Doma Summer School 2024

Overview

DOMa Summer School is an international architectural workshop. By engaging important figures globally and sparking conversation locally, the DOMa Summer School aims to enrich architectural education.

Xenia Local Tools

XLT aimed to redefine the idea of inland tourism in Andritsaina, a small village in the heart of Peloponnese. The workshop plays on two ongoing tendencies, strongly affecting Greece: on one side the wave of the overtourism effect, which invades the country during summertime; on the other the progressive abandonment of inland villages, more and more disconnected from the logistics of the global market.

At the core of our workshop stood our basecamp, the Xenia of Andritsaina (now Theoxenia Hotel). Xenia was designed in 1959 by Kaiti Diallisma, a member of Aris Konstantinidis' team at the Greek National Tourism Organization (EOT). The hotel was designed according to the principles of most Xenia hotels, with common areas capable of hosting more people than the capacity of its rooms. The design of the rooms, as well as the overall spaces, reflects a holistic philosophy of tourist accommodation.

For the workshop, both tutors and students approached the village and its territory without a pre-constituted knowledge. Joined together in a large research team, they investigated a possible dialogue between the base camp and its immediate landscape, trying to imagine possible futures for the shrinking Andritsaina.

In the first phase of the workshop, they formed five groups, looking at territories from five different angles, suggested by the seminal work of Global Tools workshops (1973-1975):

1st group - body, measure, habits, rituals
2nd group - theory, fundamentals, history, tales
3rd group - construction, assemblage, resources, typologies, economy of means
4th group - survival, agriculture, environment, territory, food
5th group - communication, message, editorial

The outcome of this first phase which was presented in several public spaces of the village, in the form of postcards and trail maps, has been crucial to inviduate the interventions. The second phase of the workshop aimed to realise five propositions for a renewed Inland-Tourism. The output has taken the form of 1:1 interventions, itineraries, performative projects, souvenirs, reactivations. More precisely students have:

- Re-activated an old community oven. The process of cleaning and reopening an abandoned space in the heart of the village became forcefully a central moment of public life.
- Designed and realised a textile roof with the fabrics offered by the last tailor of the village, before the definitive closing of its shop. The object, casting its shade on the public road in front of the shop, engages in a personal narrative connected to the destiny of most of the commercial activities.
- Worked with the rich presence of the most important natural resource of Andritsaina, diverting the actual course of natural spring water, which nowadays flows from the sources directly into the canalizations. Through simple means, students have revealed the presence of water in the public space. New fountains and kids water games have been the occasion to show a possible new development of the village and its relation to water.
- Recovered scrap material and realised public seats, disconnected from commercial activities, overlooking the landscape panoramically.
- Organised a collective feast in front of the Xenia hotel, designing a long line of tables at the scale of the whole community. The food has been cooked using only local resources, pre-figuring a possible development of hyper-local food production. The kitchen of the hotel, once working for both the tourists and the community, has been reactivated for the occasion.

Our warmest thanks to Piovenefabi for a truly creative collaboration and to all the students who took part in the third workshop of the series. We would also like to thank the community of Andritsaina who made a decisive contribution to the whole effort and especially the Xenia hotel for the warm hospitality.

See you next year, again in Andritsaina!

With the financial support and under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture