SPETSES 12-19 JULY

The Anargyrios Korgialenios School of Spetses (AKSS) and the Department of Architecture of the University of Patras are organizing the second Spetses Architecture Workshop SAW 2026 from 12/7 to 19/7 at the AKSS facilities in Spetses.

The BIP is led by the Università Iuav di Venezia in collaboration with three higher education institutions: ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon, the Université Gustave Eiffel, and the University of Thessaly.

The teaching programme combines 3 online sessions  with an intensive in-person week in Vicenza, designed to support a progressive process of theoretical grounding, field immersion, and applied research. 

The online sessions introduce the theoretical framework and methodological approach to studying the socio-spatial transformations of infrastructural corridors, with the SR11 (Strada Regionale 11 / Regional Road 11) as the central case study, and include contributions from partner institutions alongside the coordination of field research activities. 

The in-person component, developed over five intensive days in Vicenza, is organised as a structured sequence of seminars, fieldwork, and collaborative workshops. It begins with an introductory seminar that presents the research context, defines working groups, and establishes research questions. This is followed by three core phases based on the Challenge - Based Education model:

• Engage: direct immersion in the SR.11 infrastructural corridor through situated observation, sensory documentation, and initial interaction with local stakeholders;
• Investigate: development of field-based research through interviews, surveys, participatory mapping, and qualitative data collection, enabling the testing of initial hypotheses; 
• Act: synthesis and translation of the collected knowledge into critical interpretations, narratives, and spatial or strategic proposals.

The programme concludes with a final seminar in which participants present their work to an extended audience – including academic staff, institutional partners, and local stakeholders – fostering critical discussion and reflection on future development perspectives of the SR11 corridor and the broader territorial implications of infrastructural transformation.

When:
Online | 3rd, 7th and 11th of July
In-person | 20th to 24th of July 

Where:
Vicenza, Italy

Location:
IUAV Vicenza
Piazza S. Biagio, 1, 36100 Vicenza , Italy

Language of instruction:
English

ECTS: 3

Number of participants: 7-10 Students

Application deadline: May 30th, 2026

Seminar: Contemporary Materialities of Architecture
Dry Construction, Bio-Based Materials and Contemporary Concrete Technologies

The Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly is organizing an open lecture and discussion with professionals from the fields of construction and architecture, dedicated to contemporary architectural materialities and building technologies.

This event aims to introduce students to contemporary practices, technical applications and construction-related issues concerning durability, sustainability, material assemblies and passive fire protection in contemporary construction.

The thematic presentations will be given by:

• Achileas Sakavos
  Dry construction and lightweight building systems
• Petros Flampouris, architect
  Bio-based materials and the use of natural materials in architecture
• Xanthippos Mitsios, civil engineer
  Concrete and contemporary technologies of its application

Through presentations of projects, materials and technical solutions, the event will highlight the role of materiality in contemporary architectural practice and in the relationship between design and construction.

Friday, May 22, 2026
10:00
Amphitheatre, Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly

Christina Serifi is an architect, researcher and co-founder of TiriLab an initiative exploring multicultural heritage, local technologies, and knowledges in rural northern Greece. She was previously Principal Researcher in Terreform, a New York Center for Advanced Urban Research, regarding indigenous knowledge, alternative educational models and self-sufficiency. Christina is also part of MOULD research collective. Their most recent project,  Architecture is Climate, explores architecture's entanglement with ecological crisis. She is currently teaching and conducting research at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and the City at TU Braunschweig.

Within the framework of the course PELION CHŌRA: Dissecting and Reweaving a Mountain

By The Observatory of the Countryside
Tutor: Metaxia Markaki

For online attendance contact memarkaki@uth.gr

Cultures of co-occupation
A kazáni, two types of milk, a stráta, and a monoculture in the Thessalian landscape. 

Elina Letsiou
Wednesday 20/5, 14.00, Patari Metaptychiakou

DescriptionThe lecture begins in an apartment kitchen in Larissa—a kazáni, a clay pot, and a fermentation culture—and follows the milk on its journey: from the family’s household-grocery store to the paths of the Vlach transhumant herders and the monoculture fields of the Thessalian plain. Developing an informal material biography across five scales, we will discuss how architectural design can accommodate movement, transformation, and more-than-human co-occupants.
Elina Letsiou is an architect and PhD candidate at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly, under the supervision of Zissis Kotionis. Her research reframes the household as a micro-infrastructure of care —not as an architectural typology, but as a living entanglement of human and more-than-human forms of life, sustained through metabolic processes and embodied care. It articulates feminist care theory, posthumanist thought, and infrastructure studies, with milk fermentation as its empirical field across three temporalities: Neolithic Pindus, transhumant pastoralism, and contemporary Thessaly. She is co-editor and co-author of the book Assemblages of Terrestrial Accommodation (FRMK Editions, 2025). She has presented her research at international conferences, including ArchiBau.hr (2022) with the paper Care as a Material Doing, S.ARCH International (2021), and the Creative Europe / OPEN UP — DEVISINGS programme (2023). Her work has also been shown in European exhibitions. She graduated with distinction from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2012) and completed with distinction the Postgraduate Programme in Architectural Design at the University of Thessaly (2015). She is the founder of L2 studio, an architectural practice based in Larissa and Thessaloniki.

The lecture takes place within the framework of the courses:
GEOGRAPHIES OF FOOD Tutor: Thaleia Marou
&
MACHINE IN THE GARDEN: Wanderings Through the Countryside
The Observatory of the Countryside Tutor: Metaxia Markaki

The Matter of Writing
A design workshop on the re-appropriation of writing

as part of the course IMAGE-WRITING (held by Fani Paraforou)

The workshop “The Matter of Writing” poses the following questions: What is the relationship between words and space, and how does the textual become synonymous with the plastic? Is it the gesture that transforms through the resistance of things, or is it the textual that presupposes an immaterial visibility of relationships and sequences? How does a practice take shape within the bipolarity of the immateriality of words and their material meta-translatability? Can an experience of reading and performance emerge within an expanded space-time of words, signs, and their materiality, such that they operate through it? 

Writing constitutes a set of cultural and political elements that compose, sustain, and shape a serial field of fundamental patterns, aligning thought. On this surface, artistic practice opposes a language in which critique is directed in the reverse direction, against its guiding principles. It challenges and redraws. The workshop’s explorations, based on this bipolarity and the trilogy “index,” will be expressed through flows of materials, writings, rhizomes, and social contradictions. We will also examine how writing is transformed through material and lived processes, before the palimpsest of inscriptions and transcriptions permanently alters it in our eyes.

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 | 14:00
Graduate Program Lobby (ground floor)

ΜΙΝERALIZATIONS
built environments and their local geologies

Lydia Xynogala
Thursday 14/5, 13.00 Post-grad Loft

This talk will unfold through a series of sites in Greece the US and Germany whereby architecture and geology are entangled. By a close inspection of built artifacts I will discuss how methodologies, philosophical concepts, geological knowledge and history can be synthesized in writing and imagining new stories. 
Lydia Xynogala (Dr.sc ETH) is an architect and writer working between Zurich and Athens; currently postdoc lecturer at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio and at the Academy of Art and Design in Karlsruhe. Her dissertation, on the history of mineral springs and baths in Greece, completed as a doctoral fellow at the gta Institute at ETH Zurich, was nominated for the ETH Medal and exhibited at gta exhibitions ETH Zurich, ZAZ Bellerive, and the Mendrisio Academy; currently preparing the manuscript coming out this fall by Park Books, Zurich. 

Her architectural practice, ALOS, has been supported by fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Onassis Foundation, and recognized with nominations and an award from the Greek Architecture Award. She has lectured internationally and her work and writings have been published at  Future Anterior, MIT Thresholds, Log, e-flux architecture, Manifest Journal, Domus, gta papers , wallpaper* among other journals and book volumes. Previously, she has taught studios and seminars at ETH Zurich, Columbia GSAPP, The Cooper Union, City College NY and RPI. Xynogala holds architecture degrees from Princeton University, The Cooper Union, and the Bartlett, UCL.

Within the framework of the course 
PELION CHŌRA: Dissecting and Reweaving a Mountain
By  The Observatory of the Countryside  
Tutor: Metaxia Markaki

For online attendance contact  memarkaki@uth.gr

Lecture by Christos Filippidis Urban (Re)Design as a Counterinsurgency Tool: Constantinos Doxiadis in Vietnam

Thursday 14/5/2026 14:00-17:00 – Room Γ

Download the poster.

The lecture will take place online in the framework of the course: 
Special Topics In Theory of Architecture Ii: Decolonising Architecture
Instructor: P. Phokaides, Ass. Prof. Dept. of Arch, UTh

Short bio:
Christos Filippidis is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Architecture, University of Ioannina, Greece. Over the last years he has critically investigated issues related to urban securitization and militarization with a particular focus on counterinsurgency theories/practices and urban geopolitics.

Lecture by Stavros Stavrides “Inhabiting Spaces of the Commons: Collective Housing as a Space of Sharing”

Tuesday 12/5/2026 18:00-20:00 – Foyer

Download the poster.

The lecture will take place in person as part of the series of events “Co-habiting Vacancies: From Vision to Claims”co-organized by the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly (Dept.Arch UTh) and the open research-action collective CoHab Athens, between 11/5/2026-22/5/2026.

Speaker bio:
Stavros Stavrides, architect and activist, is Emeritus Professor of architectural design and theory at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he presently teaches a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience and research methodologiesand supervises phd theses. He is member of the NTUA Lab for the Architectural Design and Communicationas well as founding member of the independent Laboratory for the Urban Commons. He has done extensive research fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico focused on housing-as-commons and on urban struggles for self-management.His recent publications include The Politics of Urban Potentiality (London 2024), Housing as Commons (co-edited with Penny Travlou, London 2023), Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (Manchester 2019), Common Space. The City as Commons, (London 2016, Istanbul 2016, Athens 2019, Lisbon 2021, Milano 2022, Bucharest 2024, Seoul 2022), Towards the City of Thresholds (Trento, 2010, Madrid 2016, Istanbul 2016, N. York 2019), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (Athens, 2010) and From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (Athens, 2002 National Book Award) as well as numerous articles on spatial theory and the urbancommoning culture. He has lectured in European and North and SouthAmerican Universities on urban struggles and practices of urban commoning.

Personal homepage: https://stavrosstavrides.com/

The Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly (Dept.Arch UTh) and the open research-action collective CoHab Athens are organizing an exhibition and a parallel events titled: “Co-habiting Vacancies: From Vision to Claims”, taking place from May 12 to May 21, 2026.

The exhibition presents the outcomes of the collaborative youth competition “CoHabiting Vacancies” (2024–2025), organized by CoHab. The competition aimed to explore possibilities for the reuse and transformation of vacant buildings—primarily owned by public institutions or non-profit organizations—into various forms of cooperative housing, tailored to local needs. The innovative competition proposals demonstrate that the cooperative housing model can serve as a meaningful tool for securing more affordable and higher-quality housing. At the same time, it promises to offer a sustainable response both to the housing crisis and social isolation, as well as to the underutilization of vacant buildings in Greek cities and the countryside.

The exhibition was first presented in Athens (November 2025) and, following Volos, will travel to Thessaloniki, serving as a platform for exploring alternative housing models and collective living practices across different local contexts. Drawing on the visionary ideas proposed by young students and professionals for transforming vacant buildings into spaces of shared living, solidarity, and care, and informed by international examples, the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly and CoHab Athens aim to foster a broader dialogue with local stakeholders and communities. This dialogue focuses on the institutional, social, and architectural challenges involved in promoting cooperative and collective housing.

As part of the program, the following public events will take place:

A) Competition exhibition“Co-habiting Vacancies: From Vision to Claim”. Opening: Tuesday, May 12, 20:30. Exhibition hours: Daily 10:00–20:00 until Wednesday, May 21, at the Exhibition Space, Department of Architecture, UTh. 

B) Scientific symposium & open discussion “Inhabiting the Commons. Collective Housing as a Space of Sharing” with keynote speaker Stavros Stavrides, Emeritus Professor, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens. It will take place on Tuesday, May 12, 18:00 at the Department of Architecture, UTh.

C) “Participatory Workshop for Inclusive Co-Housing” open toUTh students and other individuals interested in cooperative models and collective housing. It will take place on Wednesday, May 13, 15:00–17:00 at the Central Library of the University of Thessaly. [Register for the participatory workshop:https://forms.gle/MMJKLmR7TtPY6sqr9]  

D) Open discussion “Alliance for Cooperative Housing” with the participation of organizations based in the Thessaly region. Short presentations and an open discussion will highlight the prospects of cooperative housing models and collective initiatives at local and regional levels. It will take place on Wednesday, May 13, 18:00–20:00, at the Central Library of the University of Thessaly

The events are part of the ongoing, close collaboration between the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly and the open research-action group CoHab Athens. Their shared aim is to inform and activate public dialogue around critical social and spatial challenges, while actively contributing—through academic knowledge and collaborative networks—to addressing them.