The regional factor: a re-evaluation of the call for a locally identified architecture
(Supervisor: Marina Lathouri, Socratis Georgiadis)
What does the ‘regional’ today respond to? Is it still a form of resistance to the universal or the global? Does it respond to the call for a national and cultural self identification? Does it merely concern ecologies? Or is it a system of constraints that responds to the call for historical continuity in architecture?
These four alternatives are not answers to be justified, but all four are questions that reflect different understandings of the ‘regional.’
My thesis will address these understandings and their conflictual relationship through specific cases of architecture in Greece, compared where needed with relevant cases elsewhere. The thesis will try to propose a new framing of the question of the regional in architecture, which will have less to do with architectonic values and more with the notion of the local, and its constructed myths of identity and originality.
Biography:
Costandis Kizis was born in Athens in 1982. He is a registered architect in Greece (NTUAthens 2006, Honours) and partner at Kizis Architects. In 2009 he received the Foundation of State Scholarship grant, under the auspices of which he earned a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design (MS AAD) from the GSAPP, Columbia University, in New York City. He started his PhD at the Architectural Association in October 2011.
