Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis

The workshop on the one hand aims in tracing and clarifying architecture meaning- giving mechanisms and on the other in testing historic, environmental but also architectural resilience in receiving or bearing alternative compositional principles, architecture programs as also public space protocols.

The curriculum is consisted of three successive pedagogical projects, aiming to interpret the transformation of architectural values embedded in existing urban areas, gradually alienated from their original urban and architectural purpose. 

The design question of the workshop is related to the material coordinates of a central urban block in relation with its immediate territory, with the relationship of urban space and its function to  building form, to geometry, to natural light, orientation, views, textures …

Students are asked not to be engaged:
in any programmatic constraints as also in any building regulations, as hierarchic tracing, axes, perspectives, symmetries, floor maximum area indices,
in any contextual typologies as urban block, square, atrium, arcade or
in any prescribed figurative version of the “local” or the “genius loci”, as pitched ceramic roof, neoclassic proportions

Broadly speaking students are asked to be freed from any restriction, but what is immediately dictated or latently insinuated by the already existing in the area conceptual order, as also by the anyway arbitrary and indeterminate design obsessions of the author. In this sense this particular design workshop proposes  the analogy of the design process to the arbitrary nature of signifying linguistic mechanisms.