WRT
Book Chapter
LONDON: AA PUBLICATIONS

Kefalonia is for Lovers

“Kefalonia is for Lovers”, in Do you remember how perfect everything was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis. Edited by Hamed Khosravi. London, UK: AA Publications, 2021.

Team
Platon Issaias
Categories
Archive, Book Chapter, Landscape

OMA’s practice from 1972–1985 is undeniably characterized by projects that problematise the metropolitan condition of the late-capitalist city. Their design briefs, speculative projects and competition entries were informed by post-domestic environments, emerging spaces of leisure and work, and the challenges of new forms of life, aiming to reclaim a role for architectural form – a contemporary language of brutal realism. Berlin, London, New York and Paris, archetypal cities of western modernity and urbanity, offered a fertile context for these radical experiments; they became the playground in which Rem Koolhaas’s writings, Elia Zenghelis’ drawings and Zoe Zenghelis’ and Madelon Vriesendorp’s paintings created a universe of beauty, lust and unapologetic hedonism.

The text addresses four projects developed by OMA in 1984–85 on the island of Kefalonia: the redevelopment of St. Gerasimos Sacred Plain, the redesign of Koutavos Bay, and the beaches of Skala and Platys Gialos. In these projects, Zoe’s artistic practice – and particularly her work on Greek landscapes in Kefalonia and beyond – became enmeshed with OMA’s formulation of architectural devices that operate in the ‘transposed paradises’ of these Arcadian, hedonistic projects. Colours, abstract forms and the confrontation with topographical and natural elements – the sea, the sky, mountains, plains, lakes – are here not mere representations of architectural projects, but rather the conceptual framework through which these projects exist in the first place. Moreover, this phase of the collaboration between Zoe Zenghelis and OMA resulted in a striking design experiment based on the deployment of archetypal forms such as ‘the avenue’, ‘the pier’, ‘the platform’, ‘steps’ and ‘the canopy’, as well as the treatment of vegetation as a primary formal and organizational element in their projects.

The text concludes with an interview with the Greek architect Elias Veneris, a key member of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in the late 1970s and early 80s, project leader of OMA Athens and key contributor in the Kefalonia works.

[Links to the online exhibition at the AA and the book at the AA Bookshop]

About

Fatura Collaborative – Research & Design Practice, was founded in 2009 and is developing projects across a wide range of scales, from intimate objects and performance, to architecture, urban design and planning. We are interested in architecture as social infrastructure, in developing collective equipments, in the design of spaces of care, empathy and welfare. We design and research expanding new problematics about ecology, the domestic, everyday life and the city.

Members

ELISAVET HASA
ARCHITECT

is an architect, researcher and educator based in London. She holds a diploma in architecture from the School of Architecture of the University of Patras, Greece (2015) and was awarded a PhD from the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art (2022). Her thesis dealt with the materiality of grassroots, ad hoc and mutual aid projects by social movements in Europe and the United States, with an emphasis on their relationship with the state. She is teaching in undergraduate architectural design studios and history and theory courses at the London South Bank University and Central Saint Martins. She is also a registered architect in the UK (ARB) and Greece (TCG) and has practiced architecture in London, Madrid and Athens.

PLATON ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

is an architect, researcher, and educator. He studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MSc from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft and The City as a Project research collective. He is Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the co-Head of Projective Cities MPhil programme at the Architectural Association, where he is also teaching Diploma Unit 7 with Georgia Hablützel and Hamed Khosravi. His research interests explore urban design and architecture in relation to the politics of labour, economy, law and labour struggles. He has written and lectured extensively about Greek urbanisation and the politics of urban development.

THEODOSSIS ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

(he/him) is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator, Heinz Architectural Center, at Carnegie
Museum of Art and Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. He studied
architecture in Athens, Greece, and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on architecture at the intersection of
human rights, conflict, and the provision of shelter. This interest led to his PhD dissertation
“Architectures of the Humanitarian Front” (2021, Yale University), which examined a period
around WWI when conflict, displacement, and territorial insecurity provoked the reconfiguration
of humanitarian operations –their spatial organization and ethical imperatives.

GIANNANTONIS MOUTSATSOS
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Lund, Sweden. He graduated in 2010 from the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens and holds an MSc in Energy Efficient and Environmental Building Design from the School of Architecture of Lund University (2015). He has practiced architecture as a freelance architect in Greece and currently in Sweden (eg. Tengbom architects), where he works on a wide range of projects including small houses, larger residential complexes as well as care, educational and industrial facilities.

ALEXANDRA VOUGIA
ARCHITECT

is an architect and an educator. She graduated in 2007 from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds the MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from GSAPP, Columbia University (2008) and a PhD from the Architectural Association – School of Architecture, London (2016). She is currently an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has previously taught at the Architectural Association and the University of Westminster and practiced as an architect in New York and Athens.

MYRTO VRAVOSINOU
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Thessaloniki. She graduated from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2015 and holds an MSc in Environmental Architectural and Urban Design from the same institution (2023). Since 2017, she has been collaborating with a group of freelance engineers, working on a variety of residential, workspace, and small-scale digital fabrication projects. Her special interests lie in urban and architectural design practices that promote spatial justice.