 I hope everyone had a good break and tonight it's my pleasure to introduce and also I will be doing the response after the lecture to introduce Point Supreme who's here from Athens. So Point Supreme was founded by Constantinos Pantazis and Mariana Renzu in 2008. After a decade of study and work abroad in London, Rotterdam and Tokyo, among other places, they returned to Athens with the intention of critically rethinking design and the making and I think also remaking of architecture in the context of the contemporary city and their city Athens. Although I think it is safe to say the Greek city is not their only influence or what is in their imagination when they are working in a local context. Their work integrates careful research into architecture, landscape and urban design known primarily for their richly worked collages which draw like their name on art history, specifically collapsing surrealistic effects and painterly qualities to reconcile the past which is inescapable and ever present within Athens. But also I think importantly to understand a kind of making of a new contemporary which plays between representation of their their context and also that idea of what is real or reality. Their work and they themselves have been internationally recognized and particularly of interest, Jimenez Lai, founder of Bureau Spectacular included Point Supreme in his 2015 exhibition at Chicago's Graham Foundation and subsequent publication series of the same name Treaties Why Right Alone where he situated them alongside other offices of their generation such as Young and Iota first office in fake industries. Within this publication writers included Kirsten Gears who is teaching here currently offered that their exuberance is a new kind of resistance and Pierre Paolo Taburelli carefully observed and locates their work through qualities from other painters such as Magritte Hockney Hopper to also Madeleine Riesendorp. One thing I'm particularly impressed with beyond the collages and their built projects alone which would be more than enough is that within it also there is a kind of deep research and understanding to things like particular types from a particular five and six story scale housing which seems to permeate their work and show up in different places to something simple as the table which I can say we had a wonderful conversation this afternoon with my studio around two tables modestly reconstructed for an hour long discussion about drawing which was fantastic. Most recently they were included in a remaking of Stortz of the 1988 MoMA deconstructivist showed held here at the Air Monty Gallery in New York this past winter retitled reconstructivist architecture where they were one of 13 offices exhibited alongside Bernard Schumi and Peter Eismann. They've lectured and given workshops all over Europe and exhibited in New York, Paris, Montreal, Mexico City, Milan, London and Florence as well as participated in the inaugural Chicago architecture biennial with a collage series Playfulness of the Real and exhibiting their eight visions for the future of Athens at the 12th Venice Biennial. Point Supremes visually obsessed and vibrant designs embrace contradictions and transcend scale. There's a lot that can be said about their work and I'm looking forward to the response and while they may be working under a kind of present condition of austerity their work is anything but. So please welcome Point Supremes. Thank you so much Hillary for that very impressive introduction and thank you so much for coming to see this talk tonight to listen to this talk. We're honored to be invited to show our work to you tonight. Okay so let's start with a small introduction to Athens the place where we operate because that's very significant for the work we have been doing. So Athens is first of all just to make sure everybody knows Athens is the capital of Greece sitting at the southern edge of Europe. This is the first drawing we did of Athens. So Athens is this is a very completely urbanized territory which is framed by mountains on three sides and in this surface of concrete only a few hills stick out so it's the only exception to this urban lava. This is the first drawing of Athens we did. You see there's no empty voids there's no parks for example. It's a very continuous surface and this is what it used to be so this is a very old drawing of the hills this is the Acropolis Hill the Parthenon up there the Likavitos Hill which is actually the tallest the mountains that frame the city on the three sides and in fact this is the first settlement of Athens of modern Athens under the Acropolis Hill and this is the image of the city from the plane these days so this is what you see so this is the mountains framing the city the Olympic works from 2004 more recently and then the coast connecting to the GNC and the islands to the end and if you look at a map of the of the center of the city this is what you'll see this is the Acropolis with the Parthenon on top the Likavitos Hill the tallest one the marble Olympic Stadium here and generally you see that everything is is a surface of concrete apart from these exceptions of hills and this is what Athens is communicated with this is a typical postcard where you see that all you get is the Acropolis the Parthenon sitting on this beautifully eliminated hill and everything else is kind of erased so that you don't see the city at all in in the popular communication of Athens same if you look at any kiosk selling tourist souvenirs you always see temples and statues and a bit of islands but never the actual city never what Athens really is which is this in between thing between ancient remains and if you if you look at any typical place neighborhood of Athens that doesn't have the benefit of an exception like a hill or a temple or something this is what actually happens you get this continuous urbanization made up of the same module always this the apartment building that is always the same following strict regulations such as having the setback on the top floors so this is actually what Athens is made of the modern Athens or here you see for example the very characteristic profile of these buildings they're called polycatechias meaning multi-residents houses and again if you go to the periphery where the city dissolves on the mountains surrounding the city this is what happens so you see that it's the same kind of formless lava that makes up the city it doesn't have a shape other than the one that's given to it by by what's happening around it we have always been looking at representations of Athens existing representations and this is one that we find very successful or very close to what we the way we read the city this is a painting by Spiros Vericius from the Vasiliu from the 80s where he basically shows the city through its components what is input through what is important so you have the open sky with a very significant light sun or moon you have the mountain framing the city you have the urban fabric made up of these six floors of polycatechias multi-residencies and then you always have a kind of outdoor space perhaps private where life actually takes place most of the year since it's so warm and if we zoom out again you will notice that Athens here is really at the center of a circle that is the country it's really at the center of the country and you see that there's all these connections to the islands so in our view Athens is part of this archipelago of islands literally connected by boats in the same way that the island the rest of the islands are connected to each other here you see for example this is Athens again with a co its coast and the boats connecting it to islands that are just a halfway ride islands that are half half hour away from the city and you see that actually Athens has a coast it's like an island it goes all around the coast so if you take the car from the center and you hit the coastline it takes you 20 about 20 minutes by car and this is where you get it's a beautiful situation with the first islands already seen in the horizon and if you drive a little bit further down or up along the coast you get these amazing beaches really beautiful but actually very casual and informal and not celebrated at all in fact very disrespected because people in Athenian people are very spoiled with the islands around so they never bother to think of these beaches as part of their city they don't use them this is a part of a study we once did collecting photographs of this is real photographs of beaches on the Athens coastline that nobody knows or some of them nobody knows about so we also are in the habit of trying to discover as many of them as possible and this is something also for you to realize how close Athens with its acropolis sitting on the top is to any kind of island capital this is a very low res picture but if the relationship is very easy to get so every island town is built under the acropolis or church sitting on the tallest hill of the place and then there's just the city below and the sea around and if you look at the architecture of the islands it's also very similar to the architecture of the Greek cities of Athens because it's very simple it's very pragmatic it's not very complex in the way it's designed but then beauty just happens in a very informal way this is the interior of a Greek church in an island and this is a space that we really like a lot it's very harmonic without being strict or symmetrical like it looks like it should be so there is so much complexity this in this space you see here the mechanism of the of the counter and then there is the two images of the sense that are not the same nothing is aligned even the tiles are not very well done but there is so much richness in that so much complexity in this space but at the same time so much freedom for the visitor to feel to breathe let's say and likewise this is a religious ceremony it's the baptism of Jesus Christ and it happens on a very humble infrastructure on a wooden pier and a very few elements really matters in this event let's say how far away you are from the water how white is the the pier how close you are to each other and how far away you are from the priest that holds all these religious symbols and then the distance from the boat so the special experience there is very intense without having a lot of design just the very basic principles the same happens here this is a public space in an island where you see that the distinction between the two spaces happens with the very minimum means it's just a white color with and lines circles and lines okay you can see here oops sorry like here you see that the even the grid is not it's not very strict it gets adjusted whenever it meets the tree and actually the people in the island have to do have to paint this space every every two weeks during the tourist period so actually there is a rituality behind a social event behind the space as well and this is a gate in a house that someone spontaneously did it's actually it's a very complex object it's a multifactional complex it's a gate and at the same time is a sculpture and sculpture and the antenna of the house itself so going back to Athens this is an aphioteca it's one of the first areas that were built under Acropolis and actually it was built from people from Anafi Island that they came to Athens to work as builders so you you you have this feeling of being on an island and what you are in the very center of the of the city so so tonight we're gonna show you some examples of our work in a few different categories the first one is this this one it's projects based on the existing reality as found so the goal of this project is not to overcome that reality but to colonize it in other words to in a way through symbolically or programmatically or through form to exploit the given reality the found reality and to reveal it so in these projects in the end become a new way of of seeing and of animating that initially found reality so this is part of the first project we did when we went back to Greece to establish our office that was a very complex or rich project with many different parts it was called unbuilt or the legitimization of the undervalued the first part of that project was a triptych this one which was called the Likavitos on fire so Likavitos is this the tallest hill in Athens sitting in front of Acropolis Hill you see of course the hills used to be even like bigger longer but the city the city eventually consumed part of them so it was that was the 2008 the time just before the crisis where every summer there were fires put up in different places natural places around the city so as for development to happen afterwards so in this triptych we wanted to awaken people the public to show this kind of hidden tendency where if something wouldn't happen to stop this tendency then even the center of Athens the remaining of the Likavitos hill might be consumed by Polycatechias so this this picture was published in the newspapers so it showed to us that this kind of statements have matter like they have they have an impact the second part of this project and built dealt with the Polycatechia so this typology of residential building that makes up makes up the cities of in Greece completely so first we made this Lego model of it because it's a very simple iconic and basically shape we proposed to Lego to make you know make this building to produce it to sell it but we never got an answer about that and we were looking at different representations of the city so for example this is again a series of stamps that you get in Greece so in marble statues and and masks and and all that so we also addressed the stamp company of Greece and proposed to make stamps that instead of the acropolis and the temples would show just Polycatechias this was also rejected and then we made a series of of case studies of models of Polycatechias it was a hundred Polycatechias because we said basically what we said was that if Polycatechia is the only type that gets built in Greece then any kind of solution to urban problems we have to find the solution through this form disguised in Polycatechias so we made this series of of Polycatechias it's one of which dressed a different kind of problem or tried to basically also tried to test the limits of of the type like how far can we go when does it stop being a Polycatechia for example in this case it was one of the most extreme ones which is a Polycatechia disguised as Lecavitos Hill so there was for example public spaces found in these experimental models or forms proposed or different programs or public spaces and this project was also published in the most popular Sunday newspaper supplement so there was a very big article about it and a discussion so we were also very surprised because and because basically it proved this kind of reaction proved that these projects are indeed very were indeed very relevant to the people to the common people of Athens and here years later we kind of came back to that and built initial project by another project that was kind of continuing it which was this it's a real tourist campaign for Athens called only in Athens we did it in collaboration with a friend a poet and a philosopher who came up with the name so the idea was to talk about Athens to add to communicate Athens to actually to advertise Athens as well not through what is so special unique about it such as the acropolis which is already what's being capitalized on but through what is actually very banal or generic in Athens but at the same time very original in Athens so the logo of the campaign was this contemporary metope made up of all the different building types that you casually see so next to the remains of a temple you always get the Polycatechia there's there's always Byzantine church somewhere around and then there's always a church very close by and eventually a beach umbrella and we did a series of images about about Athens that were printed on t-shirts and on objects so this one was about for example the framing of the city that you always get through Polycatechia or it was about the sculptural qualities of it or secret magical places like the outdoor cinemas in courtyards stray dogs sleeping on statue heads this is a real photograph resist sprayed on columns of the academy in Athens also real picture from the riots Athens as part of the island network a new map typical balconies with their sunshades and eventually we also made this object a marble polycatechia that is now being sold among marble statues of goddess Athena or Poseidon etc so this is a part of the launch of the picture of a launch of the first exhibition we did with the different objects there was also a mosaic of Polycatechia and some of the t-shirts and part of the pro of that project also was this a very important image for us it's called only sorry it's called Athens as an island so it's again this idea that Athens is exactly the same as any typical island town this is kind of a real picture of Athens but we replaced all the concrete polycatechia building types with island whitewashed architecture so this image became very popular in Athens it became the cover of a summer city guide in 2013 and and even more we started seeing people using this image and sprinting it and using it for example in the summer when people would close their shops for holidays they would print and put this picture on their door glass door saying we'll be back in September so people really started to to use it that was also part of the campaign it's a tablecloth for the city because every island has a tablecloth that you get on your taverna with the big when you order your cold beer and the Greek salad you always have this map of your island so you can plan your next swimming excursion so we did the same for Athens the next project is Athens by Hills and this specific drawing is called tribute to modern on brisadour there we replace the sky the New York skyscrapers with Likabetus hill and acropolis Likabetus is a male word in Greek and it's the tallest hill in Athens while acropolis is a female word and both of them they bend over their child which is acropolis and then around them there are symbols of from Greece like the ancient theater and the column a boat and an olive an olive tree and this is a postcard from from our collection we very often try to find old postcards because they reveal the collective subconscious the very essence of the city so this is a firework event that happens between Likabetus and acropolis and this is the the image that we produce actually we study each of the hills in Athens we try to research how tall it's hill is how you can get there what is the context around it what is the existing program there and we try to emphasize what was already there or to propose something relevant and actually the very essence of this project was that acropolis is a part of a network of hill and it's not by itself so so this is the main image that we produce that you see them all the hills exaggerated with a program on top of them for example we added a ferris wheel on a Likabetus hill that is in a constant constant movement in a total contrast to acropolis that is a new stable while in this image we wanted to show all the the richness of a possible typologies of hills this is the model that we did actually we took the liberty to show Athens as a as a concrete box around it by the mountains like Constantinus told you at the beginning and then it's the urban the grid of urban fabric and all the hills exaggerated with their programs on top and again this this project was picked up by the local news newspapers it was something that the people didn't really didn't realize that exists in Athens here it says another way that the city I'm translating the title it says that another another way to create a city friendly and and the next project is called a hundred years of acropolis and it's a starting point is this drawings by Hirosike and Hokusai these ones are brought by Hirosike they are called hundred views of mountain Fuji actually we think in these drawings we think that we see a mountain Fuji but what we actually see is the life around it the contemporary life of Japan back back then and we wanted to do the same for Athens so we use acropolis as an alibi to show what the what the contemporary city of Athens really is so you can see here acropolis through a park and this one is a typical roof terrace of a hotel with a swimming pool and acropolis at the back so actually we wanted to show Athens through different kind of programs and seasons and times and so this one is the Olympic Stadium while next to it is a some athletic athletic sports close to acropolis again the polycatechias and in the back is acropolis or the ancient agor and the train the metro in in front of it the ancient theater of Athens and a view from a colonial area so we collaborated with many important photographers in Athens and this project is still going on and the next one is the marble mural which is an imne to marble it's a 10 by 2 meters neural we were asked by commercial exhibition to choose any material we wanted and to do something with it so we thought that the most banal and typical material in Greece is marble and it's usually used as a luxurious surface for a kitchen or bathrooms so what we wanted to show is that the marble is has thickness and it's an alive it's an organic material so we selected the marble from different origin different texture color and history and actually we were the pieces that we chose had some kind of defaults like this one here or this one so there were pieces that they had no market value let's say but for us this kind of moments they were the they were they were the starting point of an aeration of a story to tell then we compose these pieces in an interesting way we think this is with the different textures the different marble pieces and then we apply to them different kind of techniques like laser cut and CNC and digital printing but also a class traditional painting and sculpting so you see all the different layers that they were super imposed to each other and this is the final result and then we exhibited the whole mural as a billboard as a and we did this metal structure taken from a typical advertisement this is so these are some details this this marble is called California but actually it's from it's from Casablanca so they name it in a different way to give more value to this marble that's why we print it on them this gold or while this one the texture of the marble look like an animal like an elephant skin another detail so so this is in now another category of projects that promote public space the purpose of these projects is to return the cultural role that to public space that is no longer there and also to turn them into a destination so usually that the things that are in focus is the form and the experience and the identity of of these places for example this one is a square in the center of Athens here is acropolis up there you see that it's a very narrow space like an outdoor room used as a parking at the moment there was a competition announced for it asking architects to redesign it to turn it into a square again so we were sure that what was gonna happen by most architects is the typical thing where you know you kind of design a basically a hard surface and then you add a little bit of nature to compensate or to decorate it this is from the ground level and so what we this wanted to do what we decided to do was to to make a project out of nature because that's what's missing that's what's necessary and also to give it a kind of urban scale a monumental scale so that it could be seen from the acropolis visible from the acropolis so it would have this kind of urban effect and so we did a project was which was all about nature so there was the palm trees we decided to plant palm trees in order to get this kind of scale in height and also to plant the floor completely the floor so we kind of thought of it as a building made of nature so this is some sketches from the process also the square is surrounded by it's a very typical Athenian thing where place where the buildings in the center are empty over the ground floor so we decided to also add the balconies and turn these office empty office buildings into residential so this was one of the main images of the competitions competition where you see the bulk of the added bulk one of the added balconies here and then this kind of nature project or where nature is treated like a building and in fact like an icon this is the ground floor experience there was all sorts of aromatic Mediterranean plants also so it was a very central experience we won't go into too much detail tonight and then here is the second example in this rooms category this is another square it's really at the very center of the city so it's really between two of the main avenues streets in Athens it's it's we always this is a this is one of the self totally self-initiated projects so most of the projects we just do as a reaction to particular urban condition or problem sometimes we can fit them into briefs of the previous one there was a competition eventually announced for that square this is something that we just did so you see it has it has a very beautiful setting this square because there's very beautiful trees and shade which is not very common but otherwise it's a very miserable place that nobody uses in fact it's a junkie spot so we always we know we always were looking at the square and we noticed that there's to this rectangular space in the middle with these very small erases of two steps and another problem in Athens is that there's no water in the in the center of the city so we decided to just fill in this rectangular space with water so as to turn it into a shallow pool in this way also to return the water and make a statement about this lack of water downtown this this project was also so much published in the press and so many people got so seriously interested in it and wanting to make it you know in in the crisis there's a lot of city initiatives of Athenian people that try to do things on their own and some of these initiatives contacted us and one of them they went and found a sponsor which would be a German company making pools that offered to do this pool for free for the city with the condition that the city would just maintain it that's why we did this model of the pool to present we because we were invited to the city hall to present it to the mayor of Athens and the mayor was very excited and interested to do it so this project went very close to being realized but eventually it stopped because it got there was strange bureaucracy about it so laws that wouldn't allow the place to change so that was the end of it and another room another example of this category is this this is the city square the city hall square of Athens so this is the city hall in fact here so this is also in the very center of the city is a very big square that as you see it's impossible to use it because there's no shade and it's a hard surface and in fact the fountain is usually not working so this is a very rare picture of it work shown in use so it's a really depressing no fun area to be in so we decided to contrast the situation by turning the whole surface into a lawn with sprinkles so that it would immediately become the opposite like a fun place that you would like to be in imagine how hot it is in the in the summer months in the city center also published a lot and the last example in this category of ambitious public spaces or public spaces with an identity is this one it's it's not a square it's a street so it's it's actually this street it's called Sigru Avenue this is the main street that takes you from the center of Athens to the beach so it's to us it's always been in our minds it's a very magic magical place it's a very magical road because it actually it gets you straight onto the a GN archipelago it really you really head towards the islands but it's something that you don't realize when you're using the street because this is the existing condition what happens is that there's a lot of visual noise how it's called like billboards and things like that and then there's no public space in the middle that you cannot walk there's no pavement in the middle and in fact at the end of the street there's a few trees and billboards so you don't even look at the water when you're heading at it so we made this image to kind of undo that situation we added we took out two street lanes and added a big public a wide public space in the middle and proposed basically that water related iconography and programs would invade the street so as that you're always reminded of the fact that you're heading to the islands when you're using this street a lot of our friends said that they were very shocked by this image because they use the street every day to go to work and they never thought about it the fact that simple to us a very obvious fact that they're heading to the islands okay the next series of project is extending the public space in order to make the collective experience more intense this one is called the Athens heaven there was an art be an alley in Athens called heaven and we took the initiative to send a proposal but actually it was a urban proposal we calculated how much a green space is missing from the citizens in the center of Athens and now that it's something like 2.7 square meters per a citizen while in the European cities the average is seven square meters so we calculate how much green space is missing and we use we use this surface to undo another problem of the city which is the connection of the city center and cropolis to the to the sea actually Athens had used to have a very strong relationship to the city but now it's totally lost and actually the boundaries of our of this park refer to a very specific municipality in Athens in Calithea it's called Calithea which means a good a good view yeah so this is the main image that we the main drone that we did that shows a cropolis to the back here and then this park that connects it to to to the sea while this one is a the an image from this magical space and then again this this project was picked up by the newspapers is one of the most popular I say the most advertised project of our office it says that's how I won my city we are making a program for the mayor and the next project is a six dogs cultural center which for us is like a piece of heaven of the previous projects in the center of Athens so this is the garden of six dogs and this is the the buildings on top and this is the how it used to be so it was there were five bars and cafes one next to each other so it was a total total mess and the owners decide to work together to collaborate and to make one big cultural center they came to us and but they didn't have any budget so the budget they had was like 200 euros per square meter something like 200 200 dollars per square meters so it was the only thing we could you could use was to paint the space so and to clarify it because the urban presence of six dogs is very unique it actually it's a whole street in the very center of Athens and behind it is this urban courtyard that was totally inaccessible back then so we applied a color strategy from white to gray and then black and we propose a program that has different kind of daylight condition so yeah and density so first it was the gallery then it was the cafe the gig space and then the club so this is the front entrance of six dogs and this is the drone that we we did so the gallery cafe gig space and club and this is the image of the the spaces interior so so the only thing we could afford for this project was to buy paint so everything was based on that and the furniture you see in the pictures is the furniture that the previous shops used to have but we just recycled them to make new furniture and painted them in the corresponding color so this this one for example is the the beds that you this beds that they used to have we cut them and we did them it was the cells of the new bars and then we did this big billboard that it's very common in New York but they nothing's it's not so it intensifies the urban dimension of the six dogs it's a it's a very popular place nothing's and this this is the section actually this is how you go to the garden so you go under under the building to this garden and so actually we you go from a totally desaturate space to this very colorful and green garden this is the axis and then this is the garden behind it actually what we did actually what we did for the garden of six dogs is that we persuaded the clients not to do anything actually to only bring the garden to its natural condition to reveal the topography and the section of the garden itself so this is an image that the New York Times had that says that it's a place that you should visit in Athens and then this is an image of the garden from above and the next project is called Athens Ferry where we took the upper we proposed how to take the upper part of a ready-made object of a ferry boat and to position it on top of existing rooftops in Athens creating in that way a public space that it's missing from a ready-made object that actually it's a very unique in Athens you can see the square pool project in the theater square in the fall Europe here a few projects around this is the fall Europe here this is the square pool and this is a typical this is how a ferry boat is actually this is a deck of a ferry boat which actually works as a public space itself and the next project is a competition that we won for a landmark on a pier in this is this is the pier and it's in front of the new National Library and Opera in Athens they were built by Renzo Piano actually this is the biggest project that happens in Athens and this pier is just in front of it so they were asking for a landmark and what we did actually we extended the the brief of the competition itself to the whole Athenian coastline so for us the site was not just the pier but it was all this unexploded coastline so this is our proposal actually I want to show first this these are the other winning proposals that their main inspiration let's say it was the fact that this alarm was close to the the sea all this a wavy landmarks while what we did was a very simple very simple building actually it's a canopy that provides a shade that it's I mean no public space kind of work in Athens if there is no space there is no shade and then there is a this a tribune that refers to the water activities in a sea and then we use a ferry boat as an as the extension of the the pier itself so this is the the section of the building that you see the relationship between the building and the tribune and the ferry and this is all the events that can happen in the space in between them and actually the idea came from an event that already happened in Athens like a few years ago this is a theater performance on a ferry boat and that was happening while the ferry was going from Athens to Idra Island and this performance was very very successful it was fully booked since many months ago and we wanted to introduce this kind of experience to the daily to the day life let's say of the Athenians so this is a view from from the ferry towards the the proposal and we also propose water taxes so this this pier was the beginning of the starting point of water taxes but they were taking the Athenians to the different beaches because right now it's quite difficult to go there is a lot of traffic jam so we wanted to undo this situation and actually the iconography of the building was taken from the the symbology of maritime structures but also from Greek paintings and this is a night view of the of the proposal again this is how the the media publish Faliropia and the next the next image is our participation in Viennese Vietnam in 2012 where eight of Athens project were shown and as an image standing on a podium each podium is different it refers to a specific aspect of the of the image and then in between them there is a space or a symbols that highlights a specific aspect of the of a project or a establishing new relationship these are the eight models we presented this one for example is a square pool this one is Athens heaven where we intensify the gate to this to this park this one is a theater square where we wanted to show this celebration of nature through this Lena Bobarty's celebrative columns and symbols and then a zoom again and these projects were all published like Hillary mentioned earlier in this book Athens projects and also what was even more surprising to us was that in 2014 we were included in the list of the 25 most influential people in the country so we were very surprised we were very surprised about it but basically it proves that this kind of initiative is to deal with public space in the city and the identity of the city is indeed very critical and it it can be very relevant the last the last category of examples of projects we're showing you tonight is this it's called the playfulness of the real it's about realized projects the first one is about shade the problem of shade it's a competition that we won in Tel Aviv in Israel it was an invited competition in fact they were asking for solutions cheap solutions for shade in public spaces that is very lacking in Israel like it is in Greece so they were asking for a very cheap solutions that could be replicated that could be like multiplied and placed in lots of places so we looked at the typical solution for shade in Greece which we really like which is this tip shunt shades come in in very simple colors that all the polycatechias all the balconies have it see it was even part of the iconography of the old airport of Athens you see it also on the islands it's really really standard so we proposed a solution based on that the typical cheap fabric sunshine fabric but placed in a graphic way so actually the proposal was to have a module which was this it's five meters by ten meters and then to replicate this module as many times as one needs according to the site this was the competition site in the park in order to gain a kind of monumental and landmark effect also very contemporary through the use of the graphic use of color this was some of the playful structural very simple tests so the point the point was that our proposal was so cheap that we could save money in order to propose program under the canopy so what we proposed was not in our proposal in the given budget is very small given budget apart from the canopy itself we could also buy or construct simple furniture that could accommodate different programs so part of the competition entry was this a series of images walking through showing different programs happening like having a tribune that is overlooking to an existing surface where people already use it for sports and things like that we also placed a kiosk under it for refreshments picnic tables for lunch and game area for elderly and a children's corner at the end so eventually half of this so the competition proposal was six modules but they changed the site after we won and placed us to play the project in front of the whole on design museum outside Tel Aviv so we built half of it three modules so we could afford to buy this pick and sorry table tennis table and a few furniture yes and so this was the project from above and recently we decided to do a playground in Athens on our own initiative because we're lacking playgrounds and especially we're lacking playgrounds with imagination so we started having some ideas about what it should be and then we started contacting companies asking for sponsorships because of course we had no money to do it and we got all negative replies about the concepts we had but eventually we kind of accidentally got a positive reply for the sponsorship by a company that actually sells these very standard toys plastic or wooden toys that actually is what makes most of the playgrounds in the country so it's this kind of object so of course we said yes and we've we found a municipality in Athens that was interested to give us a square to place it so it's this it's outside the center they gave us this spot here it's a circle which was available so we changed the concept completely and just used look at the the catalogue of available toys and proposed this initially so putting the idea was to put the toys together in a circle so that the children would eventually feel like they're playing together say sharing the same one toy and actually looking at each other while playing after going through all the regulations and getting the permission this was and talking with a company about the sponsor toys this was it the result so this is the project these days we're trying to get it built so also a strategy we did was a kind of camouflage so we tried by painting the toys in this way to kind of hide where the borders of its actual toy is in order to make it look like one one thing one structure and also as you can see the circle is not a perfect circle it's a part by lines because the the structure we were not allowed to touch the toys that we would get from the company but for us this didn't matter we adjusted the design in order to to have this collective special experience also you have to think that it's very rooted into our culture to be together in a circles and hold hands and touch each other while doing well being public also in the press while this one is Nadia this is an apartment we did a renovation of an apartment that we did it's a very dense and sensual space it's two floors so what happened is that we instead instead of dividing the program into rooms we try to let the program happen by accommodating it in structures and objects and devices that could control the relationship so you can still see and experience each other it's program from the other ones so we were developing a catalog of this kind of constructions it's one of which has its own hidden references and carrying its own agenda its own world according to what it wants to do so it was a very it's a very complex very rich synthesis of different things in fact the apartment is on two levels and the two levels are also very opposite experiences so this is the ground floor which is a very marine like experience it's the public program while on the top floor it's a much more earthly warm experience which is where the private places are kind of the bed bedrooms this is one of the drawings which tried to communicate or control these kind of relationships it's very interesting because in fact in the space all these constructions also work as viewing devices there are kind of different frames and you can we you can already see that this project was very much influenced by and one of the urban projects Athens by Hills while we were doing to realize that it's actually the same thing where it's basically you have a continuous surface like the sea and then you have these islands floating above so this I think this was the first time where we noticed this kind of relationship this is the view from the entrance so this kind of different screens very much also influenced by this kind of very boat or summer iconography graphics highlighting important moments where different programs change details on the floors like trespass holes changing programs and one of the bathrooms was in fact directly inspired by typical outdoor spaces on islands with the pebbles floors a sun rising from the bottom floor to the top floor and another house that we are just finishing it's very recently built is this one it's called the Petralona house so it's also very close to the Acropolis very in the center here's the Parthenon up there so this is this was the existing house in the plot it's a very complex weird triangular plot very dense so the the program had to double this existing ground floor we decided after a lot of tests to do this kind of volume so that light could still penetrate the garden in the back and also to give it a kind of curved roof in order for the Sun to still be able to reach the garden from the top of the volume and what's most interesting about this house is its structure so there's no columns in the house so basically this whole thing is hanging from above like a bridge so what is gained is that the whole top sorry the whole back of the house can be completely opened up towards the garden without any column inside so the house was designed as a kind of reaction to the context the different sides of the neighborhood and also it was the design was fitted to different references or materials or atmospheres that were available or just desired so every side was it was very different and pretty complex this was the model of the design and with a street view here and the curve that you saw in the back the garden going all around and this is one of the photos of the until recent situation a lot of the a lot of the materials were found reclaimed from junkyards a lot of it is handmade some of it is indirectly inspired by islands so for example this is a window from an island this is a balcony from an old house in Athens this pot is a very typical thing you get especially on islands also it's important to realize that this kind of richness in color and texture and is something very typical in the old houses of Athens also in terms of the interior where everything plays a role in any way there's there's no hierarchy everything is important because this is the entrance of the house and for us it took us a while to I mean there is a lot of complexity because this is the first moment that you the visitor reach the house for example took us a while to find the right the right handle and then next to it there is this pot so when you arrive to the house there is a very nice welcoming smell from the flower and then there is this pot from a Scyros island so even though this is a very specific moment of the house there is a lot of richness and a lot of thought that intensifies this rituality of getting into your private house so it's a very this is the way that we treat the whole special experience in the house there was there was a lot of objects and things and materials casted into the walls of the house as well and the back of the house the wall that looks towards the Acropolis Hill was painted following figures from ancient pottery athletes and this is the concrete wall exposed concrete wall that kind of cuts the house in two or is there actually the what the what what holds the house together it's where the house is hung in from so I think I think this is the details you saw next to the zebra wall on the entrance but there's all these other things happening to it so this is part of the exterior side towards the garden it's not finished yet and this is part of the interior so it's in our mind it's this projects for example is also a little bit like an urban project is like a city where you see this kind of building elevation in the middle and in fact there's there's a tree planted in the middle of the house you can see it in this more later picture so that's something that we are very interested in or actually it kind of happens on its own where the projects work in in different scales also here you see some of the reclaimed things doors found on the street or in junk junkyards and island details like the shelves sticking out of the wall and while we were working on a Petrolina house we had all these material samples but also objects in front of us and we thought that it's so interesting and so beautiful all together and we wanted to to create another relationship between these objects so we did this project which it's called the totems which is a list of the things that we use for a Petrolina house and each of them refers to another condition so the first one is what you encounter what you see the like the frontal side of the house while the second one is the ground floor and the relationship to the garden and the last one is the two upper floors so what we did in this project we actually wanted to emphasize that everything really matters it doesn't matter if it's a structural element or if it's a plug or it's if it is a decorative element everything has equal importance to us so with a lot of generosity and no prejudice we I was trying to learn this work we did this this project some zoom in so you see the hose and then the tiles and tiles from the floor so actually some of them is actual material samples of the companies where sent in us or some others are from junkyards so it didn't matter what is the scale or the value of the object for us everything was equally important as I said before and this is the last project is our participation in Chicago Biennale two years ago it's called the playfulness of the real where we present this duality between the realized project and also our urban project so this is flowers of the first built project that we did and heaven Calabria cafe and theater square Nadia and Faliro Pier Georgia apartment and Athens as an island Nadia again and Athens by Hills and then the Petron house and Athens and Athens Ferry that's the last thank you thank you thank you so much for a great talk and it's fantastic to see your work everyone can hear me okay so I think mostly I'm sure the audience is eager to ask questions and it's a real privilege to have you both here to present the work I think one of the things I like a lot about your work and your approach is that there are many different ways in to the work and I think that might be something interesting to talk a little bit about in terms of at this point there seems to be some repetition in the way that you approach the views of the city the way that you're making collages it's maybe not clear yet if there is a really prescribed method maybe in the work that you're approaching everything always through a collage and then maybe a model comes maybe this is something good to talk to you and especially with the students in this sort of gearing up towards the end of the semester and thinking about their own work and a kind of process that might be some way to talk about things I think for me I'm interested also and as we talked about earlier today we had we're sort of ahead of the audience we had an hour together to talk a little bit about drawing and representation and the relationship of that to making things become real and so maybe a little bit of just the collage and where you know the projects are they starting always from the making of collage okay yes something that actually we didn't mention in the talk is that before every project there's a lot of observation and kind of obsessive recording of things of elements found in the city or around us so in time we have developed a kind of skill I think where these things take place take their place in a sequence of similar or not items elements this is a little bit how this last project Mariana showed you the top terms of materials this is how it happened it's a very characteristic process I think where sometimes we collect elements or pictures or notes about things that we know they're very interesting or very critical and they don't have they haven't found their place yet but then in a project suddenly they come together so in a way collage is indeed one of the methods that happen very early on I wouldn't surely say that it's the first thing that happens I think first comes sketches or notes of this kind of collections of ideas or projects or objects that are relevant in that in every case of every project where we bring them together because it's all about these relationships and this is what we always try to to do in fact to create these kind of relationships given made up of usually banal or ordinary or value less objects and things so pretty much after that after this kind of notes or lists I think maybe yes collage is one of the things that comes first because it's a tool that allows you to bring these objects together with the whole story they have behind them to put them together and see what happens to see to have a first view of that kind of relationship actually also I wanted to add that before we go we went back to Greece we were working in a very big scale a project saying I may and we are TV and some other offices and so we when we came back to Greece we had to deal with mainly a small scale a project and for us with it was we were very curious on how this will turn out how exciting we are going to be about this I'm saying this many to the students because sometimes we are this we have this anxiety of doing big things and big gestures and everything but what we discovered in Greece and it becomes more and more intense in our work is that everything even if it's small scale can be very complicated and very imaginative and I think the same with the same enthusiasm as we do the urban projects is like the very like a small scale yeah yeah I think I think that's clear I mean it's wonderfully rich about the project to that the idea that something as complex as a city could actually be easy in some ways relative to the small scale right and that you know this this going in between those two things is quite interesting so to think about you know the problem of designing the city to the spoon if we think about right or back and forth and but also a kind of you know do you think that there is a new that through this you have defined in speaking about the urban projects maybe a new urbanism in your work I don't know if you have a coined a term or that there's something along that line I think if we're you know thinking about the city in the way that we look at these these manifestos I think Jimenez talks about it in the book in the introduction or in his description of the project about you know the sort of manifestos for the past two thousand years or even the way we think about how architects have written about cities right maybe we're at a moment where we're no longer you know designing delirious cities for delirious people or even generic cities for generic people but somehow that the through your work you're making a kind of new urbanism and I don't know maybe it's not possible to answer the question at the moment but a it seems to me that you're you're working in this way that it's it's always working on both scales and through something very playful I think this idea of two of your titles even reality is found and then the kind of playfulness of the real to me are are critically important and the based in the context of Athens and so I mean maybe you can talk a little bit more about it I think in the line of your thinking I think what's important in the way we work to us is that we we take reality very seriously and this works in in a lot of on a lot of levels so on one level first of all we're we're not addressing architects our work is not really addressing architects it's addressing normal people so to keep reality as part of the project is a way of communicating with the people and the normal the simple people secondly I think because of lack of means we have to use whatever is available so to have to place reality in the center of the project makes the project half half done already from the beginning right and I forget what else it was but once there was an article written about our work saying that we don't have to invent the utopias that actually utopia is we can can be the city that we already live and how we deal with the existing city and in a way that interests us a lot because actually a lot of our projects look utopian because there are so many elements together but if you really see the essence of the of the project they are very much realizable in a way not so so the point is not to have to propose new cities or new realities but to take the existing reality and try to see it differently or impose another way of seeing it or using it I think that's great I mean also it seems to me that there's this I mean I guess at one hand I would just come back to the the comment about the not you know the work is not made for architects made for normal but I think architects we also need to be inspired and projects and you know so in a way there's a kind of delight in the work in that but I I would also ask you about that I mean is there are there references I mean we see references to architects and to architectural history maybe in the collage of this the street to the sea right the kind of reference to Las Vegas and Venturis I think you can also talk about the history through that or the the sunshade project in in Israel that reminds me just in terms of colors of Max Bill for instance or I mean you don't present the work in that way but is that at all part of part of it I mean you talk about surrealism and and then there are of course the references to other painters but just what is the relationship to other architects let's say in the work do you think about that absolutely we're I think we're very aware at least of kind of classical architecture maybe we're not so interested in referring to very new things that's happening but we are very very aware of things that have been done and our work is full of maybe hidden or not visible references because what's what's important to us is not the references per se but the new relationships or relationships established between many different references in a way we don't try to to do something new we just try to work maybe in a new way with things that are already known or available I don't know if it's a conscious decision to not show or not to keep the references visible I'm not sure about that yeah I mean it's it's quite complicated because for example for each project we always start with a cloud of references around the drawing and then we say this from there this one from there and then we start eliminating like from Petral another a lot of referencing this house and we can talk about this for hours for example the the you know the red garras door in to the house it's actually collage of an island door that we found in a junkyard and then it's Frank Lloyd Wright screens on top of it and then it's the flags that we use in all our projects to show this celebration of daily life so yeah extremely extremely different especially in our areas I mean with Pinterest and all this you know interest internet thing you really have to be aware of what we we are using so yeah so there's a lot of references but like Marina said there's so much transformation how many or exactly because there's so many or they're going through the process a very long process of I am of how to say of transformation because of what's actually available and what you can do and all that in the end I think you don't even see and we don't even remember we don't even recognize what's there I mean you just mentioned the gate example which is a mix of four or five different references you don't even see it we don't even see it that's interesting when it happens yeah because it becomes its own thing and also it's part kind of transforms the part next to it because it's not it's never standing on its own that was also the story with Nadia part went with all those structures because I don't remember anymore where every what everything is built on okay maybe we can open it up are there any questions thank you so much for the lecture was really really great especially for me the context of your work because obviously here in the US or even Europe when we speak about Greece we speak about like austerity and we like all these measures and it shows what architecture can do given like limited resources and given this type of context but my question is it seems that that's like a really strong driver for your work that was done in Greece like this idea that we don't have a lot of money to do architecture and or we don't have a lot of like the lack of resources is very like and my question is would you do the same type of projects if you had more resources or is this the type of projects that you would do if you don't you know so does that make sense sorry so it's basically like is your is your project driven by the fact that you don't have the resources to do them or is it or is it would you do the same even if you were like given like a like the crazy budgets and whatever well we have we have we have to be more imaginative with the fact that there is no budget in our projects but I think that we would do the same thing all this juxtaposition of low and high value things it's something that we find very interesting in architecture and also the density of things that happen together so I think we would do the same I think if we had more resources we would just be faster because now we just we have to spend much more time to make what we want to achieve what we want to achieve that's I think that's the biggest difference so that actually costs yeah let's see that our life could be much easier but the architects would be the same yes in other European countries that have had problems with like like Portugal or Spain you see like very similar work that kind of comes out like like this kind of like joyousness in like not not or thinking about architecture in new ways because there is there there isn't their resources to do it so as architects do you think that the market or our relationship to the market is really really influencing the work that we're that we're doing and like the even through the representation or is the representation like just a sign of the times of what people are interested in I don't know I don't know what the answer to that question is I'm sure it influences but it depends on who you are and how you deal with it right I think everybody's reality has its own limitations though I mean whatever context we very often talk with friends operating in Germany or here and even if you're in New York which is not the place of austerity you have all these other constraints so it's kind of similar everybody has their own constraints but it's interesting because now that we are in New York because delirious New York is a very very interesting very influential to our work I mean here everything works properly while in Athens it doesn't but this doesn't matter because we are trying to do something similar for our city even though it's not well-functioned I would say thank you very much for the presentation today it was wonderful just a question about the representation you guys are using and although this is a presentation it's probably curated we so probably one diagram out of all the things you showed us and even that had arrows to become a diagram basically so my question is not college as just a way of work but college as representation regarding your statement as architecture not for architects for people do you feel that the fact that college gives you an interpretive edge it it doesn't diagrams maybe give you steps or instructions but college as an ability to be interpreted does that give you an ability to relate to people better than you would have if you just use the for example if instead of the newspaper we saw the collages we saw the diagrams of your work do you think that college gives you something more in terms to work with I think so yes in on one hand collage allows reality to enter I think more strongly because then you can because in a way diagrams and other representations are more exclusive collage to me is one of the most inclusive methods right it's possible to bring things and keep them there in their full spectrum in like the car in the whole whole world with them photography does right images do images I think are the most easy tool to communicate with with normal people let's say in on architects I mean we are trained to read drawings and all that but not everybody is at least in Athens for example our experience with clients has been such that we realized it's not only clients even assistant assistant constructors sometimes constructors have done crazy mistakes because they can't even understand this the concept of scale in drawings right so images is kind of more immediate always collage is a kind of image that brings brings a lot of information or is very inclusive but like do you see it even helping you in constructing these imagine is because you have these found situations and instead of like you have to construct something you have to imagine a new condition for it so you're seeing collage as sure the easier way sure yeah thank you representations in newspapers was an important part of your presentation but I wonder if that's ever worked against you like has the media ever misrepresented your projects or your intentions yes yes a lot of times we have been attacked actually the file you appear competition that we won because it was a very very important project it was an open competition and we've been so badly attacked from some citizens that didn't want this project for example to happen they preferred the wavy prizes instead there's been so much attack in especially on the internet which is so much easier obviously there's there was there have there has been people collaging on top of our images and ridiculing the project there's been so bad talk I mean it has been very emotional in fact very very heartbreaking sometimes what the things that get written or said but on the other hand you kind of have to ignore ignore that it's part of the reality I don't speak Greek but did the articles you show were they positive the articles we show today yeah I think you would understand the negative ones but I think there's something about the some of the collages and a couple of the projects that you didn't show that I know of your work that I really like a lot and admire I think that there is this incredible intent about working through collage that is about making something real it's not about leaving it suspended in this kind of other world I mean that's something I'm somewhat interested in in our in our office that maybe it's not exactly a total translation that there's something for surprise and then but you work hard I think at still the surprise in the architecture when you actually come to it so I think if anything you know perhaps the reading of the collages for the peer project you know they're not complete right that there is still the surprise yet to come and that's always something hard for a general audience to yet imagine right that the idea of imagination is very hard for someone not working in in the kind of visual realm and finding themselves in that all the time right to leap so in any case I mean I think also for me I was wondering a little bit about the images of the the collages when they come to the city and you have so many of them it's remarkable and to think about the way in which you can start to collect those almost that they become an atlas of sorts I was thinking a little bit about you know from postcard to atlas are there other sort of forms that the work takes on and I was kind of curious about could you imagine doing these collages in other cities or with this or is that just something have you thought about that is that something you would want to do I'm curious if that actually we do almost the same we do the same thing for a the Ljubljana Biennale that we are participating this year and actually it came we are doing the same thing for an ex mining city in Slovenia we didn't intend to do it but it came out very naturally actually we do exactly the same thing we are trying to reveal the hidden aspects of the city through a series of representation so that they were already there yeah we're definitely interested interested because by doing it you also kind of realize what's unique about Athens again so all this kind of exercises I think refresh and mobilize your viewing things but in a way that we think that it's like an obligation from our performance being young architects and we think that this should happen almost in every in every city let's say if possible from other architects as well to do the same for their cities that we will have such interesting documentation yeah that's interesting I mean that is maybe a little bit of a difference between just you know sort of generationally speaking to American architects that don't often engage in the city I mean with the exception of people working in cities of course but I think if you are not in a city you tend not to think of that or even the education hasn't been about putting that forward so for me that's always been a kind of you know a distinction between European and an American education let's say I think of course in the context of globalization and as you're you know describing the use of internet and so on we can't escape those things so that I think has shifted somewhat but in the in the kind of making of that so maybe we'll take one more question yeah I especially in seeing the Petra house and the cast or the in the carvings that you had into the walls for like small shelves and and then looking at so at the scale of the house and then moving to the scale of Athens as a whole and how you carved into basically a almost a concrete block is how it seemed like it was described with these like green oasis and public spaces I'm really curious how you both imagine these small insertions starting to work to activate public spaces through planning and phasing over time so like solid versus void over time what do you mean over time like how a single insertion can be planned and then more will be added at a later date I think it I think it's interesting to think about phasing in a lot of those projects and actually it makes more sense to think of it in phases in some cases because it's a it's such a complex condition when you put the sitting at the center of a project you have to always remember that it's you know it's such an organic process so maybe it makes more sense to think of it happening in time there's there's been some projects where the process and the phasing has been more important but not in the examples we showed you today why are you asking what is the kind of you explain again why is it important the phasing in terms of how realized it's a project so I didn't I didn't get it why are you asking this I was just interested in because you see the wall that has these like cuts and carvings from the petra house so you like cast into that main concrete wall and that all happens at one time versus like looking at the scale of like the entire city and the cuts and voids I was just curious if you imagine that all happening at once or like if it happens like those those insertions not actually the the Petralana the Petralana wall is it's not happening in one phase I mean we establish let's say the basic elements but then we have also nature that is captivating the that will activate let's say the the wall itself or the whole thing will change in a in a few years and I think that's what we are trying to do in a in our project we specific we specify some some elements and then we let the other things happen spontaneously it's very it's not it wouldn't be realistic to think of things happening at once it would be utopian and we're a bit against that so happening in phases makes more sense or for example for the theater square we mainly had the like the tall towers the tall trees the cypress trees in the entrances and then the this grid of palm trees but then all the density of nature in the human scale can happen during a period of time yeah one last question okay thank you very much I am going back to your representation I'm it's really interesting that the project seemed to begin and end with images I'm curious what is the the role of drawings in your in your practice is it do you even do them do you know what to cut like drawing somehow and also the process doesn't really allow you to draw when you find you know you can't really draw found door no there's there's a lot of drawing happening and there's a lot of precision taken into account and what's interesting to us is that these images that you see actually carry the drawing behind so everything's very calculated in drawing but in a way I think in in talks like this like lectures I think it's more efficient with time if we don't show drawings because drawings I think need more explanation while you can go through pictures more fast I think it's a very practical thing of the talk but I always find it very amusing to think of the drawings that are happening that nobody sees or also I find it amusing to look at pictures or remember the drawings that led to those pictures I can see the drawing in the picture that's very interesting in the process thank you very much