Where Three Rivers Kiss - Fatura

WRT

Book Chapter

SANTANDER: WAVES LOST AT SEA

Where Three Rivers Kiss

Team

THEODOSSIS ISSAIAS

Categories

Architecture, Archive, Criticism, Ecology, Infrastructure, Landscape, Movements, Policy, Study, Territorial

‘First, single-celled animals signalled to each other, “I’m going to devour you,” “I’m over here!” “Let’s hook up,”’ writes Eleni Sikelianos, tracing a pathway into intimacy. Before we had mouths, they had porous lipid membranes but no cell walls. Malleable, they flexed and floated in a thick mineral-rich soup that kept them in shape and in transience. Their permeable boundaries were thresholds of exchange, diffusion, and osmosis, absorbing and exuding nutrients and waste. Promiscuous critters engulfed – devoured – each other, exchanging genetic material: a primordial kiss. After all, to kiss and be kissed is to expose oneself to unknowns, to find a new host, to be vulnerable to infection, to allow for exchange on cellular levels. Against evolutionary narratives of competition as survival, they organized and coordinated in new, more complicated but always drooling bodies. ‘Life did not take over the globe by combat,’ Lynn Margulis tells us, ‘but by networking’: cooperation, interdependence and symbiosis. Water – brackish, thermally alive – was not their backdrop but the condition of possibility. It carried signals, dissolved boundaries, allowed cells to fuse and flee. Intimacy, from the very beginning, was a messy, wet matter.

[…]

“Where Three Rivers Kiss,” in Waves Lost at Sea, edited by Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual. Berlin: Spector Book, 2026.

[Buy online here]

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

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 Professor of Practice 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.

COLLABO RATORS

>< FERENIKI FOTOPOULOU

>< MARIOS GERONTAS

FORMER MEMBERS

ELISAVET HASA