After our first decade as a still new Department of Architecture, we feel the need to constantly reinvent ourselves and to face questions concerning the philosophy and practice of our studies, questions which keep coming up. Studies and curricula should change not only by following the signs of our volatile times but also by using experience to improve everything about them. Today’s social and economical crisis automatically becomes a crisis in architecture. The actual crisis itself now adds to the restrictions in their expectations that new architects have to face due to the usual problems in practicing their profession. However, the crisis makes people think more ambitiously: is it possible for our studies to have an impact and ultimately bring a change to our profession and expand architectural practices in order to encompass contemporary urban life and the new biopolitical facts?

The curriculum and the content of our studies are a result of the evolution of the initial choices made when founding the Department. The student who attends our program deals with architecture in close collaboration with other related fields such as the technology of representations and multimedia applications, new construction technologies which view buildings in relation to the environment, contemporary artistic practices which address the scale and the questions architecture poses about modern living. An essential, related and interconnected field to architecture and design is considered that of humanities where history, theory and anthropology show a vital, critical interest in architecture. Our studies are organized round the compulsory courses while, in time, a system of electives is added without  specific directions, a fact which gives the student the chance to build his/her own scientific profile, in the course of his studies.  Since 2009-2010 there has been a Postgraduate Course of Studies in Architectural Design in our Department which expands and promotes the work and the directions of the first five-year cycle of studies. The general thematics of the Course under the title “Symbiosis” shows our intention to delve into the environmental and social dimensions of architectural design and practices.

We aspire to be a Department setting its own unique position - with perseverance, imagination and through the taking of risks- on the map of Greek and European architectural education. We dream of an architect, who instead of being stuck to the obsolete practice of doing things by hand, will possess the inquiring mind of an anthropologist, the inventiveness of an artist, the communicative eloquence of an excellent user of technology and multimedia, and a strong environmental reflex as the majority of the developments we expect to be made internationally in architecture will stem from a new radical understanding of the relationship between technological culture and the restricted and thus invaluable resources of nature on a global scale.

The Chairman of the Department of Architecture

Professor Zisis Kotionis