ABBAU+

ABBAU (Final Master's Thesis Project images)
in collaboration with Konstantinos Dimitrianzos

David Chipperfield Lecture

David Chipperfield the last living specimen of a dying species articulated his practise as being the mediator between the symbolisms existing within the historic narratives and modern architecture. With enquiries of typology, space, form and order that derived their principles from modern architecture but at the same time got integrated with the context of culture and history to configure newer typologies of public and private buildings. He presented his projects as contemporary extensions to the narrative of modern architecture starting with Corbusier, Schinkel and Kahn.

I feel there is something about these modernists that is very inspiring, their sense of hope as they represent every building in the manner of the utopia they establish for the whole world, their constant negotiation with their practise and principles, their urge of constant invention. As if their sense of life stems from architecture, as every environment, every event and just about everything is realized within universal modularity, like the physicist explaining the structure of an atom and a solar system through a single formula...

Excavating the Future

Our city is a spatial interpretation of a possible future community in the region of Poplar located north of Canary Wharf. From the present context to the frozen image of a possible future in 2088, the leap in time bridges the two moments and also produces a blind field in between. During these 80 years the community has transformed into a new spatial agglomeration. The project involved tracing one such possible trajectory of the future and imagining a ‘world’ born out of reaction / revolution against the unsustainable polarized geography being produced by the global capital.

(photo courtesy Nora Karastergiou)
The development neither has any singular narrative (history) nor any masterplan diagram (structure) to explain the formula of everything (strips, bar code, contraction, expansion, leaf, fingers, donut, computer chip and many other metaphors and patterns that we repeatedly use as architects or urban designers). The city has narrow dark alley ways of Paris (pre-haussmannization), Industrial pollution of Victorian London and Zeppelins that cast shadows below as they make their way to their destination within the city connecting this pocket of collective resistance to other places.

(photo courtesy Nora Karastergiou)
The representation of this unhygienic, unsustainable development with multiple poorly lit and ventilated spaces, crowded public realm and dangerous streets is attempted by us through multiple fragments of this M C Escherian Metamorphosis that has black, grey and white spaces housing fragments of history, narratives of future and glimpses of different spaces unearthed by us as we - the archaeologists of future excavate this future artifact and make our way back to the present......

(This is the brief of the project that I, Kostas and Barbara did for our final presentation with enough rhetoric and aggression ensuring our success at not being employed in any architectural or urban design office ever in our life time!!)

next plan is to illustrate a Fairy Tale book, design a city making machine and paint.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious,
Freedom is consciousness of the necessity.
-Marx

Images of Utopia

Mega structures, Public realm and the Collective

I had my pre final submission today. We are working on a project that gives proposal for the future of London. We have based our project within concerns of social sustainability but have taken up a distant futures in order to formulate visions of Utopias and be able to create a narrative where social unsustainability has become a crisis strong enough to form multiple collectives. I feel the thing with utopias is that it enables one to break away from present trends within the discipline and from all the discourses of practicalities but at the same time allows one to form a framework to manoeuvre around the concerns of the present, where idea of creating new imaginations for the future becomes the intervention...a birth for new set of sounds, grammar, language, society and civilizations.

(drawing courtesy Kostas)
It is during this presentation of ours that something amazing happened! For the first time our course director stood up and looked at our drawing, ...and then he spoke, but he did not speak as Colin Fournier the course director, trying to negotiate around different interest groups or diplomatically playing cards of offence and defence, but instead he was Colin Fournier from many years back, a young man who had just finished making a drawing with Peter Cook in the Archigram series, someone who had just assisted young Bernard Tschumi to formulate a project that will change ideas of context for ever. He spoke and described the continuous struggle between the socialist modern architect’s vision and the present day all facilitator, negotiator, open market, post modern architect’s systems and policies. We read the success of our presentation through Colin's transformation, and have come to realize the ordeal that lies ahead.......taaddaaaaaa!

Bernard Tschumi

Few days back I had the opportunity of attending a lecture by Bernard Tschumi at the AA. As he started his presentation with saying ‘Architecture is not knowledge of Form... but a form of Knowledge, and its role is not to just make buildings... but to raise questions’... (especially within the space of an institution that has quite skilfully reduced the entire field of architecture into an orgy of form making exercises) he was an instant hit with me and my Greek friend Kostas. He went ahead with explaining the context within architectural scenario and each of his project right from Parc de la Villette to the more recent ones like his museum in Athens responding to those contexts. What was interesting was when he spoke about the project he was able to talk about THE project (and not how it was built and how was it managed and how many agencies worked)...But as Colin, our course director and his then partner during Parc de la Villette, observed that he had successfully for the sake of the presentation had forged every project into the ‘Context & Concept’ framework leaving out all the Joker cards, all the aberrations, all the unexpected skews and scratches....On the whole it was a very interesting lecture followed by an equally interesting question and answer session wherein Mr. Tschumi was able to provide quite intelligent answers to some of the most stupid questions I had ever heard of. Very interesting and very inspiring.

Peter Cook


I attended a lecture by Peter Cook, one of the few celebrity architects associated with the Bartlett (UCL). The lecture was called “Gossip and everything in the past 2 years” where he spoke about his practice spanning right from the good old days of the Archigram to the recent Graz museum. He was an absolute performer, great timing and a nasty laugh. He looked like Charles Correa, but a lot more shorter, animated and comfortable (besides being dressed in black top to bottom). And on that particular evening I think, ‘Sir’ Peter Cook was on a roll! He spoke about anyone and everyone and amazingly even bitched (I don’t even know why am I so surprised in spite of being aware that it is something that is inherently embedded within our practice), before an audience of some 300 odd people, as he slotted every other architect and architecture around the world in good, bad and the ugly, he was simply hilarious!
He narrated this incidence wherein he was called for a building opening which was a tower shaped like a twisted torso, designed by Calatrava and explained that how they were not even allowed inside the building but instead invited inside a white tent next to it, which had photographs of the building. He then spoke about how bored he was of MVRDV and had fell asleep during one of their data-scape-analysis presentation. At the end of it I had realized the lecture was superbly true to its title…and I totally enjoyed it.
But filtering all the bitching out, he made some points that were quite interesting…about the notion of iconographic building, where he was damn funny! He said these days everyone who has the money to finance, wants something iconic…even if they are getting a coffee shop done or installing a small bench along the sidewalk they want it to be ‘iconic’. Then he spoke about the practice of architecture and the trend of redevelopment of old city areas (where he appealed to save Canary Warf from such redevelopment monstrosities) as he showed slides of images with huge HSBC bank and other banks that have taken over the area…it was a nice lecture, nothing new…but nice.