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 Department of Architecture of University of Thessaly, organized a conference at 7-8-9 November 2025 with the title “Broken City” and subject the contemporary challenges for the architecture and urban environment where both  undergraduate and postgraduate students, young graduates as well as phd candidates participated in a critical dialogue for the current issues of greek cities and the potential of architecture to become a tool for questioning and empowerment, shaping new collective dynamics and responses to social needs.

The conference created a framework of exchanging ideas in order to highlight the issues of our time, as well as new directions and proposals for cities and architecture through the lens of five topics:

1. Surveillance and Repression
2. Tourism, Gentrification and Urban Identity
3. Architectural and Environmental Resilience
4. Privatizations and common resources
5. Visibility and Advocacy

As a closure a collective volume was created (conference proceedings) which includes texts of oral presentations presented.

Conference proceedings are available here.

Conference website: https://www.arch.uth.gr/spasmenipoli/

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

Lecture by Francesco Sartore, PhD candidate at the University of Padua, entitled "Visualizing Innsmouth: Digital Reconstruction, Immersive Environments, and the Limits of the Virtual" on Thursday 28/5/2026 at 14:00 in the Postgraduate Hall of the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly.

What does it mean to give form to a place that was never meant to exist? Visualizing Innsmouth — a research project developed at the University of Padova in collaboration with Duke University — takes as its subject Innsmouth, Massachusetts, the fictional city conceived by H.P. Lovecraft in The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936). Drawing on textual evidence, geographical and historical context, and Lovecraft's own autograph sketches, the project produced a navigable 3D reconstruction of the city, allowing users to retrace the protagonist's footsteps through streets that exist only on the page.

A discussion is then to be opened regarding the technical and perceptual limitations of the world of game engines and its surrounding ecosystem, beginning with those identified in this project. The aim is not to eliminate these limitations, but rather to explore how to work within and alongside them.

Bio
Francesco Sartore got the Master degree in Building Engineering and Architecture (UniPD) in 2024. He is a PhD candidate at the ICEA Department of the University of Padua. His doctoral research focuses on the possible uses of game engine software on the analysis, visualization and design assessments of the built environment. He did his master thesis in collaboration with Duke University Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. After graduation, he started his research activity on the T.E.A.C. Project (iNEST founded by PNRR) and is currently working on I_BRIDGE and SMUH projects in ICEA Department and Verona Municipality for the digitalization of documentary heritage using BIM tools. Alongside his academic path, he has cultivated an interest in drawing and 3D modeling for videogames and animation, enriching his interdisciplinary approach to game engine and 3D visualization research.

Re-Opening World Futures through Culture Landscapes. A Case in the Swiss Alps
Juli Osusky
Wedensday 27.5, 18.00 Patari Metaptychiakou

In times of climate crisis, we are witnessing the failures of modern planning and design in the diminishing of planetary futures. How, then, might we design otherwise? In this talk, I approach this question by examining culture landscapes in the Swiss Alps, where humans and non-humans together produce the conditions for mutual survival. By approaching landscapes as formed through water cycles, I speculate that designing cultural landscapes is a radically different practice from designing interventions; one that may open up alternative planetary futures in the Alps.

Juli Osusky is an Urbanist and Urban Designer based in Zurich, Switzerland, currently working at the Office for Urban Design of the city of Zurich. This talk is based on their master thesis in Architecture and Urbanism, which explores culture landscapes as a concept for dealing with water uncertainty in the alpine valley of Lumnezia, Switzerland, questioning the role of design. They hold degrees from TU Delft and ETH Zurich.

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

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

21/5/26 17:15 Amphitheatre

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

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

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)