DOMa Diaries 06

Overview

The sixth edition of DOMa Diaries returned to the Benaki Museum, bringing together seven Greek architectural practices to present projects that have yet to be completed. Across different scales, programmes and contexts, the presentations explored time as a creative instrument, process as an essential part of architectural practice, and reuse as an opportunity to reinterpret existing spaces and give them new meaning.

The programme opened with AREA and Stella Daouti, presenting Rock the Block, a collaborative project with the Municipality of Egaleo that reconsiders the apartment block as a field for collective rather than exclusively private life. Based on an analysis of the communities inhabiting a group of existing buildings, the proposal brings architectural transformation, municipal structures and resident participation into a shared design process. Mold Architects followed with a house in Serifos, originally designed in 2011 and revisited a decade later. Their presentation examined the creative implications of returning to an unresolved project, revealing delay and revision not as obstacles but as integral components of architectural maturation.

Arid, represented by Dimitris Sotiropoulos and Eva Alberini, presented a country house in Messinia, tracing the project through the discoveries and unexpected conditions encountered during its design and construction. Here, topography gradually shifted from constraint to design guide, while the building process itself became a means of understanding the architectural idea as it acquired material presence.

The second part opened with Lydia Xynogala – ALOS and the redevelopment of the land zone of Loutraki Port. Addressing a coastal landscape marked by earlier phases of Greek tourism, the proposal sought neither to erase nor romanticise its past, but to reconnect fragmented parts of the waterfront, reactivate coastal life and establish a new continuity between memory and future. Roleplay, represented by Roza Giannopoulou and Eva Bolou, presented the adaptive reuse of an industrial complex near the Corinth Canal. Working with rather than against an earlier proposal, their intervention uses selective subtraction, fragmentation and landscape to bring different layers of the site’s history into a new relationship.

With Kizi Studio, the discussion moved further back in time. Konstantis Kizis presented the architectural configuration of part of the ancient Phaleron necropolis along the Esplanade connecting the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center with Phaleron Bay. Conceived as a descending spiral towards three excavated mass graves, the project creates a moment of spatial suspension within the linear movement of the Esplanade, negotiating the encounter between contemporary public space, archaeological remains and the monumental presence of the SNFCC.

The final presentation came from Kokkinou + Kourkoulas, with the redesign of an existing building in Plaka intended to accommodate three markedly different programmes: an embassy, an archaeological school and a dance school. Andreas Kourkoulas and Sotiris Nikolakeas approached the project through the relationship between architecture and contemporary dance, shifting attention from the building as a perfected mechanism towards bodily experience, atmosphere and spatial flexibility. The resulting proposal embraces changing uses, permeable boundaries and forms of occupation that allow the building to evolve through its users.

The day concluded with a discussion led by Thanassis Manis and Nikos Soulis of DOMa, drawing connections between the seven presentations: the pressures generated by the contemporary economy of holiday housing; the importance of reading architecture through its broader historical, social and environmental context; reuse as an active reinterpretation rather than a secondary treatment of the existing; and the role of social bonds in collaborative forms of design. Taken together, DOMa Diaries #6 presented architecture not simply through projects in progress, but through time itself as a medium of architectural thought—a time measured less in construction phases than in moments of awareness.