ARISTOTELOUS ANÁBASIS
NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS_SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE_ 4TH YEAR STUDIO_8A A S S O C I A T E P R O F E S S O R _T I L E M A C H O S A N D R I A N O P O U L O S A S S I S T A N T_S E R G I O S S T R I G L O Y I A N N I S
“The greater the urge for unity, the more one can safely conclude that weakness is here; the greater the urge for diversity, differentiation, internal division, the more power there is here.” F.Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book Three, Athens 2001, 305-06.
National Technical University of Athens, Averof Hall, Design Room, 1st Floor. March 2020. To be precise, Tuesday, March 10, afternoon: the closure of all educational institutions in the country due to the pandemic is announced when fourth year students have just finished two collages of 3 meters long with fragmentary plans of Aristotelous Street- spread on drawing tables. Studio 8A __one teacher, one assistant, 37 students, divided into 2 groups: Aristotelous lies double before our eyes. The scheduled visit is now a thing of the past, its ascent cannot take place: 1500 meters, from the Upper Town to the sea -which the students are never going to conquer. They are not going to walk. They have all also just ordered gray cardboard for the creation of 2 models in scale of 1:500 –received the next morning, just in time; the general lockdown is imposed on Monday. We know the rest: CiscoWebex, 39 windows, Dropbox downloads, home backgrounds, casual outfits, interrupted speech, desperate annotations, delayed audio transmission, delayed image transmission, delays in general, sublime yellow or magenta sketches, PowerPoint connection breaks, appositional comments, an insistence on physical models nonetheless, headaches, eye pain, back pain, turned off cameras, turned on cameras, online smiles, online tensions, online study. Through the 8A Studio, students are invited for the first time in their 4th year to face public outdoor space at the scale of Urban Design. The axis of Aristotelous, symbolically charged but essentially forgotten and multi-problematic is chosen as the brilliant field: it is divided into 8 sub-regions whose processing is double: 8X2=2. Not 16, because 2 are the urgently requested, three-meter models of the whole. Each student group must study their area, but necessarily cooperate with the previous one -and the following one. How then “necessary”? The temptation of a general plan -master plan if you will- was fought from within, for two reasons. The first is the lack of time, or rather, the lack of physical space. But the main reason is another: the inherent urge in these 2 large groups of 37 for variety, differentiation, internal division. What is this urge, in a period of pandemic, if not a sign of great health? Unity finally exists, but it is not stylistic -so neither univocal dynamic, nor univocal static. It is of a different kind, nobler, conflicting -something that only one person can never achieve. This is what Bréton notes in 1928, at the end of Nadja: “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.”
Group Β BARKONIKOU ANNA MARIA CHOULI CHARA DUKA FOTINI FELEKOURA VASILIKI – NATALIA GATSINOS STELIOS KARYDI VASILIKI KOUVA ELENI LYGEROU EMMANOUELA NIKOLAOU MYRTO PAPAPETROU YANNIS PASTROMA VASIA PATAVALI AFRODITI RACHIOTIS ORFEAS SIDERI EIRINI SOFADITI VASILINA STAMODIMOU PANAGIOTA TSIKOURI LOUKIA XYDEA VASSILIKI – DIMITRA
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA_2021