 It's really a pleasure to be here today with Andreas Angelidakis, that's an important voice in architecture, not only in architecture now. Andreas is going to be introduced by Laura Diamond and Aaron White is going to join the table as a respondent. In Andreas Angelidakis' Demos, installed in Athens in 2016, large blocks of grey soft foam served as the armature for public gatherings, where people chose where to place the foam and then stood on the blocks while speaking or sat while listening. In his text accompanying the installation, Angelidakis noted that a public gathering of an audience and speaker around the architectural space of steps has historically been referred to as an assembly, which is also a contemporary term used to describe a coding language for a technological device. To assemble is to program. Angelidakis' Demos spoke to both uses of the word over time and created a conceptual intersection between bodies as ephemeral collectives and technologies. It is this intersection that has, at least in my understanding, been a place he has returned to again and again through a range of projects over time. In his projects, Angelidakis acts as, quote, an architect who doesn't build, which gives him both an inside-outside position from which to work. He was trained as an architect receiving degrees from SIARC and the AED program here at Columbia. As an architect, his work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at Documenta 14, Mocha Toronto, and the Breeder Gallery in Athens. We warmly welcome him back to Columbia for today's AED lecture. Hello. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Andres, for inviting me. I start with this story of a modernist building in Athens as a way to begin to understand the city and also my field of research. I mean, Athens was radically different from the traditional modernism we've seen in northern Europe. There was not much provided by the state, so people who moved to Athens and had to find housing had to, in a way, invent it. Athens is a city formed by a series of migration crisis. The 1920s and from the coast of Turkey, the 1950s post-war sort of martial plan geopolitics migration, the end of the Soviet Union and migration from Eastern Europe, and then recently from Syria. This building was one of the very few traditional modernist buildings in the sense that it provided quality housing, whereas all the buildings around it were built with modernist technology, with a concrete frame, but for quick profit or to just find quick housing. I kind of always speak about buildings as personas with feelings and intentions. So Hara, this building, was providing affordable, good quality housing. I was interested in this building, it was almost a foreign entity in the city. And during the first years of the financial crisis that began in 2008, the city of Athens continued to change in unexpected ways. And this building kind of stood there as a sort of dignified, now old lady still holding on to the past. The financial crisis made a lot of people who have moved to the city to move back to their countries to Eastern Europe because actually Greece was worse off suddenly. So I was thinking like, this building that has seen the city change around it so much, like what would it want to do? Of course the narrative of Athens is always connected with ruins, with a Parthenon, the Acropolis, but also with crisis, which are not very different things. Usually ruins are the result of some crisis too. I was thinking of ruins as sort of buildings in action and caught in transformation. And I thought of Hara as a kind of building that wanted to become a ruin. So I was wondering how would she react to a city that is so disappointed. So I had been looking at Athens as this city formed by powers outside of architecture, by migration, by legislations, by economy, the technology of the concrete frame having been used to generate other types of vernaculars, how the relationship antiquities to the current state of being a ruin. And what I found was that the vernacular that was most evident, having been generated by the city, was that of unauthorized architecture. So architecture that didn't follow the rules, neither of building codes, but also of traditionally produced architecture. There was a lot of buildings that were produced over time, starting out as just frames, perhaps inspired by a structure like the Parthenon. So these concrete frames that are inhabited step by step, not designed and constructed, but constructed and then designed a little bit and then inhabited, then designed some more, built some more. I was looking at structures like this that were sort of, you had to figure out what the political history or the financial history of the person who built it were to understand how it became as it was. And I was talking to my analyst because I kept going back to this project. Actually the unauthorized project I started with in a studio here at Columbia with Keller Easterling in 1994. And then I went back to it over the years and most recently for Documenta 14, which was titled Learning from Athens. So I decided to answer to that question. And I was talking to my analyst about, I was wondering why that project was so important to me. And he said, well, because you were unauthorized as a kid too. And he meant me telling him I grew up playing with dolls and not understanding that I was gay, but understanding that I was somehow different. And somehow my difference was not acceptable in 1970s Greece. So I wondered whether I was looking for myself in these unauthorized or unfinished or in process buildings and what it meant for a building to grow up as unauthorized. I went back to a moment where I sort of inhabited an unauthorized persona to get out of military service in Greece. And my friends put me up in drag. And I showed up as a transvestite prostitute at the military camp. And I was very curious of that moment because I understood that being completely unauthorized or outsider gave you also some kind of extra energy. And I was wondering whether the city was becoming as it was a sort of chaotic place because it had that. I found this footage, we were driving to the camp and we passed one of these unfinished buildings. It kind of made sense in a loop. So Athens as a city of often described as chaotic, unorganized, undesigned, yet it's become very attractive to people recently, lots of artists moving there. Somehow the city is sexy. And I was wondering if it was exactly this unauthorized character of the city that was making it interesting. The architecture that comprises the city is not particularly interesting, it's sort of very generic low-key modernism, but there was something other. So I was sort of psychoanalyzing the city of Athens. Of course Athens is also famous because it has these ongoing riots in the center ever since 2008. There's by now tiny riots happening all the time. It's almost become a tourist spectacle. So tourists come now to look at Athens and look at the graffiti and take photos of the riots happening in the area of Exarchia with like fighting with the riot police. With the Archaeological Museum there's permanent riot police 24 hours a day. So that's, I thought, maybe the city that has been formed by these other powers like migration, geopolitics, corruption is just angry. And that's how it's reacting to it. So it's this sort of angry, ancient, archaeological riot police narrative that's sort of becoming a branding tool for the city. For Documenta Fortina I was asked to produce sort of architecture for the public program, which was run by Paul Perciado. And I looked at two structures. One, the one on the left, is the steps where democracy was invented. On these steps like the citizens of ancient Athens would go up on the step and address the public. And then on the other side was the unauthorized architecture. And I thought of a step that is made out of a fake concrete and just somebody steps on it and talks. I came up with a system I called Demos. Demos being the assembly of people in the city in antiquity, but also I was interested in the demo as a sort of software technique, like you demo a software, you try it out. And these blocks were light-weight enough that anybody could rearrange them. Everybody could make very proper discussion settings or just be more random, filled with people that would just step on them or be completely uninhabitable. And these blocks were used for eight months during Documenta 14 for the public program, the Parliament of Bodies by Paul Perciado. And then it generated sort of a sequence of other projects. I did a version of these blocks for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Warsaw is an interesting city. It has a very peculiar restoration and preservation history. It was, Warsaw was documented just before World War II because they knew the city would be bombed heavily and they documented all the downtown and then after the war they rebuilt it. And if you visit Warsaw now, those 1950s reconstructions look actually old. And then the older buildings that survived had been renovated in the 90s, so they look newer. So you suddenly don't understand what is new and what is old. And for the public program there, which was two years after Documenta, I bought a texture line of aged concrete, so it has moss and rust on it and made the same blocks. So it kind of newer but older version. Then for Moscow, I did a pink marble one because it was in this sort of classical room at the VSC Foundation but also I was thinking of LGBT rights and why not do like pink marble in Moscow, maybe they would be upset a bit. In Kassel, again working with Paul Presciado, we decided to work on the shape of a military tank which is the product that is basically running the whole economy of Kassel. Kassel is a, apart from we know it now as the birthplace of Documenta, but it's also a very weapons industry city and that is something that is not discussed very much there because they're not exactly happy with the connotation, so we decided to like face on and make a series of soft blocks that could be assembled into a Panzer tank. And then people were invited to take it apart and use it to sit. What kept happening was that even the days that there was no public program, people would take the tank apart just to be able to destroy it. And then the guards were super upset and they were like, why is this happening? Why are people taking it apart? Should we stop them? And I said, no, that's not the point of the project. It can start as a tank, but then people can do whatever they want with it. And then for the project that sort of pre-opened two days ago in Bergen, again I did with Paul Presciado a series of blocks. This time I wanted to use the texts from the participants, make it very colorful and pop. But then all the texts, for example, is a quote by Sir Jordan Truth, the first black woman to fight against slavery and women's rights. Or Maria Galindo, her quote about being disabled, dark, poor, lesbian, indigenous. And they're all rendered in sort of pop skater or hello kitty fonts. And this was in a way to try to approach the idea of queer architecture. Like how do you make something like that queer if all these political statements, like Monique Vidick's famous quotes, lesbians are not women. How do you render that? So I decided to use this kind of pop, skater culture, fashiony fonts. Let's see how that goes down. I just did the pre-event this weekend and the official event starts in September. And these blocks, I mean what's interesting for me is that people decide to use them however they want, like a DJ desk or to actually sit and present something or like to serve drinks. This is a show I did in Athens where I also kind of wanted to address my frustrations with being an architect and my frustration with architecture. And I decided to assume a very cynical approach. Thinking what can architects do? They can make fancy buildings for rich people. Let's address that. So I did these sort of screens with text on them. This one says simple tricks to look better in a photo. I picked up the text in an Instagram ad for filters and they're all built into this sort of yellow construction type of frames because I was also reading that yellow is a color of happiness and sunshine but also jealousy and sickness. So I was approaching this kind of contradiction. I'm an architect and then I'm not finding a right voice. Architecture is such a great tool for designing the world or reading the world but then I don't like what it produces. So I showed a couple of 3D models that are failed, want to be starked text structures covered in text. This one says innovating banking product on it. I was kind of inspired by the graffiti that covers the whole city of Athens and all these North European tourists coming to photograph it because of course in their cities graffiti is not allowed. And I was thinking maybe that's the only way that buildings can actually say something and then what they decide to say is kind of controversial or contradictory or derogatory. That show is called the submissive acknowledgement of powerlessness which is actually also a phrase by Keller Easterling from her text Medium Design. It doesn't talk about architecture in that text but I liked it as a way to describe architecture because one of the very few things that architects are not allowed to be is weak or powerless. I was thinking that architects are always made to look organized, in control, sometimes masculine. So what could happen if we let go of that kind of presentation? I also looked at this figure of deogenous as a sort of proto-troll type of person. He was a philosopher who lived as a homeless guy in Athens, in ancient Athens with his dogs inside the ceramic pot and he would go around criticizing everything. He would criticize Alexander the Great for being such a sort of conqueror or Socrates. And I was interested in this persona of deogenous that just produces things by criticizing. I also liked the way these videos turned out so that's the only reason for them to be here. I mean as architects we're trained to show projects and this is really just an exhibition so it's just a finished thing. It's sometimes harder to talk about complete things. So the contradiction in this exhibition was that it's a kind of designed exhibition that talks about the lack of power. So it also looks kind of designed but then it talks about the weakness of design. And then, well my lecture might be shorter than it should be. Let's see. This is the last project that opened in last week in Art Basel and it's again the same soft blocks where I added some architectural elements. And they reference clearly like early postmodernism. It's called post-ruin. And I'm interested in this early moment of postmodernism like Memphis design and the Goofram furniture because that was a moment where architecture was being critical. Like it was being critical of consumerism, of the way we treat the environment and that was like in the late 60s. And after that architecture sort of lost that capability because it understood, sort of went back to its autistic way of looking at things and treated postmodernism as a style rather than as a tool. This project I mean it has a contradiction that presents sort of iconic structure but then people are allowed to move it and do whatever they want with it. And so they can take a nap or they can just use it as a playground. And I thought that's perhaps another way of showing your weakness like allowing people to do whatever they want. And of course in an art fair you get all these unexpected sort of investor type of art people and then suddenly you see them, you know, oh I can play with this. So Art Basel is a super serious kind of place where you look at art from not touching it, not speaking while you're looking at it. And this was, it took a day for people to catch up. Father with his son, the failure of patriarchy. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I think I know at least in my section we had a really lively discussion around your work so it will be great to hear, you know, the questions that everyone has. I have a number of different questions but maybe I'll just start, I'll start with a sort of simple one and then maybe get to some of the rest of them as we talk. So I was wondering just about your use of color. You mentioned, you know, that you were using pink and then also yellow. And I think that actually colors something that we don't often really talk about that much in architecture, interestingly. And so I was wondering just in terms of like your own sort of references that you're thinking about if you are responding to any architects in particular when you're using color or if that is coming from color as used in a sort of like a pop sense or more of like a sort of, yeah, sort of, or how artists have used color. So just your use of color. Yeah, I guess I mean I've always been obsessed with that moment in early post-modernism like all the Goofram soft furniture and the Memphis group where, I mean, also pop art was critical. So like the Campbell soup was about consumption. So I was interested in this contradictory thing. But I also thought it was cute, like pink and yellow. So I guess it changes. Sometimes I do things that are all sort of gray and concrete and depressing. And I do installations that are very modeling almost. And then other times I try to go for the other extreme and sort of try to make it kind of flashy or too colorful to see like how what the reaction is. But I guess my color choices are superficial. But deliberately superficial. Both, yes. I mean if I, you know, when I'm looking for, when I do these soft pieces and textures, I go to like stock websites with stock images and see what looks good. So I might be looking for like an aged concrete but then nothing looks interesting enough. Like it doesn't strike the balance between artificial and realistic. For example, the pink marble had on the print these typical scratches that marble gets from quarries when it's being cut. But then people thought it was from the printer because it's printed on vinyl. So that kind of contradiction I thought was interesting. Great, yeah. Yeah, thank you for a great talk. I wanted to throw a couple of things out there just to make sure we get to them. First would be you yourself are a product of the AAD program and ostensibly that played a role in kind of reshaping certain notions of the architect that you went back out into the world with. And we have a whole audience here of people who are in somewhere in that process. So it might just be good to hear you talk a little bit about the influence of this place or in how you mobilize that moving forward. I also have to hear more about your thoughts on the critical nature of the postmodern, which I just came through a kind of final review season at a bunch of schools. And a lot of schools are sort of horrified to see a reemergence of certain postmodern tendencies, uses of icon, iconographic devices and whatnot. So I'd love to hear more about that, but my actual question. We'll just hold those as potential. To ask you to say a little more about the relation of words and things in your work. Because not only did you give us a film and a text this week, but the text reappears in the film. And like we saw the blocks, often they're very deliberately or not carefully selected phrases appear. But in the models in the, I was especially interested in the models in the Breeder Gallery show. Because the Starcotech form gets its kind of repressed message imprinted upon it. Although it's interesting it's not imprinted because they're 3D printed. So the words are the same materially as the forms. But they're as opposed to the blocks let's say. They're the forms render the message less legible because it gets distorted as it gets printed on the form. But even as it gets printed it starts to read to me at least like the kind of hazard striping of the kind of scaffolding logic of the rest of the show. So I wonder if you had more to say about this back and forth between those words. Yeah, I came to Columbia in 94, so like before you were born. But that was, it was like a crucial year because that was the first year that Columbia introduced the paperless studios. Which was the all digital studio. And which I mean like the equivalent today was to introduce telekinesis studio. Like for us it was completely foreign to use only computer no paper. And Columbia was the first school to do that so it was sort of a pioneer moment. On top of that I was lucky enough to have Keller Easterling for the paperless studio. Which makes it even more complicated because she was more interested in the economies of technology and the politics of technology rather than the technology as a tool. And of course we know she was right all along. So that was very formative for me. I was already interested in computers but that was sort of an amazing way to think about things. What was the second? Well I mean just because I keep popping up against this kind of horror of the re-emergence of the person. So if you had any thoughts on that. I mean I've been for a long time. I mean I think it's already old fashioned because the kids in schools already are interested in post-modernism. So it's nothing new. But for me when I... The faculty are horrified though. In my experience I'm sort of horrified to see their students discovering this. When I... Like in the late 90s I discovered exhibitions like MOMAS 1972. What was the Italian show with all the early post-modernist problems and in Italian design something. It's a very famous show but I forget the name. Domestic landscape, yes. And there you can see like in all the architects or designers were asked to produce small interiors. I was particularly interested in Gaetano Peccia and his interior for a sort of bunker for a time of great infections or viruses. So they were using architecture as a clear critical tool to criticize both modernism. Architecture is a sort of serious practice. The finances behind architecture, consumerism. And the late 60s, early 70s was the moment where psychologically the world changed. And it went from this sort of positive aspect of the 60s where we were thinking the future was going to be fabulous. And then in the 70s we realized now it's going to be horrible. And that was like a series of things like the May 68 uprisings, the first financial oil crisis. And actually people caught up with the world. So that show was very prophetic in that sense. And you even see like people doing ecological projects in that first wave of ecology in the 70s. So I felt like postmodernism could have been a movement that, I mean it was a movement that understood this new sort of psychological economy. Then they said the fact that for example when Steve Jobs dies, the Apple stock goes down even though the iPhone is identical. But the value goes down because it's psychology. It's not anymore about the product itself or Baudrillard with a system of objects. So for me that critical postmodernism had the agency to respond to where the world was developing whereas later on it became a style. Even when it became a style, sort of the style of shopping malls, again that was responding to the way the world was. So I've always been interested in architecture becoming more critical. Because I think architecture studies have given people those tools but then the profession doesn't require them. So that's sort of a contradiction again and I was interested in that. And the text. Words and things, yeah. Words and things. For that show I picked, I could have written the texts to reflect to the things I wanted to say, let's say, but I decided to pick them out of different sources like from Keller Easterling or from Instagram ads or from the girls that do like Mona and Astley who are doing Jet Set magazine. It was a tiny publication and they did an issue on how architecture began to speculate. So I was picking up those texts and using them as a sort of decorative veneer over these structures in the sort of vetma, balenciaga fashion way. Like make it critical but make it look cute as well. Which was a kind of contradiction again. Yeah, I'm interested in this idea of contradiction as being more of a queer way of approaching things. Like if you're going to say something serious, put it in a hello kitty font and then people will either get it or they won't or make it harder. So yeah, I wonder. I probably didn't answer anything. No, no, no. Well, it wasn't really a question. So but sometimes the words seem to, sometimes there's a contradiction involved. Sometimes the phrase itself is a contradiction. Sometimes the words seem to be speaking what we all know to be the fact but which a lot of work gets put into hiding. And is that something that's always cognizant of it? Like the message is never, although it appears to be univocal and clear, it's kind of association with the thing problematizes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean like when you dress up a building in the words inventive banking products, of course we know that real estate is a banking product. And that when you're an architect and you're going to produce a building, it's going to be a banking product in some way. Like people are going to take loans to buy an apartment in that building and then those loans are going to finance other loans and generate the economy. And we kind of know that that's wrong as well, that it's not going in the right direction. Because, you know, that kind of system of that capitalism wants continuous growth is not going to work because like what are we going to grow up? Like the planet is only that big. So yeah, it's even stating the obvious but also like without saying whether that's good or bad. I guess that's what I'm more interested in. Like when you're an architect and you don't actually propose what's good or what's bad. That's what most people want from us to tell them how something should be, how the chair should be or what color the room should be. And when you say, oh, it can be like yellow or it can be green or whatever, not proposing an exact thing but more of a contradiction. That could lead to a sort of new type of practice for architects where they're just fired all the time, I don't know. I actually have a question just before we open it up. I was wondering about 2008. You mentioned, you know, what that moment meant in Athens and riots. I was there briefly in 2009 and so I have a sense of, you know, I think it was sort of a moment of crisis, not sort of constant crisis in the city. But, you know, and of course globally, you know, that was true of, you know, so many cities and just with the crash in fall of 2008. And, you know, we're very much living through the sort of that sort of post-2008 moment. And I wonder if you could just talk about the sort of everyday in Athens. And I think you, you know, with the video that you're showing, it sort of, you know, it gave a sense of that with the sort of abandoned buildings. But the way that 2008 in Athens in the everyday continues to sort of reverberate and then how that, you know, is something that you're reflecting on in various ways. Yeah, for, I mean, of course 2008 was a great year for crisis everywhere. But in Athens it was much better or worse because what happened was a policeman killed a young kid and was never charged for it. And so that kicked off incredible riots in the city where almost most of downtown was burnt. At the same time, the Greek governments have been treating immigrants very badly. So they, through bureaucracy and through difficulty of getting any kind of paper, any kind of, you know, care. So all the oppressed immigrants joined in the riots. And some parts of the city, like you could, the police would have a barricade and say that you enter at your own risk. Because it was really sort of turmoil for at least four months. After that, the actual financial crisis hit Greece because it was kind of late. And then you saw downtown was, let's say in the year 2010, 11. You could rent a shop in Athens for 100 euros a month because nobody wanted to have a shop anymore. Everything was sort of covered in graffiti. I think more than two thirds of all shops in the downtown area closed down. And so that really affected the landscape because that's at the sidewalk level, the city changed radically. And then weirdly enough, this graffiti and crisis thing became a sort of branding delusion. And now people are doing Airbnb tours on the graffiti streets of Athens. Where it's, I mean, it's not cute because it's still in crisis and you, I mean, for me to walk to my studio, I sometimes walk over people shooting up or like passed out on the street. But it's so radically different than anywhere else. I mean, I guess the crisis was manifested physically in the city with the empty shops or empty buildings that it literally changed the way it looked. And yeah, it's, I guess it's just another branding opportunity for the city, which is interesting. They come to see the Parthenon and then the contemporary ruins, which is also great. I mean, the everyday life, also post-documenta, the city changed again, at least in the arts community. Documenta was meant to help all these state organizations with infrastructure things. But what happened was that the state didn't do anything. And then now there's like maybe hundreds of artist-run spaces, exhibition spaces in the city. Basically every week there's like three openings to go to. So again, the city is like, it's kind of the place where you have to do it yourself. So that would be a way to describe the city. And your documenta, the unauthorized installations, those were in, was it an anarchist area or neighborhood? The public, I did two things for documenta, just showed one. I did one which was a sort of installation in an apartment that was a research thing about Athens. But it doesn't really translate well into images because it was kind of dark, sort of spooky, full of shadows apartment. Never photographed, you sort of had to experience it. And then the other one was the public program. They were, the public program was in an ex-police headquarters. But documenta had its offices for three years in the anarchist neighborhood, which now became the most Airbnb neighborhood as well. So it's interesting to see how all these things like managed to become branding opportunities again. Which is bad, but also good. Should we open it? Yeah. No questions? Yes, Oscar. Thank you for your sharing. I'm very interested in your description of the unauthorized development in Athens. And it somehow makes the city artistic, attractive and diversified. And I just, I'm wondering whether you see such unauthorized development as a supplement of the modern urban planning. Or you see as just a phenomenon that's uncontrollable or unpredictable. Because it is, you can see there are many, like other unauthorized cities that are not successful. Yeah, I guess some more posing questions rather than providing exact answers. Because that idea of having a user-generated design, let's say if we could call it that, is not new, it was also tried in the 60s with its utopia projects. But I think there is definitely something to be investigated when architecture sort of seats a bit of control. And allows for, you know, people actually controlling the environment. But I don't know if it's possible that it's actually a way to do things. I guess more studying the way things happened to understand them better. So I'm using architecture more as a research activity rather than designing a specific proposal. I don't know if I answered. I'm guessing unauthorized development could not really happen anywhere. But maybe there's elements from that that we could take. Hi, my name is Oscar Caballero. First of all, I would like to say that the process of researching, reading and trying to understand your work was truly fascinating. We had like a lot of comments in our arguments class. And I want to focus in two things that have really caught my attention. The first one is how your work is going beyond the architectural matter. And you're kind of analyzing things in a metaphysical way and taking your own personal experiences, beliefs, political postures, and merging them with this persona that is basically the essence of the building. And I think that's the point where we're kind of seeing not only an architectural background, but like this broad palette of identities that you hold. And I think it shows like a highly developed sensibility towards materiality or vanity. And for many of the exhibitions and installations, I think it's so beautiful the way that you're exposing this vulnerability. And it's kind of inviting us to experience your work. And the second part that was really interesting to me is how you dispose concerns such as originality, cynicism. And you mentioned in the reading, the internet is all about copy-paste. So to be designing stuff feels really ancient and wrong. And we see this with your kind of collage processing, many of your work. And I think it's so interesting because as artists, creators, architects, people in general, sometimes we're so worried about if something is original, if we're taking references or copying it, or is it all the same thing. And I think it was such an honest approach to it and unapologetic at some point. And I think my question for you is more like asking what advice could you tell us to contemporary architects and maybe future artists or creators in how to be more honest and more direct with the work that we're trying to do when we're living through situations, places, circumstances that are always trying to, or sometimes trying to filter us or censor us. And thank you. I like this kind of question that is like 90% compliment. That should be my writer next time. Compliment, compliment question. Yeah, the copy-paste idea. I mean, of course, I guess I was referring also to the time because I kind of started my architecture career by building online in these online communities that existed in the late 90s and early 2000s like active worlds and Second Life. And to build there, you basically had to copy something from a library and then paste it and then maybe change the code name and then it would become a wall. And then copy that wall like 20 times. So that's almost like the typical example of you ask a contemporary person for a picture of a flower like in, let's say, my generation, they would go out with a camera looking for a flower whereas now they would just Google the word flower. So in that sense, it feels old-fashioned to be designing something that doesn't exist. It's better to take something that exists and maybe reposition it. Now the thing with honesty, yeah, I don't know if I can advise anybody to do that because the client, there's always a client in architecture. And I guess that's what I always try to avoid by escaping onto the art world so often is to avoid having the client. And you always need to tell them that what you're proposing is going to be better. You can't tell them, oh, it's going to be good but it's going to have these and these problems and it's probably going to cost you more and break down sooner. And they don't want to hear that. But that could be one of the ways that we generate better architectural products. If, of course, we enter into the discussion that we need to be producing architecture at all. I look a lot at the way younger kids look at the environment and the ecological concerns and basically the only thing we can do is never buy a new car, never build a new building, just stop everything. Or we can say fuck the planet and we do whatever we want and let's go all the way. Yeah, I guess attempting to be honest, even though I'm probably lying most of the time, but attempting is a way of letting go of that power of the architect and seeing what happens with it. Okay, so I have a lot of questions but I'll try to just ask you one. So you said you stopped designing for buildings so you want to focus on architecture. So my question is what is architecture to you and do you ever see yourself going back to designing for built structures? I guess I didn't. I mean I never really worked as a real architect. It's too much work and it's too difficult. And I realized it wasn't fun enough or I couldn't find a way to make it fun enough. So that was like completely narcissistic like reasons for not doing it. And also, yeah, no I don't, I don't know, I mean if I would go back to it, I never went to it to begin with. But usually when I'm faced with a creative decision like let's say working with a graphic designer, I would just like, you know, tell them do whatever the hell you want and even if I don't like the result. But that's, I feel like that should be the way that, what I would want other people to tell me, do whatever you want. So yeah, probably from the sound of that I'm not going back to architecture. Just another one quickly. Why did you have a robot speaking in the video? Because I like your story. You draw parallels between Athens being unauthorized and yourself growing up with your sexual orientation. So why did you have a robot? Because robots are marginalized or unauthorized? No, that was, you mean in that the voice. No I just found that voice and it was faster than trying to make a recording of my own voice. I actually bought that voice. So yeah, the English pronunciation was better. More proper, I don't know. Hi, I have a question about the authorized article. Through the article we can learn about Athens has experienced two rapid expansion with massive migration. Although we have noticed all the defaults of the African ritual and antipruch and how they ship the Athens. And we have to admit that both of them are very clever policy. They solve the temporary migration efficiently. Oh, sorry. Both of them are very clever policy. They solve the temporary migration efficiently and give an architectural response to a political problem. I want to ask is what can we learn from this to policy? And what kind of architectural response can we give when our city is facing temporary migration without doing damage to urban environment like these two policies? Because for now I haven't found a better or more clever policy can deal with that to accommodate a large number of new residents for a city in a short time. So that's my question. Yeah, that's kind of impossible to answer. I think we should just accept that architecture would always do damage to the environment and just be at peace with that. Otherwise, but I guess you're referring to also like cities receiving large numbers. There's probably, I don't know, for Athens, especially in the in the last 10 years where we received a lot of refugees from Syria. One thing that could have, and also the financial crisis was happening at the same time. And basically half the city was empty, like the apartments were empty. So there was an opportunity to like just put the people in empty apartments and rent them. So the government was receiving always EU funding just rent whatever is available and give it to people to live. Yeah, I don't have an answer. I don't mean how to do that. I think that's up to you to find it. Something that really interests me about your work is the way in which there seems to be a current concern for futurity and the question of the future. But it strikes me as a, and that's, for example, in your work with sea level rise, your speculative projects about sea level rise, or fantasy. All these different works seem to have a, yeah, this recurrent concern for the future. But it strikes me as very different than the kind of dominant ones in architecture right now, which, you know, by and large could be split into two camps between kind of a managerial logic and maybe like a kind of sci-fi, fetishistic, disaster work. And I guess I might be reading too much into this, but I see in that kind of echoes of queer critiques of futurity at Oman or Bursani, and yet not quite so dark. But there seems to be a melancholic character to your relationship to the future. And so I'm wondering how you position the question of the future in your work and in your kind of imagination towards your work. I guess I've always had the problem with the future, because I guess in my mind I'm always living in the past. And yeah, I guess I have a very flexible relationship with the future. Like, I will, you know, whatever comes you, I need to adapt to it anyway. And I guess there's no way to exactly control the future or even predict for it. That's a very difficult question. I should have expected that from you. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, mostly I don't think of the future, so I could try to ignore it. Well, something that I thought was interesting throughout the text, which I thought was great, by the way. And also I see it here as well. It's like how important people of power is when developing something in shaping societies. And for example, how important the lawmakers or the contractors or you as an architect who's presenting an exposition is to developing like the entire concept. But also how important it is, like part, how do I say, how important it is the user participating. How important is the response of the citizens. So when developing a project, how much do you think the final result is up to what people is going to do with that development? Because lawmakers can do laws, but it's up to people to respond what their response is to that law. And you can make an exposition, but they do whatever they want with it. So how important is it really important to the final result, 50%, what's your opinion? I would say, yeah, I mean, you know, it's probably more, I mean, if as architects we were trained more to design legislation, that could perhaps have a stronger effect on buildings. And it's something to think about almost as a way that you would, let's say, program a robot. Like when you're doing simple programming and you teach a robot like how to skip a cable on the floor, that's kind of you programming it. So in the same way, when you're designing legislation, you're sort of programming potential activities. And you can, we can only guess how people are going to react to them and with the design. Like for the piece in Basel where it was really up to the public to redesign it, even though it was as contradiction presented as an iconic sort of postmodern thing, but then people take it apart and then it's not anymore that. It was more out of curiosity, I guess, to see what people would come up with that or how would they react to the contradiction of like an iconic design that they're taking apart. And we even tried like different days with the different setups and then to see what kind of thing they would lead up at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's not so much how much you expect people to interact with it, but how much you're going to allow them to. Because, of course, architecture is a lot about control. So how much of that control are you going to give up to somebody else? And do you think we can in any way control how much we give them to work with? Yeah, I mean that could be sort of the design subject. Should there be a boundary in the design or should it be completely up to the user? I guess more up to the user could be more interesting because that's one of the things. Of course, I mean, even my things, it is a system of modules. So you're starting with that, you have to give them something. And there's similar, I mean, intentionally even to those, that typical kids' building block game, which was kind of, you know, iconic post-modernist thing, but in building size. Yes, I mean, it's something that everybody has to figure out. I mean, like, I gave them control, but then it's still pink marble printed on vinyl. So it's not controlled to change its color. It's like they have to stay within that boundary. But still they figure out things or they actually express their hatred for it, which is also part of the thing. Thank you. Good question. Do you ever perform your own modules? Like, do you ever take a stab at being your own user? I've slept those things so much. No, but no, I mean, I do because they're always asking me, you know, like what could be good configurations for it. So for example, for Documenta, I prepared like, I don't know, 45 versions of the space. But then, you know, what was, I guess, surprising for them is that when I said, like, there's no wrong way to put them. So if people put them upside down, that's also, you know, it's correct. But yeah. When you have to select like three photographs to show us, how do you make that decision? The most sexy, I guess. No, I would go... What's your theory of sexiness? Like, I would go from like, I mean, from the Documenta piece, I tried to show like the extremes, like the sort of super organized and then super uninhabitable almost. Yeah, I mean, from the bargain piece with the text, I don't have proper photos. So it's just like bad photos that people texted me, you know, on WhatsApp or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. Superficial. What looks better? I wanted to ask you about, like, the text about unauthorized because when you talk about the city, you mentioned the city as a she. So in Spanish, it makes sense because we give gender to words. So last to that, like the city. But in the reading, we were like arguing, like discussing like, what does that mean? Is the collage, as you mean, like the city, are you meaning as the collage of the politics, the behaviors, the inhabitants, the culture or what is the meaning that you give when you say the city into the text? I mean, also in Greek, the city is female as a word but also Athens in particular was named after Athena, which was a woman. So it all makes more sense to call it a she. Also a lot of times I use architecture as a kind of avatar for my own things. So for example, the first project that I showed this building that wants to become a ruin and starts like being resurrected as something else, is my analysts tell me it's about my mom passing away. And so a lot of times I use research as a sort of personal reflection, which is also kind of a radical thing for architecture, like we're not trained to be personal. But yeah, actually when I talk about the city, I'm quite literal, like really that, the place. And of course it includes everything from, but I mean I'm partial to buildings. So when I'm talking about the city, I'm as a collection of buildings, I guess, which is a collection of personas. Building on that, when you say the collage, and like in the lecture I was curious, what are the parts of the collage that you're mentioning of the city? I mean it's both physical things, so literally the city is a collage because it's like different parts added over time, but also in material things like legislation, people's perception, people's memories, people's feelings. So it's always the way you perceive a city. Let's say you were in Athens in an afternoon in May, where it's like perfect weather and the sunset, etc. It's going to be different. So even that's part of the collage, people's perception. Hello, this is the question about the authorization article. As I read, just from to modify my behavior to fit, thought to be corrected. So as I read, you used the word authorized and correct, and being loved as a synonym, that's what I read. And wasn't it correct, I mean for example refugees, wasn't it correct for them to build a house in the land to leave as their home? So what I understand is that based on the target, I think you hierarchies made a hierarchy between the targets and if it is right by extension as an architect, can you also do the same thing to the architect or architecture as a psychoanalyst? I don't know if you understood the question exactly. Did you understand it? Maybe just take that last bit. Maybe not whether it's possible, what does it mean to treat architecture as a psychoanalyst or what is a change about the way one would look at the city? I guess this is something that came up during psychoanalysis, which I used to do for 15 years and then I had enough of it because I did the project, that's enough. But I guess I would talk about my work more than I would talk about myself and that's how it came up. And then I also understood that being an architect and talking about emotions or about personal issues is also kind of taboo thing. But yeah, for me it was kind of inevitable that I would look at buildings or cities as persons. It was not something that was planned long term, it just understood that it was happening already and so I just named it, which is a lot of the way that I do my work anyway. I just make it and then understand it later. If that makes any sense. I probably didn't answer, but... So you actually made a hierarchy between the targets. So my first question is that if I'm the refugee, it can be simultaneously correct but also unauthorized, but on the reading, always those three words, authorized and being loved and correct are grouped together. So that's how I understand. I think the other made a hierarchy of the targets and he thinks the inhabitants in Athens is more higher hierarchy, better than the refugees. That's why he is using those three categories as a synonym on the article. So yeah, that's my question. Yeah, I mean, well, refugees of course are lower in the hierarchy because they have nowhere to be. That is like a sort of very radical thing to be, like to have nowhere to be exactly, like you need to leave your country. I guess being unauthorized, we're talking also with Andreas before, is a kind of deciding, taking things in your own hands, but also being outside the system. So, but yeah, I'm still not understanding the question. Maybe I'm burnt out. Well, fascinating talk and discussion. I have kind of a couple of questions. The first is about gender, theory or gender, whatever, and architecture. In the way you saw it today, the way the built environment is materialized has a great impact in the collective performance of gender. This in a way is something that has, of course, kind of, it's got the capacity also to be part of a discussion of what is the way gender is collectively produced. And it allows to see that, like if we go to the moment in which it was stated that gender is something that is performed, that performance is also material in the way you're showing it. I'm very fascinated by the capacity of your work to really reconsider the way gender is also something that is produced through walls, through structures, and of course reflecting regulations and normativities. My question is more like when you're looking at that built environment, the built environment through this process of kind of exploration, archeology, and psychoanalysis, it's mostly reflecting power. And the structures of kind of disobedience or dissonance or alternative, what is the way that you saw them imprinted or materialized or embodied in the built environment? That's my first question. And the second is about this particular action of basically, with a few friends, changing the way you could edit yourself to a particular purpose of challenging power and then becoming powerful. And this moment of emergency as powerful, in my opinion, is also crucial to your work. And I could, again, think what's the way that all the powers were also reflected and somehow through your digging, you discovered that as something that was also part of the built environment. Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess, most, in the history of buildings or history of architecture, buildings were always thought to be more or less masculine. Even though I think gender is something that we should define for ourselves, so it's not so easy to say what is, I mean, it's easy to say what is masculine, but it's less easy to say what is feminine and even less to say what is queer or undefined because then you need to be avoiding all the cliches but also find ways to represent. One of the ways that I at least attempted to, let's say, approach queer architecture was through contradiction because making a clear proposal and a clear statement is usually what's expected from an architect. So when you make a contradictory proposal, you're entering into sort of darker or pinker areas. But the notion of unauthorized, of course, it is something that is sort of, let's say, illegal or outsider, but it also gives you a boost of energy. Like when my friends put me in drag to escape the military in Greece, I was like, I thought I was going to be super scared because I'm not a drag queen and then I walked into a military camp dressed as a girl or a prostitute even. So I guess the adrenaline of being so out of place gives you kind of energy. And of course, with drag, it's well known that when you're performing somebody other than yourself, you have more freedom. But also to contradict a bit myself more, I was mostly interested in performing myself or finding new ways to perform myself rather than to take up another persona. And I guess it's the same for buildings. I'm always trying to understand how they can better perform themselves or more sort of be more clearly themselves rather than what is expected of them. So first of all, thank you. And it's easier to talk about emotions and art than it is an architecture because of all these other factors that we get a bit lost in the process, which could be fair, could be not. But you talked earlier in one of your answers about how it was very personal for you to this relationship between you and the building in a city. And it's also easy, or not easy, but possible to read social patterns in the structures of cities like Athens at that time. But do you think that it's possible to read the same kind of personal relationship between you and the city and its evolution with other people in the community? Can it be used as a design methodology? Does it have a place in design as can we understand the two evolved design in that sense? If I said yes, then I would be actually proposing a methodology which would be contradictory. But I guess what I'm mostly interested in is that architecture is, I see it as a tool, especially architecture education. It gives you all these tools to understand the city. And when you're understanding a city, you're also designing a narrative for it. And through that, perhaps allowing the other people to understand it. And when the way that we understand the world also makes us connect to it more. So even if you're not designing the actual city, but you're in a way designing the narrative, because that's also what I did. An authorized narrative is not something that is accepted as a reading for Athens. It's like, I made it up. But it also helped me understand how the city came apart or how I saw it. So yeah, designing a narrative for a city is very much a possible methodology. And it could be applied to anything. Of course, Athens is a better example because as a city is less resolved. If you look at a city like Paris or New York, they are more resolved cities. Like we know their form. Even in New York, like it's changing still. And you get situations like Hudson Yards where it's a new narrative for the city and it sort of goes to the future that Nicholas was talking about. Yeah, so I was kind of more designing stories which makes it sound lame, but it's not. I don't know. I can actually ask. When you refer to yourself as an architect who doesn't build, and I'm wondering, just you are trained as an architect and working and making installations and videos, and I wondered just how you think about this sort of negotiation across these different categories. And of course, there's a sort of, perhaps this is a projection on my part, but a sort of frustration with these categories that are placed as someone who's making things. It's like in that process of making, you're not thinking, oh, am I acting as an artist, or am I acting as an architect, and then that's maybe something that's sort of placed by others. But I am also thinking about it just in terms of students who are here and sort of thinking about what they'll... I mean, it's an intense year and then maybe how they'll take this year sort of moving forward. And the different ways that we can understand what an architect is today. And last week we had Amy Siegel, she came and spoke, and I think there she was trained as an artist and then was very much in the art world, but using architecture as a sort of, it's a sort of material that she's doing, but there's no sort of cutting across categories in the same way. And I think also these two worlds are very much connected, but they're still yet also distinct. So I just wondered, sort of in your own negotiation of architecture and thinking about what an architect is, sort of how you think about that. Yeah. I mean, I called myself an architect who doesn't build because actually I failed at building or I failed at getting commissions or I failed at getting those commissions to be like how I want it to be. So I said like, you know, fuck it, I'm just going to be the one who doesn't build. So it's not really, it's just a way of owning up to what you're doing and also realize that the process of, you know, getting a building from idea to actual building was like so long and painful that it's like, it wasn't fun anymore. So I'm going to just set self-brand the guy who doesn't build, even though I do like building and construction, but in terms of sort of escaping onto the art world or even hopefully escaping from the art world too, because that's a horrible place as well, I guess, you know, when you study architecture, I see it as a series of studies that gives you so many options. It's mostly teaching you how to think, of course in a very sort of structured, organized way. Whereas in the art world, you can be much more intuitive and just like, you know, have the nerve to just put this upside down and then see if people are going to react to it or if it's going to actually communicate anything to anybody. And it could be such, you know, it could be a gesture that relates to the failure of the political blah, blah, blah, Nestle taking up the water in the world, etc. But you just do it with that. And that's very different because as architects we are trained to sort of present our case and have all the arguments like today. And so to support that. Whereas as an artist, you have to have the nerve to do just that and then see if it works. I guess slipping through disciplines or through environments, it's, for me, I guess I get bored easily. So like I like to be in the architecture world a bit, then I'm in the art world a bit, and then I'm being somewhere else, like in the sort of writing world. And I think architecture education gives you those tools, so it's great to use them up. So my advice would be like to own up to whatever you can or you can't do and then just take up all the possible, you know, like use any possibility to do what you're thinking of. It doesn't have to be only one way. Yeah, great. I think that's the last question. Hi, thank you for your... Hi, my name is CJ. I really like your videos. And I think my question is about the column. The column is repeatedly, it shows on the video. You train as an architect in this building and you say you fail to be a capital A architect. And I wonder, like you use architecture as a tool, as a media to criticize things. And I wonder, what is this column meant to you? And what is this like story behind these columns? And can you answer as a postmodernist and as a formal? Yeah, I mean, the Greek column, and I mostly use the Ionian order for the city of Athens because the first major migration crisis was in 1922 when the Turkish government and the Greek government didn't agree on their future. So they had terrible falling out. The Turks kicked out all the Greeks who were living in the coast of Turkey, which was the Ionian area. So it talks about that. The beginning of Athens as a big city was from that migration crisis, from Ionia, which is the coast of Turkey. But also, Athens is a city that is constantly struggling with this branding cliche of antiquity. It's famous for antiquity and it's famous for an architect that was superstructured, mathematical and precise. And then the actual city is random, do it yourself, figure it out as you go along. So it's two different completely, two different protocols of design. And I guess I also use the column as a sort of an ironic branding thing for the city. Like the actual one that appears in the video is a 3D scan of one of those tourist little columns you can buy in kiosks in Athens. Did I answer? It's also like recently in Bergen I did this send a drawing with columns of these queer quotes, soft architecture, and then Popper Cialis said, I'm not sure all our feminists are going to appreciate the sort of phallic forms of the column, but of course, most of the time the column falls down. So yeah, it's like everything mixed together, I guess. I feel like I'm not answering anything. Okay, I think that's the last question. Thank you so much. It was wonderful having you, and yeah, thank you.