an apartment in the keg vehicle

2 versions for a keg vehicle transformation to an apartment. The space is visited through the roof openings with the use of vertical ladders. A big circular window is proposed for the part of the vehicle that is turned to the front cabin of the truck. For this purpose a reinforcement of this front part will be necessary.



A design in such a procedure, is the formation of a particular naming. Furthermore the deformation of an existing way to name particular things; the importance of a particular find is always in the center of such a procedure. An archeology of a given thing calls an architect to discover, crop, cut, paste, distort and transform. This intellectual act and this architectonic act is ruled by some commands of photoshop. Images have a strange role in this particular archeology of the surplus. We share its items as if we share concepts. Some Sol Lewitt's sentences on conceptual art can have a different meaning here: 'Ideas can be works of art'. 'If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics'. 'All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art'.


A constructive naïveté, where naming and defining is in the same time identified to the artistic character and to the 'work of art' 'itself', is under preparation. We detach fragments from their background and rediscover new possible promises that they could give us. An ironic post digital culture will investigate the depth of this present civilization of the plethora.
The keg apartment is proposed as a program. The keg wagons can be detached from their cars and can form more stable units for a certain period. We can imagine areas where a number of keg vehicles can structure a slow mobile community that could arrange the nearness or the distance to particular neighbors through the particular place that each apartment could have.

The project was published by Ethel Baraona Pohl.

the hinge as a time structure

[from the Oxford Dictionnary]

We could construct a possible ontology of architecture based in the concept of hinge. The hinge would then be a generator of every possible architectural condition: the control of difference in space would be undertaken by the hinge. Furthermore : we could read the Georg Simmel's essay about the bridge and the door as a particular silent honor to this architectural piece that is absent but maybe omnipotent in the text. If we keep thinking in a Simmel's background we could also add in this "hinge syllogism" a particular view connecting the possibility of constructing views over the fragmentary and the "holistic". Still the hinge can be proved to be the regulator of this particular mutation from the part to the whole for which Simmel writes in his Philosophy of the Landscape.

parlez-moi de lui

work shift

One page script for a theater play in Greek.

weak monuments show

A function of the city as murder place is constructed and shown in the Bar Association of Thessaloniki (Tsimiski & Pavlou Mela - 18.10.2009 - 17.11.2009). The project could be a curatorial one but the curated material is found in existing, real archives of the city and in some significant rooms and halls of the city: lawyers offices, the court house, police stations, the city's morgue, funeral offices, the criminology department of the city.
Thessaloniki's murder urbanism is related to the presentation of the infrastructure of murder; this is done through the creation of another archive including drawings, documents and texts. The drawings describe part of the city's equipment for the reception of murders. This description is mostly done through plans and sections of the places that receive or are awaiting for the city murders. This murder infrastructure is linked to a concept of modern urbanity. A particular mapping of the city through its illicit lethal acts detects the murders as theatrical, unrepeatable city actions. An intrusion in some of the official murder archives materializes the approach to the city's murder infrastructure. In 4000 pages of selected official documents the names of the protagonists were erased. Furthermore a series of texts are printed in the multiple show's catalog: theoretical texts treating murder in the city, historical texts, narrations, short interviews from the medical examiner in Thessaloniki's morgue, from a toxicologist's specialist, from a professor of criminology in the University of Thessaloniki and from other murder specialists. *

cyprus again

An interesting table was set with Athanasiou, Yoka, Pilidou, Antonas, Toumazis and Papoulias. Some considerations and reactions after our presentations in Nicosia were recorded, in Greek. The next day, during a long walk, a particular emphasis was given to new unimportant aspects of the heterogeneous city.

Weak Monuments inhabitation

The room of the spring and the summer 2009 in Thessaloniki, Kastritsiou street 11, close to some important murder sites of the city.

to piraeus

Traveling towards the North, Aegean sea.

The Chania room

Once again back to the strange semi ruined convention center MAICh, in Souda, near Chania; a place that should be used as a thriller movie background. Big corridors, strange elevators and paradoxically working photo cell systems for lighting. This year's novelty: a good speed internet connection, working through ethernet cables in these rooms.

Singing Room

KAM 2009

"ταξινομητικές κατασκευές, αρχειοθετικοί μηχανισμοί, ιεραρχικές μικροδομές και αποκρυπτικά σχήματα με τον πεζό τρόπο σχεδιασμού επίπλων με ιδιαίτερα ράφια"

London Bridge

The Antonas Office proposal for London Bridge, published in Arch Daily, by Ethel Baraona Pohl, and also in daily tonic & design daily.
Also announced in antonas flickr set.

the 3 walks monument

London open air bookshop

Lancaster again

London was this time very hot and the hotel was unbearable during the evening.

The Prague's Monument

A sculpture is constructed in Prague, May 2009: the construction is an observation of the roof opposite to the hotel room. The shape of the description is the sculpture's shape: this short film and a series of photographs.

Greek version of Neufert, old edition of the book that every European architect kept in his cupboard before its content (frequently updated) became digital. We can read Neufert as a Norbert Elias book's extension, covering the changes of what a modern stable life was supposed to mean. Also check anarchitecture.

the crane room conflict

Many people hate the crane room project. Ethel Baraona Pohl announced it in ArchDaily. It was also published in Phat City, Mippin, damonj.spaces, insidefeeders, bbs.fuyiplaza, archimag, arch.m6699, boiteaoutils.
The crane room project is proposed through a double strategy concerning the reuse of crane mechanisms.
The first element of this strategy follows the rationale of moving rooms: the bus hotel, the keg apartment, the floating room are part of a vast research about a nomadic housing, reinterpreting existing old vehicles or mechanical particles of a recent past.
The second element proposes an installation of the crane mechanisms. The installation challenges the idea of another narration : it has to do with the apocalyptic mythology of the end of water. A desalination unit is the only technology needed to create sweet water out of the sea. The crane rooms are proposed here as forming a possible complex by the main source of the future's water; in the same time the complex of founded crane rooms allows the preservation of the individual shell and the creation of a landscape out of it. The project is also proposed as a comment about the Internet society, depicting in an landscape project something strangely familiar: a concrete image of this abstract social condition that humanity experiences for the first time in its history: the crane rooms landscape is a well known image. We live in such a landscape even if this same landscape seems so exotic; inhabiting a hypnotic "control panel - cell" the inhabitant of the globe can also be conceived as an inhabitant of a small restricted universe. Through this conception of a distorted social constitution, the crane room ensemble is related to older projects such as the no wall house, the open air housing, the night shelters, the concrete beds or the RealFake house 2.
In these design works, designing is less important than the architecture of the narrative construction; the reuse of existing structures is usually important. An archeology of existing elementary technology and the reinterpretation of it in unexpected ways are crucial within the design process. Designing in some of the examples is a curatorial project that orchestrates existing things.

Piraeus Port Works

An architecture work in the Port of Piraeus: the custom storehouses and chemical laboratories represented through an archeology of finds. Published in Port City Safari, Silvana Editoriale, Milano, editor: Claudia Zanfi.

Found here in yannikos' del.icio.us account.

Lebbeus Woods about architecture in BLDG blog:

[ ... ] "we’re living in a very odd time for the field. There’s a kind of lack of discourse about these larger issues. People are hunkered down, looking for jobs, trying to get a building. It’s a low point. I don’t think it will stay that way. I don’t think that architects themselves will allow that. After all, it’s architects who create the field of architecture; it’s not society, it’s not clients, it’s not governments. I mean, we architects are the ones who define what the field is about, right?
So if there’s a dearth of that kind of thinking at the moment, it’s because architects have retreated – and I’m sure a coming generation is going to say: hey, this retreat is not good. We’ve got to imagine more broadly. We have to have a more comprehensive vision of what the future is".

accident

the amphitheatre house presented in arch daily, text in Greek about it here.

ALEXANROS hotel Monument