Polygon Window

Recently I took part in a housing competition in Athens. My proposal was for a complex density that sits somewhere between a cluster of single family homes and an apartment building.

Post Padula

Padula was really great, especially the spooky forest where Fresco Bosco took place. Walking around at night you could see clouds of fireflies, and weird shadows from the installations on progress. Angelo's piece rocked: the Neen Emblems were installed along a huge wall facing the forest and they were imposing and funny at the same time.and we had tons of fun with Franko B and Alessandro and John of Lovett/Codagnone who did a great performance called Obliquities. Their soundtrack kept repeating "I recongnize that I'm not you, I made myself, I made myself what I am, I changed myself, I became someone else" over and over again, a totaly hypnotizing mantra that I can still hear...At the end of the night a gang of kids from the local town had gathered outside the monastery and brought an amazing over accesorized disco-car complete with huge sound system, light show and a homo-disco soundtrack that was just a perfect ending.

Some plants I liked in Naples

Naples is a pretty amazing town, and thanks to the wirlwind motorbike ride around town with our gracious hosts Vito and Katia last night, we got to see a pretty good part of it. During the day I just couldnt stop photographing the plants (?!). Here's some I liked.

Today we're off to Padula where Angelo is part of the Fresco Bosco exhibition curated by the super prestigious Achille Bonito Oliva

Schaulager

This is one of my totally favourite buildings and too bad I couldnt find any decent photos of it. Its Schaulager (2003) by Herzog & de Meuron, a kind of storage space / exhibition space. The concept is simple: art works stay in storage for so long and nobody can see them or see if they are ok so why not have a storage space where they can be easily exhibited while in storage? The solution by H&dM is not so simple, yet utterly fabulous: A kind of box with faux-cave exterior, with a prismatic space carved out of it, leaving a rockmade little house on the prairie in the middle. The windows are of course cracks in the rock.

Three Tree Buildings

Cute Marble Detail

I finished my Kamikaze deadline yesterday, so here's a cute building with a nice marble detail: the screws holding tha marble to the facade are kin of jighlighted and also they rusted a bit and there's some airconditioners too so its a nice example of how a modernist and maybe lightly brutalist building can look good today. Its in Thessaloniki, when I saw it I thought it looked like a building by Krandonellis, yet it's by Thomaidis.

A House made from stacked pieces of Land

This was my contribution for the Star Wars issue of the Hong Kong based concept book CREAM, which we got to know via our good friend Panos Tsagaris. Star Wars always makes me think of the desert, a kind of african landscape + Herzog's Fata Morgana and I was already having the idea to make somthing from the pieces of land leftover from the Invisible Home project. (I just re-read what I wrote, my syntax is way off today, I better stop bloggin and get back to work cos there is tons of stuff to do before tuesday)

Wrapping and Building

A slight fascination with wrapped buildings. I'm not really sure whats' interesting about them but I keep photographing them, but then again I photograph everything.

Virgin Suicides

While in Patras we visited the now defunct all-girls school Arsakeion. Even though the place has been out of use for only a few years, it seems ancient and the apparent recent renovation for "culture purposes" somehow makes the whole thing super beautiful and super spooky.

This coming September, a large contemporary art (and Architecture!) exhibition curated by Nadia Argyropoulou will take place in the school. More on this soon...

Some pics from the New Trends Exhibition

The students of U-Patras together with Yannis Aesopos did a fantastic job of setting up the exhibition. Here's some highlights during his presentation Minsuk Cho of MASS Studies showed this video of Towers in the Park ,
the amazing model of Taira Nishizawas' gymansium
JDS Architects Mermaid project
Enric Ruiz-Geli / Cloud 9 Villa Nurbs
Polaris Architects The Threatened City
R Sie(n) 's Hypnosis Chamber
and
the super active Veronica Valk form ZiZi-YoYo, Esthonia

Almost ready

New Trends is almost ready thanks to the hard work by the students of U-Patras who volunteered to set up the installation. The exhibition opens tonight, and tomorrow is an all-day symposium where all the participating architects will present their work, so its should be a super intereting day. Oh and here's some pics of the Cloud House model which took forever to look a bit sloopy but thats part of the deal. Also the presentation boards came out nice.

AGENDA: New Trends this Friday

The New Trends in European and Asian Architecture opens this Friday in Patras. The theme is AGENDA. On Saturday there is an all-day conferance.

Polygon Concrete

As usual I've been browsing past photos, and this time I went all the way back to 1995. I photographed these breakwave modules for Purple Prose and wrote a piece called Alt-PREFAB which I think was all about how concrete prefabrication can become a little psychedelic. Seems like I'm alwasy interested in the same things over and over, but these are still kind of cute anyway.