and voids stand complete and unassuming. Vassilikioti turned developmentalism on its head; she turned anticipation into concrete.

It is the soup du jour of architectural criticism to grant legitimacy to works from multiple peripheries by alluding to their synchronicity and affinity with celebrated works from the center. Itinerant and anxious, but mostly righteous historians travel to places hitherto unknown to them and discover works -buildings, drawings, zines. To them are the operative words here. Trans-national, multi-national, supra-national, inter-national, para-national networks and spheres of influence are being revealed and seamlessly everything falls back into its place in our established hierarchy of knowledge. They expand the canon, or so they say. This-that-looks-like-that. She-who-studied-there. He-who-learned-from-him. Monsters from the past creep up again; cigar-smoking architects, the master builders who erected cities and penetrated landscapes and produced seminal works of Architecture –always with capital A. I don’t want your canon, your old or new.

[link to issue]

LIMA: James Frazer Sterling, 1969-1976

16 December 2018

[link to Domes Afetiries]

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Categories: Paper

[…]

Tο φωτομοντάζ που δημοσιεύεται στο Architectural Design (AD) 40, τχ. 4 (Απρίλιος 1970), 187, με στόχο την προώθηση του Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) προδίδει τις αντιφάσεις του εγχειρήματος. Αντιφάσεις που η σημερινή αναθεωρητική ιστοριογραφία τείνει να αμβλύνει. Στη φωτογραφία απεικονίζονται οι διεθνείς αρχιτέκτονες να κάθονται γύρω από ένα επίμηκες τραπέζι. Όλοι στρέφονται προς τον Peter Land και τον γεμάτο μαυροπίνακα με σημειώσεις και σκαριφήματα. Με την τεχνική του φωτομοντάζ, η συνάντηση των αρχιτεκτόνων εκτοπίζεται σε έναν στενό δρόμο της Λίμα, στο βάθος διακρίνεται ο αυτοσχέδιος οικισμός του El Augustino. Οι αδρές επιφάνειες των προσόψεων των μικρών μονώροφων κτισμάτων οριοθετούν τον δρόμο ενώ, σε πρώτο πλάνο, δύο μικρά κορίτσια στρέφουν το βλέμμα τους προς τον θεατή του φωτομοντάζ. Αν εμπλεκόμενοι φορείς και αρχιτέκτονες επιδιώκουν την εγγύτητα με τους κατοίκους των γειτονικών barriadas, αυτή επιτυγχάνεται τεχνητά με την υπέρθεση των φωτογραφιών. Οργανωτές και αρχιτέκτονες υιοθετούν την ρητορική του συμμετοχικού σχεδιασμού, αλλά όπως σκιαγραφεί η εικόνα, μιλούν για –και όχι με– τα γειτονικά barriadas.

From active Objects to Objects of Desire

15 December 2018

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Categories: Essay

In 1960, de Castro presented a number of his Active Objects at II Exposição Neoconcreta, Rio de Janeiro, and became associated with the neo-concrete artists. This series offered an inventive solution to the fundamental propositions put forward by the group’s ideologist, the Brazilian poet and critic, Ferreira Gullar. In his signal 1959 essay “Theory of the Non-Object” Gullar argued that the modernist–constructivist desire to distill and subsequently end painting was finally reaching its inevitable conclusion. For Gullar, this process, intensified by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, culminated in the neo-concrete non-object—a new notion of the art object inserted directly into space without a frame or pedestal. Subsequently, the non-object was not only liberated from the delimiting structures of the frame and pedestal, but also from the verbal designations imposed by language. Challenging classifications according to pre-existent categories within art history, it suspended any a priori knowledge favoring the “primal –total-experience of the real.” De Castro, now among the neo-concrete group, had the most consistent interpretation of the legacy of Constructivism which sought to abandon easel painting and embrace modes of industrial production. And industrial design he did, from the textiles for Rhodia to logos and graphic identities for large industrial conglomerates.

No-Stop City

16 December 2017

[link to Domes Afetiries]

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Categories: Paper

Στο κάλεσμα του περιοδικού Δομές τον Οκτώβρη του 2015 για τη δεύτερη ημερίδα «Αφετηρίες», επέλεξα να παρουσιάσω ένα κάπως ιδιαίτερο έργο, τη No-Stop City των Archizoom Associati. Η ιδιαιτερότητά του έγκειται κατά τη γνώμη μου σε δύο διαφορετικές παραμέτρους, μια συστατική του ίδιου του project και της ιστορίας του, και μια δεύτερη κάπως περισσότερο προσωπική καθώς αφορά τον τρόπο που προσπάθησα να ανταποκριθώ στο ερώτημα της ημερίδας προτείνοντας παράλληλα μια πιθανότητα κριτικής ανάγνωσης του ίδιου του έργου.

Η No-Stop City συντάσσεται, δοκιμάζεται και παρουσιάζεται με διαφορετικούς τρόπους, ζει μια σύντομη αλλά κάπως ένδοξη ζωή και στη συνέχεια εξαφανίζεται σχεδόν εντελώς από τις περισσότερες ιστορίες της μεταπολεμικής αρχιτεκτονικής, μέχρι να αρχίσει να εμφανίζεται και να συζητιέται και πάλι τα τελευταία δέκα χρόνια. Αυτό συμβαίνει κυρίως μέσα από τη δουλειά, ιδίως την εκπαιδευτική, και τη διαρκή αναφορά σε αυτό το έργο από τους Pier Vittorio Aureli και Martino Tattara. Η No-Stop City αποτελεί για τους Aureli και Tattara αναπόσπαστο τμήμα μιας μη κανονικής και μη γραμμικής ιστορίας της αρχιτεκτονικής και του πολιτικού. Όπως μας παροτρύνει έγκαιρα ο Rem Koolhaas «κάθε μπάσταρδος επινοεί το δικό του γενεαλογικό δέντρο», και σε αυτή την καθ’ όλα «ενεργή» ιστορία, οι μορφές, το πλαίσιο και οι σημασίες των πολλαπλών αρχιτεκτονικών που τη συγκροτούν συνιστούν έναν απείθαρχο και πυκνό από αμαρτίες και σφάλματα κόσμο. Λάθη και αντιφάσεις είναι δραματικά παρόντα και στη δική μας περίπτωση, όπως θα σημειώσω επιγραμματικά στη συνέχεια.

The arc-periodic Housing Infrastructure in Nicosia, Cyprus

15 April 2017

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Categories: Paper

The paper presented the 7^th semester design studio in the School of Architecture, University of Cyprus, of the fall semester of the academic year 2015-16. The studio proposed a rather open brief, aiming to problematize the domestic in the context of the south part of the island. We asked the students to design an infrastructure for periodic/temporary housing in the city of Nicosia, leaving many parameters open for the participants to define according to their own brief. The part of the city, the specific plot or network of plots, the actual size of the building(s), the typological logic, and of course the primary unit or units had to be outlined according to the social subject the project aimed to address and formalize. Apart from a few crucial numbers – number of units (up to 100), number of inhabitants (200), area devoted to housing (2000sqm) and public programmes (60% of the previous) – all other issues of density, diffusion and organization had to reflect the intentions of each project. Moreover, the public character and use of the complex or the network of the proposed buildings was essential, since we considered these as central to the nature of the housing infrastructure we asked our students to develop. The levels of privacy and publicness, the organization of circulation and the extent of which otherwise typical domestic facilities could expand as communal uses into the public realm were also left as open questions for the students to respond to. The students were called to research the crucial transformations of contemporary forms of living and the fundamental shifts occurring in the domestic environments across the world. New forms of work and labour, co-sharing, multi-generational housing, and of course extreme conditions of inequality in regards to access to decent housing are clear indications of an acute crisis, a visible result of neoliberal, planetary urbanization.

Image credits:

Andreas Birros, Laoura Tziourrou ‘2.20 x 17’.
University of Cyprus, Department of Architecture, ‘The Arc’, fall semester 2015-16