waste design strategies

Positive and negative re-use.

dpr-Barcelona published last week the waste design project. It is a project where the challenge was to re-use construction waste in order to built new "buildings". The waste is used in its most "clear" form: in this work it can be read either as a series of finds or as a mass. A combination of these two understandings of waste form the design mechanism of this offices "waste tower". A mass of waste is shaped for its main building. Some old big recipients are chosen to organize a green elevation.
We can argue that the reinterpretation of a find is a positive reconstruction of it. We reorganize a strategy for an object while we re-invent a possible re-constitution of it. In a second productive mode the object was deluded in a volume of mixed recycled mass.

How an architecture can be thought in this frame? Architecture will either be condensed in a operation concerning the object or it will occur as a creation of empty spaces in a mass of "lost finds". A complex attitude that uses recycled objects in order to create such voids in the mixed material mass could be the work of a negative design. It is supposed to create negative places out of the use of tanks, kegs and other preexisting structures that can permit the creation of vacant places. In a smaller scale, plain volumes can be used in order to give form to "furniture" designed negatively.


The proposed building can be used as a particular office complex. It is constituted by 3 different distinct volumes: the first is a scaffold designed as a staircase and corridor structure that is linked to the second volume through some light bridges. The second volume negotiates the idea of negative design in the particular case of an installation that receives in its interior old used kegs. The third is a proposed structure that could be named floating garden and may be seen as another tactic for reuse of tanks, stabilizing them through strong and thin titanium beams and columns in order to create a vertical garden.




the flickr set on the project

tv impressions

We read in Wikipedia that "on an empty channel, an analog TV receiver shows a "snowy" noise pattern. This particular "snowy noise" that was an everyday experience will no longer exist within the next years after the victory of the digital tv. We may already feel that this snow shows something lost. One can create a similar pattern on a digital channel when not using a digital TV converter box.

the last seat condition

This common phenomenon of people choosing the last bus seats in order to sleep, may be the origin of the Hotel Bus project. An emptied, reused Bus can serve as a space for parallel beds. Find the Hotel Bus in the projects collection, through the "project" tag.

the singer and the armchair

A new "double" novel written in Greek and published by ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΑΓΡΑ in Athens. The story can be projected to the changes of a single room that changes shape and content when different furniture are moved in or out. Plans of the 4 versions of the room are included. The cover maybe represents a fifth version of the room idealized. Ἡ Τραγουδίστρια καὶ ἡ πολυθρόνα. *

inhabited observatory

Ethel Baraona Pohl's post about the inhabited observatory proposes a reading of the particular building as a constructed balance between the banality of some existing material and the unpredictable distorting power of this same banality. The gap between banality and the visionary character of its distortions can be crucial in this era that may not envisage creativity as a set of ex nihilo extraordinary constructions but in the contrary as a set of unpredictable interpretations of the déjà vu.
An inhabitation of the space between banality and unpredictability, between norm and exception is a possible background to think again on architecture. The inhabited observatory is proposed as such a building: its parts could be encountered fragments of existing buildings, found all over Greece; the building could be read as an accumulation of small storehouses, water tanks, ruined secondary spaces in the countryside; never erected yet with such a voluntary arrogance this semi-ruined material is supposed to transform abstract insignificant finds to a house and a monument. The possibility of an inhabitation of this construction is thus meant to suggest a monumental look to vanishing, unimportant building fragments, never proposed as self sufficient architectonic matter. In the same time the inhabited observatory questions about writing (as a usually forgotten possibility of architecture) and about the constitution of an "empty" area through a construction of its center.

found in Andy Cropy's blip collection

city floor works

Munich asphalt and pavements, details, 2009.

cabin monument

A particular naming can transform a find to something we used to call a "work of art". The name for this conceptual construction would be "Gaze Monument". We name "Gaze Monuments" conscious transpositions of objects to unexpected areas. Sudden descriptions that are proved similar to constructions. Some things (that could already be writings) explode and reach areas "in which they don't belong"; they then are structurally formed as "gaze monuments". Either provocatively, as here for instance, or silently, objects can be proved the testimonies of "other discourses". The object, an action, a composition or any element installing reality "as such" can undertake the role of a particular definitive transformation. The work of this transformation would be a conscious change of meaning of the element. A Gaze Monument would than be the disturber that disarranges the symbolic order of things. Showing it as a non ordinary piece may already formulate a sabotage strategy.

A metaphoric structure could be for example obvious in the "cabin monument", found during a walk in Munich, 2009: it maybe expresses the possibility of different inhabitations proposed for a stable marble basis. The piece can be shown as an open possibility of hosting whatever statue in the same place. A possibility of a monumentality for replacement could be at stake. We can remember Lenin's first politics of monuments that prescribed wooden sculptures or provisional honorary sculptures for the acts or the heroes of the revolution.
Is the Cabin Monument an empty monument or does it shape the structure of the monumental? The Cabin Monument could be presented for instance as a quest for investigation about the ethical construction of memory. From another point of view the Cabin Monument pose this inverse question: can we think of ethics without memory? Can a provisional monumentality form an enough strong foundation for future ethics? Can ethics exist without a strong, monumental, symbolic order? The Cabin Monument could be a paradoxical word, pronounced in a non existing language or it could function as a particular question; as a destabilizing fragment of reality, in the same time obviously included in reality's most banal side. The transformation of some forgotten objects into important things is a silent work; it is the production of a particular recognition or a perverse reference that can substitute the work of art with a construction of the gaze. Such constructions, such intellectual distortions can form a series of steps in a city level. The city would then be an idiosyncratic museum of banality. Nevertheless such a museum is more a museum of seeing. A "gaze monument" would mark a responsibility for seeing. In the same time it does not require more creative energy then the distorting power of any intellectual occupancy.

Munich and the question of banality

Open discussion with Alexandros Fthenakis in the Architecture School of the Technische Universität in München about the recent work in the TETE A TETE series. The work was this time presented with a rhetorical emphasis to banality and within the dialectics between normality and exception. A short reference to Victor Schklofski and to his "Art as Technique" could maybe form the center of a view to the work. The first point made was that we could begin an architectonic investigation about the civilization of contemporary remains. In a future civilization we would have to handle existing objects rather than create new ones. The inventive character of the future would not be "creation per se" but a work of possible reuses of some existing stuff. This attitude could find its past in objets trouvés strategies and in ready made works but in the contemporary conditions this aesthetic moves turn to a necessary practice, or are marked by ethical characteristics.
The second point had to do with the post production architectonic tactics and particularly with the composition in an archive condition. In this background putting together different things could form the structures of future constructions not only as a necessary acceptance of decadence but as a work of memory. Inhabiting the remaining objects of the past's overproduction obliges to a series of works that include architectural creation into a particular space construction organized out of space fragments. DJ, VJ, SJ are particular modes for treating the plethora of the existing things. The aesthetics of collage can be seen through this point of view as intellectual exercises of directing particular co-existences.

Many interesting comments from the audience followed by many long fascinating walks in the city of Munich, normally considered as boring. Important "finds" invented and series of new notes in the black notebook #19.

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 examine fragments cut out 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 stage 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. * *




The catalog's picture by Petros Phokaides.

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. Unremarkable places still offer the most remarkable views. The new Jean Nouvel's construction site is maybe one of them: the quality this huge dig will not be compared to the final architectonic result. Nevertheless the dig is now a real important building.

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.

KAM 2009

"Tαξινομητικές κατασκευές, αρχειοθετικοί μηχανισμοί, ιεραρχικές μικροδομές και αποκρυπτικά σχήματα με τον πεζό τρόπο σχεδιασμού επίπλων με ιδιαίτερα ράφια". The poster is made by lambandlamp design group.

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.