Dear ARCHITECTS

Home

2010-11-25T12:09:00.002Z

Careers Service

2010-11-22T18:19:00.002Z

Garnish

2010-10-19T01:35:00.001+01:00

The Self-Consuming Barbeque Pavillion

2010-01-25T22:06:00.002Z

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/self-consuming-barbecue-pavilion.html

Take Cover!

2009-11-02T15:05:00.004Z

Touching The City, the book, is finally out! This is our first major publication - albeit with the help of chocolate bird poo. As some of you might remember we took part at last years London Festival of Architecture as a member of Touching The City / Benchspaces workshop with 'A little bird told me...' for which a horde of chocolate bird poo was made and 'dropped' on Guys Hospital Memorial park. The cloth bound tome including all the Benchspace projects and interventions and carrying on its cover the words 'DEAR ARCHITECTS' is ready and will be launched at -hold your breath!- RIBA on Portland Place, on the 11th November 2009. Obligatory drinks will be available from 18:30 - 20:00 and most probably will be continued at The Queens Head and Artichoke. If you are free and around come and say 'Hi!'. We might even sign your copy of the book. Both of us.

Learning From Dallas

2009-07-21T23:41:00.005+01:00

Enduring in the language of urban planning is the myth of the dishonoured, the damaged city. For a practise which has its roots in a commonwealth view of the city - not only in form but also in spirit - in the face of the cities defering privatisms what other means are left to propagate its essential role in and for the city, but an erroneous Marxianism of urban dialectical synthesis? What else than elimination and subsitution masked by the precinct of a hyphenated re. It was not a suprise then to see that the Department of Planing and Housing has commisoned an incentives study for the permanent re-habitation of the "debased" "traditional" city centres of Cyprus. The rhetoric of the Nicosia Masterplan as far as the present state of "traditional" urban cores of the island has entered the middle-class psyche and its imagination of them, the artists, the cultural producers, we, have had our share in framing the spatial potential of such areas; the developers moved in. Add to that the romantisising phantasmagoria of neo-classical architecture vis-a-vis the multiple square feet offered by the houses of an urbane class long lost across the recent socio-political history of the island and one can even say that the shift in the urban planning policy from re-habilitation and re-generation to re-habitation (of stil "debased" "traditional" city centres) has been long overdue.

Currently researching for the 2nd Nicosia Architectural Biennial - Public Works,thus in abundance of dB and arguments for the current state of Cyprus' "traditional" city centres, yet also aware of Luke 4:24, I -for the time being- ebb behind an exemplary if modest article by a certain Franco-American from Texas re the failures of inner-city planning procedures. Posted on the same day the Department of Planning and Housing signed the commisioning cotract with ALA who are undertaking the incentives study, it might as well serve as the prophet, and the prologue, to the study's future.

Oh! And something else: "Tradition is the tending of the fire, not the worship of the ashes." (J.W.von Goethe)

Drakouna Remembers: Anniversary Publicity

2009-07-14T05:38:00.003+01:00

Click to enlarge.
Courtesy of Drakouna.

↵

2009-07-07T14:38:00.007+01:00

A brief recoup

After Venice we, all, came back to a pressing deadline for a grave project in Cyprus - still being completed as I write this - made out of untreated travertino marble, copper and solid iroko blocks. We aslo came back to the doom of 'the crisis', where rejections were aplenty and depression on our doorstep. Writing about boat shoes or Nicosia (yet again and again), obligatory about Obama and partying on the streets while Athens (and later Bejing) was burning kept us alive and alert. And then MCP launched her first jewellery collection, and got one well deserved show after the other -with another one coming in September- an internship at DMD materialised for Maria-the-architect, and APOTHEKE, a long time Nicosia HQ of our other projects, was re-radicalised (and painted) in the face of a new conservatism in Cyprus and its art-world, becoming a mini-institute for and promoter of unashemedly difficult and critical works like Orestis Lambrou challenging photosof the interior of the abandoned Nicosia Airport, a symbolic and exemolary Cypriot modernist building.

And before you can say Nicosia Architectural Biennale, we will be co-curaing its second installment under the title Public Works - an anti-masterplan, anti-romanticising immersion into the walled city of Nicosia, which will include a radical landscaping project. More Soon.

Make Souvla - Not War!

2008-09-04T13:29:00.006+01:00

Postcards. Track them down in Venice and Nicosia.

Make Souvla - Not War !

2008-07-30T11:20:00.007+01:00

Urban Guerilla Souvla

Table Football Foukou

Waterbourne Foukou

Events

Put the charcoal on, too!

2008-05-20T22:59:00.005+01:00

While you are at it, wish us success - and courage; we have been shortlisted for the Cypriot exhibit at the 11th Venice Architectural Biennale, curated by Sir Peter Cook. Yes, on the image above highlighted are our, Dear ARCHITECTS', names (for those of you who can read Greek). Click to enlarge.

MAKE SOUVLA - NOT WAR!

Fare forward to a Souvla Venicoise!

Book your tickets!

2008-05-20T20:10:00.003+01:00

http://www.lfa2008.org/event.php?id=153&name=benchspace+walk+workshop

See you there!

35°10’25 N 33°21’54 E

2008-05-14T18:01:00.004+01:00

And another proposal for the Cypriot exhibit at the 11th Venice Architectural Biennale

Make Souvla - Not War!

2008-05-13T05:21:00.010+01:00

Dear Architect's proposal for the Cypriot exhibit at the 11th Venice Architectural Biennale, under the title In Cyprus -Relax as Architects- Reinterpret, curated by Sir Peter Cook.

Here is Omada Ergasias' proposal.

TOUCHING THE CITY: PROJECT 02 BENCHSPACE WALK WORKSHOP

2008-05-04T14:04:00.005+01:00

Site 03
The Memorial Park, Guys

Existing between cultural manifestations and utopian configurations of nature the urban bench is a paradoxical figure. Originally and predominantly intended to be a mono-functionalist object, it struggles to accept its presence amidst the claiming of nature by cultural gestures -such as landscaping and gardening- and of cultural elements by natural processes. However much the materials and forms allude to Bucolic utopias, this uneasiness is on the one hand ingrained on the bench-object, often transforming it to a memorial of times, spaces and people, and on the other, the naturalistic idealism of its placement is upset by sights and odours, that don’t really smell of roses. This dialogue between nature and culture, monumentification and process as it takes place on the bench seems to not have interested the larger part of benchspace development or functions. Yet what are the relationships that can indeed sprout out of a reclaiming of culture, in the shape of its bench-space intervention, by nature? How does this transforms our understanding of using the bench - and of remembering the bench? And how does nature’s presence in that pivotal cultural space, the city, is reconfigured?

In Praise Of The Stoop

2008-04-22T23:50:00.003+01:00

How To Live In A City, 1964

Bastard or Individualised Benchspaces

2008-04-06T15:14:00.003+01:00

The Bastard Chairs of China

Touching the City: Benchspaces

2008-04-05T12:49:00.008+01:00

Impromptu vs. Restricted Potential Benchspaces

A couch for a bench

And another one

vs.

Potential benchspace restricted to pigeon use. No sitting, no skateboards.

Comings And Goings

2008-04-04T13:42:00.004+01:00

If you can read Greek, here is a brief architectural appraisal of the geo-political re-definition of Ledras street, and in extenso the division of the city of Nicosia, as this has been taking place since yesterday morning.

Thinking the Bench[space]

2008-04-01T15:20:00.013+01:00

A bench is a chair is a stoop...

Within the realm of definitions a bench[space] is hard pressed, cornered, even, before Joseph Kosuth, as far as its making present, its awareness, is concerned. However, the amnesia within which the bench[space] seems to exist contradicts most of its objects' formal characteristics: against walls, mostly upright, stiff, surrounding trees, encircling squares, delineating, even in parabolas, paths. Memorial benches, with memorial plaques – commercial, personal or arcane- essentially in memorial parks, attempt to transpose the bench[space] from its public to the private and back again. Few escape. Within this process the bench[space]'s relations with not only the memory of itself but with our remembrance of the bench[space] are radically altered. And ultimately with its use-value.

What is a bench for anyway?

One can not remember how many times (another) shoelace malfunction has forced a stop at a near-by bench[space] mid-way through a walk to step in it – the bench[space] and the malfunction. Or how many times a coffee-cup was placed onto an armrest only to be pushed over. Anyway if anyone would start remembering, by means of archiving and recollecting, such uses of the bench, he or she could easily claim an art-historical position between Yoko Ono and Richard Long as maybe another name to be dropped by research students.
But one will always remember a drunk escapade into a locked embankment garden and all the kisses punctuating the night, cigarettes graciously smoked on bench[spaces] after the smoking ban, free wi-fi network searches in metropolitan squares' bench[spaces], eyeing cruising parades in municipal gardens and afternoons akimbo under the sun in hotter climates. Others can also remeber us asleep on public buildings' porches and verandas.
Most of these are also engraved, imprinted, retold, in one form or other, onto such bench[spaces], in a gesture of reclaiming the privateerting nature of the public existence of bench[spaces] from PPPs and PSPPs. Or as an extension of the virality of public relations and social networking.

Others are abandoned.

Bench[space] Marks: A Spot

The social function of remebrance sites – congregational or not – long since gasping to catch up with our collective biography, our engagement with cities and locales begins no longer with legends but with bits of information. In an age of extreme proliferation of recording technologies, it is the bench[space] that can still challenge the digital camera's output for a place in our personal pantheon of heroic memorials. Whereas the camera captures and reproduces, the bench[space] receives and disseminates. The innumerable photographs circulating hard disks and external drives in digital form, preserve, flickrs. The bench[spaces], scattered, marked even in Memorial Parks, mark, memory. A letter of marque: the bench[space]. A hope, a hop, an ollie even in absentia of the anti-skateboarding technologies which have marked the marked bench. And after David Hasselhoff singing, who cares about what the walls may remember?

Dedication

How are we then to inscribe the bench[space]? Can the anonymous ink suffice? The pen-knife, would it be enough? Softly does it in such ocassions. When three are not a crowd and when such corner gin places, around the world, are welcoming islets. What are you looking at? As your are sitting next to me, across me, your body into mine.

Stuhlhockerbank by Yvonne Fehling and Jennie Peiz

Touching the City: Benchspaces

2008-04-01T14:03:00.018+01:00

Guy Memorial Park

Dedications

Marks

Others are abandoned

For: Touching the City: Benchspaces