Lecture by PhD candidate Elina Letsiou on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at 14:15 in Room Z, titled "Shifting Scales: From the Vessel to the Design Principle. A Close Reading of an Inquiry into the Household, Fermentation, and Microbes", as part of the course INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH, within the meeting series: PEDAGOGIES OF RESEARCH.

Description
How does a research claim travel from a cooking pot to a design principle? Starting from bell hooks’s (1990) idea that the home is a site where theory is made, this lecture presents the speaker’s recent article “The Microbe as Co-occupant” (Materia Arquitectura, 2026). The article follows milk fermentation from a Thessalian household-grocery shop to a contemporary kitchen and reads the household as a micro-infrastructure of care that we share with microbes. We then read four of its passages closely together, guided by one methodological tool: the shift of scale. A condition holds constant while its carrier changes, from vessel to furniture, to space, and to design principle. The lecture closes with the next steps of a research project in progress.

Bio
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, beyond architectural typology, as an entanglement of human and more-than-human forms of life, sustained through metabolic processes and embodied care. It brings together feminist care theory, posthumanist thought, and infrastructure studies, and follows milk fermentation across three temporalities: prehistoric Pindus, transhumant pastoralism, and contemporary Thessaly. Her article “The Microbe as Co-occupant” was published in Materia Arquitectura (2026), and in the same year she presented the entry ektós schedíou (“outside the plan”) at the DDes Conference Carrots and Sticks, Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is co-editor and co-author of the volume Assemblages of Terrestrial Accommodation (FRMK Editions, 2025) and has presented her research at the international conferences ArchiBau.hr (2022) and S.ARCH (2021). She graduated with distinction from the School of Architecture, 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