Antonis Katsaros is an architect (NTUA, 2005) and holds an MSc degree (Politecnico di Milano, 2007). He was a laboratory collaborator in Technological Educational Institute of Thessaly (2009-2013). He has worked at the “Vittorio Grassi Architetto & Partners” office in Milano and he is a co-founder of the “A+A Katsaros & Associates” architectural office. He has participated in architectural competitions and exhibitions in Greece.

Being interested in the process of additions in existing structures is part of a wider context according to which the occupation with projects characterized by spatial and constructional restrictions is not an indication of cultural poverty but, on the contrary, an indication of the richness of the built environment subjected to constant change.
In any case, the matter of the intervention on existing buildings is connected with the relationship between the old structure and the new one. Particularly, in the case of additions in contemporary buildings, which constitute the research field of this thesis, a special condition applies; that these buildings compose the society’s recent built history. That is, if we are used to interventions in which temporal distance between old and new structures raises the question of relationship between the creator and its “long-distance” built history, in this research we are focusing on the cases where this distance is not found back in time. In other words we will deal with the relationship between the creator and its “short-distance” built history. This temporal proximity attributes to the relationship between old structures and new ones special characteristics.
Following this analysis, the process of additions is conceived as the praxis of accepting the existing structure and then organizing a new composition which could be described as the result of the addition.
If, on the one hand, it is worth dealing with the analysis of large scale interventions in the urban scale, on the other hand it is worth reflecting on the small scale processes of additions. It is worth reflecting on these continuous procedures which are conceived as an adaptation for the continuous alterations in the field of users and functions of the city or which are due to the natural damage. In this thesis, we will explore the theory and the practice of these small scale interventions and we will attempt to reveal the process of additions as an influential architectural praxis.
 

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