Catalogue of the 10th Biennale of Young Greek Architects

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Order: info@heliarch.gr
ISBN: 978-618-83352-6-4
Pages: 136
Dimensions: 21×28 cm
Catalogue Design & Production Management: FINE DESIGN

FOREWORD

The Hellenic Institute of Architecture, in the context of its activities for the promotion of contemporary Greek architecture, organizes the 10th Biennale of Young Greek Architects, in December 2020, at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

The 10th Biennale has a special anniversary character, as it is presented 25 years after the first Biennale, which was held for the first time in Greece in 1995, in parallel with the establishment of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture. For this reason, the Jury was composed of the architects distinguished in the first Biennale, Kostas Adamakis, Zissis Kotionis and Dimitris Potiropoulos (who was unfortunately unable to participate), by Nikos Vratsanos, curator of the first Biennale, and by Sofia Tsiraki, member of the Board of Directors of HIA. The establishment of the Biennale a quarter of a century ago, was a primary initiative of HIA, with the aim of supporting young architects and promoting their work through exhibitions, conferences and publications. During these 25 years, the Biennale was attended by hundreds of architects, many of whom later distinguished themselves as professionals and university teachers. The accompanying catalogues, which constitute an important document of contemporary Greek architecture, trace the first works, the ideas and practices of the new generation.

The 82 entries submitted this year, in the midst of the pandemic, highlight in a particular manner, recent architectural production. From all the studies submitted which will be presented in the exhibition and published in the Biennale catalogue, the Jury unanimously selected 40, as the most notable ones. Among them it distinguished five built projects, of small and medium scale, for the high quality of their design and construction.

This year the submissions came to a large extent outside Attica, from the Peloponnese, Central Greece and the Islands, and especially from Crete. A significant number of projects were also from Cyprus, and also from Copenhagen, Strasbourg, Mozambique and Vietnam. The unrealized projects accounting for two thirds of the total, including competition entries, exceed the number of realized projects. The plethora of projects that are not implemented coincides with the fact that they have been designed by very young architects, compared to previous years. The mature handling of complex design issues by architects, many of whom have not yet completed their first buildings. is a hopeful message from the younger generation. It should be noted that several of the projects raise environmental and energy issues, of current interest in architectural design. Overall, the largest percentage of submissions consists of residential buildings and complexes, as has  also been the case in past exhibitions. As far as the realized houses are concerned, their minimalist designs are characteristic of contemporary Greek and Mediterranean architecture.

Although the interest in urban public spaces and landscape design we witnessed at the ninth Biennale is not apparent to the same extent in the current exhibition, there seems to be a continued and sustained interest, in the romantic contemplation of the view – not the heroic and melancholy one of Caspar David Friedrich or Karl Friedrich Schinkel – but its milder, Californian and Mediterranean version. The horizontality of the architectural compositions, where the view constitutes the dominant element of the escape from the city, reminds us of the images of the Case study houses by Julius Shulman, and of the works of the pioneering Greek architects of the 1960s.

While the distinctions were attributed by the committee to built works, many unbuilt projects are dominated by a sense of atmospheric, perhaps even melancholic, ambience. Unlike the glossy renders of the first digital age, a veil-like haze covers the very idiosyncratic proposals of archetypal spaces the passage, the sanctuary, the ground – especially in landscape formations, such as in the competition entries for the Lycabettus hill in Athens, and for a Crematorium in Patras. This hazy blur of translucent layers, creates an impression of sensitivity and anticipation, of hope and anxiety at the same time. These architectural representations constitute experiments on a scale larger than those that the young architects have managed to implement, being images of a possible future practice. Can we see through their blurry images what is about to come? Can we guess what will follow after the zoom-out?

I would like to thank all the members of the Jury for their conscientious attention and efficiency with which they carried out their evaluation, as well as for their texts, in which they develop their rationale and formulate substantive questions about architecture as a contemplative creation and productive process, and on the role of architectural representations in our time.

I would also like to thank my colleagues, Sofia Tsiraki and Alexandros Zomas, members of the Board of directors of HIA, and Christina Papadimitriou, director of the Institute, for the successful implementation of this Biennale, under unprecedented circumstances, and loanna Kostika for her fine, as always, design of the Catalogue.

Elias Constantopoulos

H.I.A. President