Αrchitecture
For us, Αrchitecture is a perfectly applied and specific activity, prepared in a specific space and time, and is a product of history, not a parthenogennesis. The global reach and strength of architecture in time are phenomena arising subsequently, when the architectural practice has been exercised with virtue – joy, awareness, wisdom, professionalism and ethics, and only with the permission of Happiness or Suffering of the Historical Circumstances.
An architect for us is the one who, with the experience acquired and the natural talent of any sort, has acquired the ability- merit to see, hear and analyze the issue of his agents in order to design feasible solutions- treatments, figuring out ways to resolve the questions. Ways that open windows wide open towards rethinking, questioning, the abstract and chaos. His/her only obligatory and inevitable language/tool for communicating with others, is the prevailing Aesthetics of his/her Time and Place.
Architecture has to sing its stories with images of figures and shapes, giving place to the community to build its structure with their forms.
Design
Design as a tool of communication and participation
Our work is not a result of pre-existing ideas and resolutions applied to each situation. The proposed solution to implement has to be different every time, entirely dependent on the oddity of specific issues.
We want the residents to be communicants, in every little detail of constructions, which is of their concern and which will be their environment. Limitless time needs to be spent for the inventive use of supervisory devices-tools, which aim for the full development of their substantial participation. Participation requires the institutionalization of rules that establish relationships,
relationships of absolute clarity, transparency and honesty.
The project calls for mutual trust, at all levels, with everyone involved. This trust is only ensured, by abiding scrupulously a strict process-routine. The design is the vehicle that forms and keeps the journey, from concept to practice, from the image to the construction, from the technological complexity to abstraction, from nakedness to clothing, from the thought to the body, from having to being, from everywhere and always to here and now, from the vision to the look that cannot be fooled;
from the solitude of the musician to the warmth of the orchestra, finally, from the world to chaos.
The truth is fortunately concrete.
Small scale
The dominance of small scale
The design begins from the small scale of visible things,
the small scale of the declared needs of human module habitation.
The jump to the large scale, is made only after the cycle of the small scale’s economy is completed, and without any mandatory dependencies of charming, preexisting image standards. The building is an artificial Body with dressed and naked members, hidden and obvious parts, a trunk, limbs and eventually a Face. We seek the least possible, as an art of looking for the essence of things. We are touched by an ascetic attitude towards things, expressed in valuable ways. Technology, futurology, History, but most of all, live tradition that insists on resisting.
Simplicity and rigor, able to withstand inevitable operations, the daily operations of the residents’ real life. “Life containers”, free from any decorative attitude, but equipped nevertheless with a stage substance,
a necessary and a capable place to accommodate the theater of everyday life.
Our obsessions
Our obsessions are shaped over time.
Shining path in our minds is the seriousness of a child who enjoys his/her game. Our beliefs, innocence, honesty, integrity, intention, comprehensibleness and manufacturing ethos. Our constructs refer to all current, legitimate, processing methods, that are prioritized on occasion, based on theirimportance for the final result.
In our world there’s a place for post-industrial and robotics, but also for the industrial, proto-industrial, the crafts and the completely handmade. Their intelligent combination at practice, fumbling the cracks, denies the alleged end of History, enriches the project with a humane dimension, and lets it finally refer to the critical, for our days, value of human labor and its culture, by reaching its limits.
The project, by descretely indicating its construction method, does no longer hide, but reveals its generating mechanisms, seeking to talk about the self-institutionalization, ie the construction of inhabiting.
About aesthetics
The aesthetics nowadays is overdefined by virtual reality of computers,
the sizes of nanotechnology and the strategies of biotechnology.
It is the aesthetics of the abstract, the intangible, of the massless and weightless surface,
the infinite horizontality, the flux and the liquidity.
It is the projection of the simulation of diffused energy fields onto the real, onto people,
alleged to be nomads, with no land, no home, no yesterday and no tomorrow.
It is also the aesthetics of the incubator, the snow-white sterile laboratory, the unhistorical,
ie the aesthetics of the radical break with history, the aesthetics of irreversible, total mutation and hybrids.
It is the aesthetics of the Times, that some concoct consciously, they want to and they probably can,
but no one, can really know what exactly the Next day will be.
No intelligent being can underestimate and ignore this aesthetics,
unless he/she wants to permanently forfeit the right to speak.
As hopeless romantics of a specific world, that insists on resisting, claiming the right
to the only possibility there is, ie the utopia and the impossible,
being willy-nilly inside the dominant aesthetic model,
we implant in our construction, discretely and at every opportunity, signs of the specific, of materiality,
mass and weight, references to the live construction cultures
that are present all around us, and stubbornly keep moving us truly.
