Urban Truisms

The Jenga Project in Kerameikos

The life expectancy of a building is 50-70 years. Most of the buildings in the center of Athens were built before 1960. Old buildings that are not refurbished or maintained cannot provide acceptable living standards. In the last twenty years, people have fled from the center of Athens to the suburbs. When buildings are not inhabited, they fall apart. The crust of Athens contains many layers of building stock dating back to antiquity. There is currently no comprehensive strategy concerning the old building stock of Athens. Why don’t we save some time and consider the existing buildings as rubble and earth? The Jenga project engages the skyline of Athens as if it was a homogeneous land mass. Existing buildings and roads bled into one another becoming the playing board for a game of life size Jenga. The Jenga blocks attach to the existing skyline; sometimes they stack onto each other. They activate the rooftops of the city.

Rural Truisms

The Aloni Project in Antiparos & the Pierced Ridge Project in Tzia

When the rural economy dominated the Greek landscape, people had to manage their local ecosystem efficiently, with a careful obligation to the specific qualities of their landscape.  In the past decades, the Greek countryside has experienced a significant change due to the economic shift towards tourism and leisure industries. To maximize agricultural production, the dry and steep slopes were transformed into terraced landscapes used for cultivation.  The most familiar element of rural domestication in the landscape became the long rubble stone wall. In “Aloni” we built two long stone walls to bridge the landscape between two hills, allowing a house to fit in the space between them while maintaining the continuity of the earth which bridges and flows over it. By reinterpreting the traditional technique of earth-retaining stone walls, an artificial landscape is created, where the rural ‘genius loci’ and the domestic needs of a home coexist. In ‘Pierced Ridge’, the volume of the domestic is completely concealed within a piercing of the land mass. The only evidence of inhabitation near the ridge is the panoramic framing of the opposite views. Each site has unique topography, views and raw sensory qualities.  New landscapes emerge by privileging the experience of the place.