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Platon Issaias

By September 7, 2020 No Comments

Platon is an architect, researcher and educator. He is currently Director of Projective Cities: MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design programme at the Architectural Association, where he is also Diploma Unit 7 Studio Master developing a project on the North Sea together with Hamed Khosravi. Prior, he has been a Tutor/Visiting Lecturer at the School of Architecture/RCA (MA Architecture, MA City Design), and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Architecture, University of Westminster. He has also taught at the Berlage Institute/Rotterdam, the MArch Urban Design/Bartlett-UCL, the University of Cyprus, and Syracuse University, London Program. 

Since 2009, Platon, Alexandra Vougia and Theodossis Issaias work together as Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research collective. They have developed projects in a wide range of scales, from intimate objects, to architecture, urban design and planning. Their work has received multiple awards in Greece and internationally, most recently the 3rd prize for the redesign of Lycabettus Hill Theatre Public Space in Athens. For the past five years, they have been developing an incremental housing project based on alternative cooperative models in Da Nang, Vietnam.

Platon studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece (AUTh) and holds an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft. His thesis Beyond the Informal City: Athens and the Possibility of an Urban Common investigated the recent history of planning in Athens and the link between conflict, urban management and architectural form. He has written and lectured extensively about Greek urbanisation and the politics of urban development. His published work includes ‘Displaced, in place and in Transit: refugee population in Greece and the formation of planning protocols and domestic machines’, Transient Spaces: Building Shelter in Crisis Contexts (NY, 2019), ‘Designing the Informal-The Case of Athens’, in Athens: From Informal to Paradigm (Athens, Futura, 2019),  ‘From the Flat to the City: The construction of Modern Greek Subjectivity’ Joelho, issue 8 (2017), ‘Domestic, Production and Debt: For a Theory of the Informal’ in T. Stoppani et al (eds) This Thing Called Theory (London, 2016), ‘Mechanism of Suspension: Infrastructure and Legislation for Free Camping’ in Y. Aesopos Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece (Domes Editions, 2015) with T. Issaias and A. Vougia; ‘On Conflict, Generic and the Informal: The Greek Case’, in Very, Vary Veri, Harvard GSD, 2  (2015); ‘The Absence of Plan as a Project: Notes on the Planning development of Modern Athens, 1830-2010’in P.V. Aureli (ed.) The City as a Project (Ruby Press, 2013); ‘From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia’, DOMUS, issue 962, October (2012) with P.V. Aureli and M.S. Giudici; and ‘Labour, City, Architecture: Athens as a case study’ in P. Dragonas, A. Skiada, Made In Athens (YPEKA, 2012) with P.V. Aureli and M.S. Giudici.

In 2018, he co-curated the exhibition Islands of Exile: The Case of Leros in Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy, which presented the findings of a four-year-long interdisciplinary project on the island of Leros, Greece and int history as a place of displacement, detention, and control. Together with Hamed Khosravi, they have co-authored ‘Territory as a Project’, the preface for the catalogue of the Polish National Pavilion of the 17th Venice Biennale, and they are currently finalising an exhibition, a publication and a conference for the work of the painter and founding partner of OMA, Zoe Zenghelis.

Da Nang Types, FATURA, P.Issaias
Mechanism of Suspension, FATURA, P.Issaias
Thessaloniki School, FATURA, P.Issaias

About the lecture / October/01/2020 18:30 CET

Territories, Equipments, and Bodies: Architecture of Collective Living

Architecture, design and art practices are defined by different political, economic, social, and cultural contexts and frameworks. Different social groups and their interests, different conceptions of social, familial and gender relations and the violence related to them, management and decision-making protocols, public and private development strategies define the diagrammatic and formal relations of how we live together. All these points define a network of diagrammatic relations that emerge in a series of conflicts and their interrelated scales through which territories, equipments, objects and bodies are conceptualised: the scale of architecture, its specificity and type, the urban scale, its configuration, limits, and centralities but also the political and socio-economic realities that organise it, labour and capital, the national scale and the establishment of a citizenry, and the regional scale and its economic and geopolitical realities. 

The spatial organization of how we live together is reflected on a series of informal and formal relations between subjects, between spaces, between structural and non-structural elements, between objects, and protocols of use and occupation. 

The Architecture of Collective Living therefore opens up a discussion of how the urban can be understood through specific architecture and its design, and how its effect as an urban armature is not only of spatial importance, but equally organised by larger political and social discourses.

The Architecture of Collective Living expands from the molecular to the territorial and the planetary. 

How can we respond to changing political, cultural, economic, and urban contexts and how to propose new effective design ideas and models. What is the agency of architecture? How do we develop a pedagogical model that allows for a more effective relation between academic institutions and practice? How can architectural and urban design practice intervene in contexts where vulnerable and often in-transit population are living? How can the categories of permanence, transition, or ‘integration’ be rethought in relation to new models of social and spatial organisations that challenge conventional domestic diagrams?

The lecture will present key elements from Platon’s research work at the Architectural Association, School of Architecture, and past, present, and ongoing projects of Fatura Collaborative, Research and Design Practice.