A week of seminars, lectures and presentations organised and hosted by Projective Cities MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design.
13-17 DECEMBER 2021
Athens as a case study, and specifically the neighbourhood of Kaisariani, is the focus of the programme term 2 design exercise. A series of collaborations with the local municipality and various stakeholders, academic institutions, practitioners and activists, present and expose AA students in the city’s complex urban and social history, aiming to rethink urban and architectural design practices within the context of 21st century ecological, social, economic and political challenges.
The city and the neighbourhood of Kaisariani serve as sites of research and design experimentation, focusing on the development of new housing typologies, renovation projects and various public and collective equipments, while rethinking and promoting the legacy of the refugee population and its social, cultural and political histories and their registry in spatial and design protocols.
This third field trip is part of the three-year, model research and design project developed as a collaboration between Projective Cities MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Architectural Association, School of Architecture) and the Faculty of Architecture of University of Cyprus, and is focused on studies of renovation, adaptation, and promotion of the historic and the current urban and building fabric of Kaisariani.
The programme will conclude with an exhibition, a publication, and a conference, with the overall title ‘1922-2022: Refugee Neighbourhoods. Sustainability, and Cultural Heritage: The Case of Kaisariani’ due in September and December 2022 respectively.
Sessions:
Mon DEC 13:
Introduction, Athens as a case study. 10am, Platon Issaias (AA/PC).
Parasitic [Infra]structures: The Kaisariani Case. 11am, Konstantinos Avramidis (UCY).
zoom link, Meeting ID: 825 2750 4967, Passcode: 831334
Contemporary Urbanism and Planning in Athens: Key Trends and Challenges. 12pm, Loukas Triantis (School of Architecture, Technical University, Chania).
zoom link, Meeting ID: 899 4819 0751, Passcode: 230615
Agrarian Hinterlands: The Humanitarian Garden, the Self-help House, and the Resettlement of Refugees in South Macedonia, 1923-1030. 4pm
Theodossis Issaias (Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art).
zoom link, Meeting ID: 834 7400 9614, Passcode: 519399
Tue DEC 14:
Kaisariani: An Urban Community in the City of Athens. 4pm, Olga Balaoura (NTUA/DUTh).
zoom link, Meeting ID: 846 5709 3843, Passcode: 387898
Wed DEC 15:
Co-designing in the City of Multiple Crises. 10am, Thanos Andritsos, Dimitris Poulios, Sofia Tsadari (Commonspace/Participatory Lab).
zoom link, Meeting ID: 831 1738 3138, Passcode: 118488
Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens. 4pm, Ioanna Theocharopoulou (Cornell), Tassos Langis, Yiannis Gaitanidis.
zoom link, Meeting ID: 828 8404 1236, Passcode: 474585
Thu DEC 16:
The Filmed Apartment. 10am, Panos Dragonas (University of Patras).
zoom link, Meeting ID: 860 8398 1514, Passcode: 666528
Fri DEC 17:
Towards an Urban Typology: Concept, Structure, Form. 10am, Sofia Tsiraki (NTUA).
zoom link, Meeting ID: 826 2030 9352, Passcode: 761347
Making Neighbors. 6pm, AREA, Architecture Research Athens.
zoom link, Meeting ID: 839 4005 3435, Passcode: 098945
– NOTE: times above are GMT.
– In English, via Zoom, follow Projective Cities website and social media for more information.
Detailed Schedule, Seminars/Lectures:
Mon DEC 13:
Parasitic [Infra]structures: The Kaisariani Case. 11am, Konstantinos Avramidis (UCY).
This talk critically re-examines a series of student projects produced around Michel Serres’s concept of ‘parasite’ in the context of a diploma design unit organised at the University of Cyprus in collaboration with the Projective Cities Programme at the Architectural Association. The studio focuses on social subjects and groups considered ‘parasitic’ and designs their [infra]structures. The goal is for these parasitic [infra]structures to act as catalysts for the cultivation of complex forms of social relations in the historic neighbourhood of Kaisariani in Athens. Special emphasis is given to the overview and promotion of the unique refugee heritage in the social, cultural and political history of the district, as well as its registration in spatial and design protocols. By taking the parasite as a starting point, the talk aims to rethink the relationship between social and spatial structures. The so considered social parasitism becomes an opportunity to reflect on innovative housing models, new forms of care and welfare in the community.
Konstantinos Avramidis is a Lecturer in Architecture and Landscapes at the University of Cyprus. He holds a DipArch from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, an MSc in Architecture and Spatial Design from the National Technical University of Athens with distinction, and a PhD in Architecture by Design from the University of Edinburgh, where he was awarded the Edinburgh College of Art scholarship. He has taught extensively at various institutions in Greece and the UK, most recently at Drury University and the University of Portsmouth. He co-founded the architectural design research journal Drawing On and is the principal editor of Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City (Routledge, 2017).
Mon DEC 13:
Contemporary Urbanism and Planning in Athens: Key Trends and Challenges. 12pm, Loukas Triantis (School of Architecture, Technical University, Chania).
The presentation gives an overview of Athens’s contemporary urbanism and planning. It brings together path dependencies, formal and informal modes of urban development, with current trends and challenges. The city’s social geography links to urban morphology, patterns of mixed uses and social and spatial divisions. Key challenges in the aftermath of Greece’s debt crisis involve housing affordability, urban tourism and short-term rentals, greening and public space, new urban infrastructures, and mega-projects underway. Urban planning forms troubled relations to current urban transformation and development trends, which open up various fields of intervention.
Loukas Triantis is an architect-planner based in Athens. He currently teaches urban theory and planning in the School of Architecture, Technical University of Crete. He also coordinates a research initiative of LSE Cities about Athens in collaboration with the City of Athens. He has practiced urban and regional planning in the private and the public sectors in Greece and is a board member of the Greek Association of Urban and Regional Planners. His interests touch upon the social, political, and institutional aspects of planning, development, and governance.
Mon DEC 13:
Agrarian Hinterlands: The Humanitarian Garden, the Self-help House, and the Resettlement of Refugees in South Macedonia, 1923-1030. 4pm, Theodossis Issaias (Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art).
The presentation charts the precarious refugee and minority regime put in place by the League of Nations and the humanitarian response to the violent uprooting and resettlement of populations in the aftermath of the 1923 Lausanne Convention on the Exchange of Population between Turkey and Greece. It focuses on the extraterritorial Refugee Settlement Commission of the League, which operated as humanitarian-cum-development agency responsible for the resettlement of 1.22 million refugees in Greece, and pays particular attention to its rural rehabilitation program in South Macedonia. As a spatial program par excellence, this rural settlement utilized land reform and mass homeownership – the smallholding and the rural house – as its primary instruments. In this process, humanitarian relief and nation-building as well as the imperatives of the post-war international peace system converged and at times conflicted. Farm sizes, construction materials, manure types, food ratios, and seed varieties that were suspended between peace treaties and ethnostates, international loans and national debt, native antagonism and refugee dissent.
Theodossis (Theo) Issaias is an architect and educator, and recently joined the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art as Associate Curator. He earned his diploma of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and an SMarchS degree from MIT. Since 2009, he has been practicing as a founding member of Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research collective. His PhD dissertation, “Architectures of the Humanitarian Front” (Yale University), explores the nexus of humanitarian organizations and architecture and their relation to conflict, displacement and the provision of shelter.
Tue DEC 14:
Kaisariani: An Urban Community in the City of Athens. 4pm, Olga Balaoura (NTUA/DUTh).
The lecture focuses on the urban and residential development of Kesariani from 1922 to the present, examining its architectural, spatial and social characteristics that led to its current urban identity. Through the analysis of the urban trajectory of the area, it investigates the spatial and typological characteristics, as well as its human geography, as these are constantly enriched by changes that take place over time. Kaisariani is an urban community, in which special urban, social and cultural characteristics may be identified within the wider geography of the city of Athens. The area comprises a cultural and historic urban landscape due to the tangible expressions of its urban environment composed by several historical layers of public and private interventions and the intangible values and ways of life of its residents distinct and relatively common to other neighborhoods in Athens that embody such a condensed political history.
Olga Balaoura is an architect and an urban planner. He holds a diploma in architecture from the School of Architecture of the Democritus University of Thrace, a Master’s degree (MSc Post-graduate Master in Urbanism) from TU Delft in the Netherlands and a PhD from IUAV in Venice. She has systematically dealt with issues of urban and spatial planning and the economic and social geography of the cities, on issues regarding the urban development, sustainability and social and environmental justice, at different scales and various spatial realities in Greece and abroad. She is teaching at the School of Architecture of NTUA and at Democritus University of Thrace, School of Architecture.
Wed DEC 15:
Co-designing in the City of Multiple Crises. 10am, Thanos Andritsos, Dimitris Poulios, Sofia Tsadari (Commonspace/Participatory Lab).
Thanos Andritsos studied Architecture at the University of Thessaly and Urban and Regional Planning at the National Technical University of Athens. He has more than ten years of experience in studies and projects related to Urban Design, Sustainable Urban Development, Integrated Territorial Investments, Project Management and Planning Legislation. As a researcher, he is interested in socio-spatial inequalities, sustainable urban development and the challenges of climate breakdown.
Dimitris Poulios is an Architect-Urban Designer with studies in Greece (University of Thessaly) and UK (Cardiff University). Since 2021 he holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Urban Geography form the National Technical University of Athens. His scientific interests lie in the field of Geography, Urban Studies, Political Economy and Architecture. He has won Architectural and Urban Planning competitions and has experience working in Greece and abroad.
Sofia Tsadari a qualified Architect / Urban and Regional Planner (MEng, MSc, PHD – National Technical University of Athens), with 15-year experience in multi-scale architectural / urban design and planning, which also includes site / project management and awards in architectural competitions. She was worked on several participatory planning projects, integrated urban strategies, and studies related to climate change adaptation. Her academic interest focuses on the aftermath of crisis upon urban landscapes.
Sofia, Dimitris and Thanos are founding members of Commonspace and Participatory Lab. They have more than a decade of experience in participatory planning and community engagement/ development projects in Greece.
Commonspace is a collaborative – interdisciplinary planning and design group operating since 2012. It provides high quality services in the fields of Spatial Strategies, Architecture, Social Research, Urban and Environmental Design and Participatory Planning. It seeks to be a link between citizens, social institutions and public authorities, a hub for the exchange of knowledge, ideas and practices among citizens, experts and decision-makers.
Participatory Lab (Laboratory of Spatial, Urban and Environmental Participatory Planning for Climate Change Adaptation) is an initiative of Commonspace funded by the Greek Green Fund. It aims to create an active, interdisciplinary community that studies, documents, learns, disseminates, and implements participatory planning processes for the climate change adaptation of cities.
Wed DEC 15:
Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens. 4pm, Ioanna Theocharopoulou (Cornell), Tassos Langis, Yiannis Gaitanidis.
A documentary exploring the particular history of the Athenian “polykatoikia” [a small-scale multi-story apartment block] and the city’s reconstruction through the anonymous lives of everyday people in the time of “antiparochí” [an apartments-for-land exchange system]. The work is based on Ioanna Theocharopoulou’s book of the same title. The film is an Onassis Culture production.
Who were the rural men that came to Athens with their wives after the Greek Civil War and “swamped” the city in cement? Who “tore down” all the neoclassical buildings and why did they flood the Attic basin with apartment blocks? How did they learn and develop their craft? Where did they come from? What know-how and techniques did they bring with them?
Athens lies at the heart of everything the Onassis Foundation does. Culture that reaches out to journey through the urban fabric, descending on the city center to champion Athens as a time-honored place still very much alive – a space of great ferment where ideas are exchanged. The Onassis Foundation is pursuing lasting investment in Greek cinema and playing an active role in artistic creation. It is supporting established filmmakers and rising talents through screenplay development and the production of both shorts and features, and embracing creative processes, research approaches, and artistic development by offering scholarships and fellowships.
Athens is our city – where we were born, where we live – and we love it like its “our ancestral village”. It is, however, a contradictory and almost anonymous place, the repetitive textures of the apartment blocks extending out in all directions like clones. A space like a text, impenetrable in its generality, unintelligible, and lacking clear historical references besides the landmark that is the Acropolis and a smattering of unconnected monuments. You might ask yourself: “How did all this get built?” It certainly wasn’t put together by architects and urban planners.
Motivated and guided by Ioanna Theocharopoulou’s book, we sought out the cracks in our modern urban history to find out who these rural migrant men and women were – the co-creators of our built environment. And set out with all the standard preconceived notions – that they were the ones who destroyed Athens, that the Karamanlis administration’s “antiparochí” system was to blame, and so on.
We don’t know if these biases and myths about Athens will ever cease to exist. It’s just that now, yet another story has been added to the mix – about the creation of the oldest new capital in Europe.
Ioanna Theocharopoulou is an architect and architectural historian whose research focuses on cities and the histories, theories, and evolving concepts of post-carbon architecture and society. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals as well as book chapters, and she has collaborated on curating and chairing several academic conferences, including “Ecogram: The Question of Sustainability at Columbia University” (2008–11), and “Cities and Citizenship” (2014) with the Goethe-Institut and New York University. She is the author of Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens (Artifice, 2017). Theocharopoulou is currently preparing a new edition of the book with the support of the Onassis Foundation and Cultural Center in Athens. She has taught at the Cooper-Hewitt Master’s Program for Design and Curatorial Studies, at Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and at Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York City. Theocharopoulou studied at the Architectural Association in London and holds a master’s degree in advanced architectural design and a Ph.D in architecture from Columbia University.
Tassos Langis studied film at Long Island University in New York and the Hellenic Film and Television School Stavrakos in Athens. In 2008, he was selected to take part in the Berlinale Talent Campus in Berlin. His research focuses on symbiotic narrative forms in various media.
Yiannis Gaitanidis lives in Athens, Greece. His work and creative output shares between short films, documentaries, tv commercials, and street photography. His four short films and some of his TV documentaries have participated and been awarded in several international film festivals. Αt the moment he works in the development of a script for a feature film.
Thu DEC 16:
The Filmed Apartment. 10am, Panos Dragonas (University of Patras).
Urbanization in Greece was not based on top-down urban planning but on the ad-hoc repetition of a single building type. The polykatoikia had a significant contribution in the urban and economic development of the country. Moreover, it had a dominant role in the formation of modern subjectivity in Greece. The lecture focuses on the development of Greek modernism through the architecture of middle class housing and the representations of urban dwelling in cinema. The urban analysis takes into consideration the layout of the typical apartment and the way that the repetition of a single building type has produced the city. The film analysis takes place in three ways: As a cinematic archaeology that renders visible social and urban transformations of the past; through the understanding of the methods that cinema has promoted, or put into question, specific lifestyles and ideologies; and finally, through film form and the analysis of its cultural significance.
Panos Dragonas is an architect and professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Patras. In 2012 he was joint commissioner of the Greek participation entitled “Made in Athens” at the Venice Biennale of architecture. He has also co-curated the exhibitions “Adhocracy [Athens]” (2015) and “Tomorrows – Urban fictions for possible futures” (Athens, 2017 & Nantes-FR, 2019). He has published extensively on issues of Greek city and architecture. His research and design activities focus on the transformations of the Greek cities during the economic and social crisis, and the connections between cinema, architecture and the modern city. His design work in “dragonas architecture studio” has been published in international reviews and exhibitions.
Fri DEC 17:
Towards an Urban Typology: Concept, Structure, Form. 10am, Sofia Tsiraki (NTUA).
I believe that establishing correlation between practicing and teaching architecture is difficult and complex. Is it important that the work of an architect (theoretical, tutorial and practical) must be traced, analyzed and evaluated in reference to a common ethical and methodological basis?
Is it also significant that different projects of an architect follow a common path concerning compositional process, syntactic systems or morphological vocabulary which constitute architecture an aesthetic, scientific, structural and essentially, social entity?
In an attempt to approach the aforementioned matters, I will present part of our work, in particular projects mostly located in the center of Athens in characteristic neighborhoods, within the dense tissue. These examples, negotiate the concept, structure and form of habitable space as an “archetype life container” aiming to constitute an urban typology.
Sofia Tsiraki is Associate Professor of Architectural Compositions (School of Architecture, NTUA). Architect Engineer NTUA and permanent member of Anastasios Biris Architectural Office& Associates. She is co-author of three collective books and has edited various publications. She has participated in architectural exhibitions. She has been awarded first prizes in Panhellenic Architectural competitions and has collective and individual architectural work. Her completed projects have won awards, while others, such as the project “The house-box: Residence and space for cultural activities in Koukaki” had been nominated for the Mies Van der Rohe Awards 2013. The project “The dissolution of the box: Apartment building in Gazi” was honored with the A’ award 2009-2013 of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture, while the “Industrial Building in Kifissia” was awarded in 2016 by “Domes”. She was recently awarded the first prize in the Panhellenic Architectural Competition for the “PEDA Services Building”, in Eleufsina.
Fri DEC 17:
Making Neighbors. 6pm, AREA, Architecture Research Athens.
In the aftermath of the social state, and no less in the age of Covid-19, ‘crisis’ within the contemporary city is necessarily a social crisis, where various forms of human collectivity emerge in response to the lack of available resources. The question of context becomes a question of ‘neighbors’, transcending the digital era, while the desire for [or fear of] physical proximity redefines the concept of human density in cultural terms. The implications for architecture of “making neighbors” is thus as much about projecting a politics of cohabitation as it is about the renegotiation of physical form through an ongoing dialectic of public and private space. “Neighboring”, in this sense, can be seen not only as an evaluative criterion of successful design, but also as a strategy for the design process itself.
AREA (Architecture Research Athens) is an award winning design practice established in Athens by
architects Styliani Daouti, Giorgos Mitroulias and Michaeljohn Raftopoulos. The
team’s approach actively engages experimental design methodologies in pursuit
of the relationship between culture, form and context, with a particular
interest in public space. AREA’s theoretical and built work ranges across
multiple scales, from furniture to urban design, and has been published and
exhibited in Greece, Europe, Asia and North America, with numerous prizes in
competitions for public and private projects. AREA teaches architecture at the
University of Thessaly and the University of Patras Schools of
Architecture.
