2 sketches

Urban Design 9th semester

The Constant Experiment

...the fluid, almost abstract function of the circus is being metonymized onto a constant transforming, refreshing and doubtful redefinition of the Circus Idea, through experimentation per place and time. It is an endless architectural experiment but maintaining the same client and generic Idea. The phenomenon of the Circus prevails over the fluidity of the program; Elephants added, guest magicians invited, non-stop moving from place to place, new urban contexts...New symbols, new structural methods, new materials, new -isms and colors, new posters and circus trademarks... (Concrete Circus Context)

An urban détournement

A bricolage of Tokyo, used for the context of the city featuring in an Etgar Keret 's short story called "a hole on a wall" (Μια τρύπα στον τοίχο, Καστανιώτη publications). Here 's a preview of an animation we did as a team of five collegues(Aristoteles Maragkos, Theodosis Hsaias, Chrysoula Korovesi, Fereniki Fotopoulou, Michael Vlasopoulos). The linearity of the City follows the narrative of the story.

Axonometric View(Concrete Circus)

The RUpture evolves...(Concrete Circus)

Sketching the rupture process..(Concrete Circus)

A JukeBot..

Stop motion animation puppet featuring in a short movie we did, me and my friend/collaborator Aristotelis Maragkos.

The Concrete Circus

The following project deals with a dichotomy of architecture in "object" and "event". The concept of the Circus as a procedure of rupture between those two.

The Circus is a mobile "ghost" structure. Incomplete, indeterminant and packable. The teleology of the building and destruction of a concrete circus is a metonymization of its legitimate function: the ephemeral erection and the packing within a bunch of trucks. It is a metonymy of the uncertainty of its origin and destination. In other words the tent & truck architecture is being substituted by cement & dynamite, as Sant 'Elia quoted "Burn it every fifty years..". It's calamity becomes part of the show; the best and most trained acrobats and magicians participate in that unique and unrepeatable extravaganza.

Housing of the Event&Packing__________Solidification around the Event&Explosion
The "idea" of the Circus, that legitimize a tensed fabric becomes an ad-hoc built void. The moment that the first concrete circus is been built, through that architectural rupture the figure and the typology of the circus gain substance. The building becomes part of the show. Becomes the paraphernalia of illusion, jokes and the grotesque. It doesn't cover, but houses the circus. It's once fragmented and scattered spaces saturate a dense, centripetal spiral infrastructure. Concrete backstage spaces and open air-roof for rehearsing included.
A series of metonymies begins with the destruction and the building of New concrete Circuses. And while the ephemeral montage-able materials of the circus constitute a generic structural kit that seaks urban voids to unfold and scatter, a permanent monolithic structure will perform the opposite: It shall be a concretization of the transition from the "urban outside" to the working place of a clown, thus the fluid, almost abstract function of the circus is being metonymized onto a constant transforming, refreshing and doubtful redefinition of the Circus Idea, through experimentation per place and time. It is an endless architectural experiment but maintaining the same client and generic Idea. The phenomenon of the Circus prevails over the fluidity of the program; Elephants added, guest magicians invited, non-stop moving from place to place, new urban contexts...New symbols, new structural methods, new materials, new -isms and colors, new posters and circus trademarks...

Urban Womb

<The concrete and edgy urban environment forms a giant existantial womb, a little bit gloomy and miserable sometimes, but also protective and soft as if mutherly provided.>

This is my entry for the "New Creators" competition that was thrown by the greek free-press Athens Voice, part of the anual graphic designers' competition Ε.Β.Γ.Ε. 2007. They requested a cover design for the particular newspaper with the theme "The City". The winning entry was a white sheet with a bunch of greek "P"s in it, "typed" throughout the page . The greek p (Π) resambles a building's skyline..Lots of them accordingly constitute a city made of letters...

They say Greece has approximately 20 years of delay, related to art, science and social movements..It is very sad to watch Athens discovering a long gone 90's Minimalist solipsist culture, that has died along with Philip Stark' s Lemon squeezer, and stayed that way during Rem Koolhaas's post-Expressionistic publishes (that -who would have thought it- became a trend). Nevertheless, I' ve estimated that the winning entry is about 30 times cheaper inkwise, compared to mine. This is why you call a graphic designer to do the job. Dead-end-minded graphic designers' abstractism is always cheaper than anything else in the market.

Απο-δόμησις/ Dis-Mantlement

This is the obscure story of a character named "Primal Matter". His ostensibly meaningless everyday life becomes an epic of his complete dismantlement. His sad calamity leads to an optimistic regeneration...

p.s.:If you need the english version of the comic, comment or e-mail me (M_vlasopoulos@hotmail.com)

Hybrid Structs

The metonymized object