Athens Trilogy
The Walking Building
Video, 4:31 min, 2004-2006
Troll
Video, 5:30 min, 2011
Casino Ruin
Video, 6:39 min, 2012
"Troll" and "Casino" are emblematic modernist buildings of the 1950s. Both failed in their intentions, and both were used as vehicles to talk about the anthropological and financial crisis in Athens. Together with "Walking Building" (2006) they form a trilogy from which we can learn about the failures of modernism in the South. In all three projects the buildings have become videos; scenarios for the buildings’ future; dialogues between proposed architecture and critical fiction.
Artist's Bio:
I’m an architect. I like buildings, but I’m not sure I want to be the one building them. I like them like beaches and mountains and clouds – as part of an extended idea of nature.
I dropped out of Greek polytechnic school and finished my undergraduate studies at the Southern California Institute of Architecture after I realized they were teaching us how to design buildings but not why. Sci-ARC in the late 1980s and 1990s was all about the why.
After graduating I got an internship at an art center, as I thought that contemporary art seemed like a language more fluent in criticism and versatility. Later I went to Columbia University for my Masters’ degree, and I was part of the first batch of the Paperless Studios design course with the computer as the only tool. It was then that I became interested in the computer as a philosophical device, a landscape of ideas whose horizon began to appear during the early days of the internet. This idea somehow completed my sphere of interests: art and buildings with a focus on how society shifts, especially as seen through the internet which is the most significant paradigm shifter of our time.