Blended Intensive Program (BIP)
Architecture(s) of Care 3: Occupy, Poetically
International Summer School – Pietra de’ Giorgi, Italy
15th - 19th of June 2026

Join us for a one-week residency in the hilltop village of Pietra de’ Giorgi, in the rural landscape of the Oltrepò Pavese, Northern Italy. Architecture(s) of Care 3: Occupy, Poetically invites students and early researchers to explore architecture as a collective, situated and experimental practice. Rather than learning about a place, participants will learn by inhabiting it. For one week, we will live and work together in the village, engaging with its spaces, rhythms and community while contributing to an ongoing project of cultural reactivation centred on the reopening of the village’s historic cinema as a social theatre. The programme combines critical mapping exercises, spatial observation and conversations with local actors with a hands-on construction workshop, where participants will collaboratively design and build small architectural elements for the public spaces around the cinema. Walking, mapping, building and sharing everyday life become part of a collective ritual of learning and making, where design is understood not as a finished object but as a process of care, negotiation and radical imagination. Participants will stay together in the village in a temporary residency setting, with accommodation and daily lunch provided throughout the programme. If you are interested in experimental pedagogies, rural futures and architecture as a form of social engagement, this summer school offers a unique opportunity to think, build and inhabit together.

As part of the Master's Degree in Reuse of Buildings and Complexes of the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly, on Thursday 02/04/2026 at 17:00 [UTC+3] at MS TEAMS, an online lecture with a guest speaker from Label Architecture entitled "From Belgium with love" will take place.

Coordination: Fabiano Micocci, Dept. Arch UTh

CV
Label architecture is an architectural practice based in Brussels, a city they also call home. Their projects, on various scales, are as much an opportunity to play with existing space, from their common reference points, as not to take themselves too seriously while being serious about their work. An insatiable will to play with the obvious to maximum effect. Associates: Thibaut Rome, Michel Lefèvre, Christophe Pham, Andreas Vanysacker. Collaborators: Henri Winter, Alexis Le Gallo.

MS Teams link.

Designing Land: Kuklen Industrial Park and the Transformation of Plovdiv’s Peripheries through Global Production

Ina Valkanova

Thursday 26.3, 14.00

ONLINE

This lecture presents an in-depth study of a global production landscape on the periphery of Plovdiv—the Trakia Economic Zone. Building on discussions of material flows, networks, and social dynamics, it examines how land is transformed through interconnected material, regulatory, and experiential processes.

Focusing on the role of the private construction company Senit, the lecture traces how industrial development was initiated on former agricultural land and enabled through alliances between political, financial, and advisory actors. In doing so, it highlights the mechanisms of extended industrial urbanization. The case of Industrial Park Kuklen is examined through land ownership patterns, transactions, and management structures, revealing the political-economic frameworks that have shaped the area, alongside emerging practices of care and environmental repair.

The lecture further explores the evolving material life of the landscape, shaped by both human and non-human forces, where natural processes intersect with the controlled design of industrial infrastructures. By approaching industrial territories as dynamic and relational environments, it offers a multi-layered, more-than-human understanding of global production landscapes, challenging the notion that such developments occur on a tabula rasa or are governed solely by dominant economic and political forces.

Ina Valkanova is a researcher, urbanist, and activist. Her work explores the relationship between global production and local environments, focusing on a special economic zone on the periphery of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD from ETH Zürich (Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies) and a Dipl.-Ing. from RWTH Aachen University. From 2017 to 2019, she served as Coordinator for Investment and Innovation for Sofia’s long-term development strategy, Vision for Sofia 2050. Prior to this, she was Director of the international festival One Architecture Week in Plovdiv. Ina is a co-founder of Gradoscope, a Sofia-based collective focusing on urban and landscape process design in complex urban initiatives and redevelopment projects. She has taught at the University of Architecture in Sofia and at ETH Zürich, and has lectured widely across Europe, including at Copenhagen Architecture Week, Belgrade International Architecture Week, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and KU Leuven. Her work has been published in Steel Cities: The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, Dimensions Journal, and Bauwelt, among others. She served on the jury of the 2025 New European Bauhaus Awards and recently co-curated the exhibition It Was All Fields Once, presented at CIVA and Track Brussels.

Within the framework of the course 
MACHINE IN THE GARDEN: Wanderings through the Countryside

By the Observatory of the Countryside

Tutor: Metaxia Markaki

For online attendance contact memarkaki@uth.gr

Lecture by Niki Sorvani “Map-writing for feminist and queer approaches”

Thursday 26/3/2026 14:00-17:00 - Οnline - https://msteams.link/KSD2

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:
Niki Sorvani is an architect from the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly, whose academic and research activity lies at the intersection of architecture, feminist geography, and queer spatial studies. She holds a PhD from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), focusing on critical analysis of normativity in modernism through the Paradigm of Ernst Neufert's architectural standards handbook, a MSc in Design-Space-Culture from NTUA and a MA in Gender, Society, and Politics from Panteion University. Her research focuses on the gendered and embodied dimensions of space. Her monograph  Inhabiting the Uncanny: Toward a Spatial Exploration of the “Closet” was published in 2025. She has additionally participated at conferences, with publications in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, as well as lectures whose central theoretical axis is a feminist and queer approach to space — from the scale of the body and the house to the urban environment.

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