My point of view:
on Architecture and Events

Interview Date: 28-03-2011

VIEW the entire interview on VIDEO!

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What is the importance of Architectural Tourism? What is the importance of traveling, especially for Architects and humans in general?

Traveling is very important both for Architects and everyone basically. Especially for architects it is important because Architects can see different places, learn about different cultures, meet different people and also they can see and experience buildings in other places. This is very important for our education and also for becoming better in the buildings we design.

Le Corbusier used to say that the camera is for idlers, it’s the eye for the idlers, meaning that when an architect is traveling he cannot just go round and take pictures like everybody else. He has to sketch, he has to try and experience the place. When Le Corbusier came to Greece, it took him about one or two days before getting to the Acropolis because he didn’t feel ready for the experience of visiting the Parthenon, which for him was one of the most important pieces of Architecture ever. So architects have to experience architecture, like we expect our clients to do that. So, it’s very important to visit places and to experience places, so that we can make our work better.

Now, for the general public, when you travel, you open up. You become more sensitive about people, about places, about situations. But the problem is that a lot of people like and prefer to travel in groups. So, when they travel in groups, they don’t actually expose themselves to the city and to the place, but they stay within the group. So, whatever they need, they ask the tour operator, they want to go somewhere, they ask the tour operator. They don’t go out to ask the people of the city, to try and communicate, to try to connect. I think that it’s the same thing with buildings. People sometimes just go and take pictures of the buildings. They don’t experience the buildings. So, they may say that they were in Italy, in Spain, in Turkey, but they end up coming back with a lot of photographs but without enough experience. So, it doesn’t really matter who’s traveling, they have to merge in the place and experience the place.

What do you think is the added value that architecture creates within a city?

Cities are basically made out of architecture. If you look at the way most cities present themselves, they usually show a building, like Athens would show the Parthenon, Paris would show the Eiffel Tower, whether it’s engineering or architecture it doesn’t really matter. But it’s buildings, very important buildings, landmarks of cities. So, cities need the landmarks, like Rome needs the big churches to connect within the fabric of the city. But cities also need a good fabric.

For example, in Greece since the 1970s, when there was a big boom of reconstruction, rebuilding the cities, a lot of the traditional urban fabric was destroyed, because they thought “We need to house more people, we have to develop, we have to make bigger buildings, taller buildings, denser construction…”. But that really destroyed the fabric. So, in one hand, architecture pieces are important, but on the other hand the urban fabric that is preserved, is also very important. 

What exactly is the ‘ECOWEEK’ and what is the scope of its activities?

ECOWEEK is an NGO. It started in Greece in 2005. Our mission was to raise environmental awareness and to get people involved in and understand that an environmental solution, what’s good for the environment is also good for them.  And it’s also usually more financially sensible. In the long term, it’s cheaper to make something ecological than not do it ecological.

We were trying to raise awareness because in Greece in 2005 ecology was not so exposed, not so common, like it is today. I think Greece has made big steps in the last five years. So, ECOWEEK evolved, from being a local event in Aegina, where we started, to becoming basically an event that is like a conference with workshops, that involves young people, it empowers young people, it teaches young people, it brings together young professionals with experts, with established professionals. And the idea is to promote co-operation, working together and also meet different cultures.

So, ECOWEEK basically has been evolving for the past 4-5 years and has become active also in Cyprus, in the Middle-East, we work in Israel and Palestine, and also this year we started in Italy, in Romania and we hope to go to other places as well. But the idea is not to come to a place and say “Look, we know how it should be done” or “We know to tell you what to do”. It’s basically learning from the place, learning from the people and involving and creating the sense of co-operation, this platform for co-operation. This is basically what ECOWEEK does.

ECOWEEK 2011 theme is ‘URBAN COMMUNITIES + GREEN ARCHITECTURE’. How did you come up with this theme and what do you intend to produce during this year’s workshops?

We know that the population is moving more towards the cities and we know what kind of problems are created in the cities where too many people try to find a job in the city, trying to find the easy way of life in the cities. So, this is why we called it URBAN COMMUNITIES. Because we feel that it is possible to run an ecological way of life in the suburbs, or in nature, but it’s harder to do it in the city.

And a lot of people say that cities are ecological because they are dense. But density is probably the only reason why cities are ecological. They pollute, create a lot of garbage, they take a lot of resources like water coming from other places where they need it… So cities in the way they are built today, they are not really sustainable. This is why in every city we go we try to work with the mayor, with the local government, to try and use the platform of the workshops as a resource for the city. It’s not that we’re doing projects that stay on a shelf, or that nobody makes any use of them. The idea is to run the workshops with projects that would be beneficial to the place.

This year, we’re in Thessaloniki, which is one of the most amazing cities in the world. It’s a city that was destroyed by a fire in 1917, it was redesigned by Ernest Hébrard in 1918 and it has an incredible plan, incredible public spaces. The architecture has suffered over the past 40 years; a lot of nice buildings have been destroyed. But, the city has a great basis to develop in a sustainable way. And of course, it’s got the waterfront, an incredible front to the Thermaic golf.

So, it’s a great opportunity for the young architects and the designers and the landscape architects to work within the context of Thessaloniki. It’s a great resource, to learn from it and to try to give new ideas. So, we have groups from the Technical University in Berlin, who are working on sites of the city, we have other groups from Greece, from other countries, from Sweden, from Italy, from lots of different places, who are all working on different parts in Thessaloniki. We expect the mayor to come on Saturday and we’ll present to them the ideas that the students came up with and there will be a nice discussion about what they could do with these ideas. 

What is the importance of Architectural events, like ECOWEEK, worldwide? What are the profits for a city holding such kind of major events?

Young people are an incredible resource. Thessaloniki is a city of young people, it’s got about 220 000 to 250 000 students. So, trying to generate ideas, brainstorm and empower all this incredible resource of young people, I believe is an incredible benefit to the city. This is where we’re trying to head to. This is an idea that was actually born in Israel, in a workshop in the Middle-East, where for the first time we asked one city to give a project. That was last year. So, they told us “We have a street in the old city; maybe you can give us ideas on how to make it a green street”.

The students worked on this idea and we had important people like Michael Sorkin from New York, Omar Yousef who is a Palestinian architect from Jerusalem, Matti Kones from Israel and they all worked together with the students and they produced incredible ideas. So, other cities came to us and said “Well, we would like to be part of this, maybe next year we’ll give you a project”.

This is how we came to Thessaloniki this year. We told them we’re coming, we have all these young people from Thessaloniki and from abroad coming, we have these important people coming, give us a project and we’ll design for you, we’ll give you ideas. I think that any city, whether it’s going to be Milan in September, Romania in November, or back in the Middle-East in February, this is material that can really not help but benefit the city.

At the end, can you please provide your personal proposal for 10 buildings (constructed and visitable) which you think as the most important worldwide that someone must visit anyway?

 

 

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