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GREEK
ARCHITECTURAL
TALENT
ARCHITECTURAL
TALENT


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20.5 - 9.6 2013
AT MEGARON ATHENS
THEIR FIRST
BUILDINGS
Diamantopoulou Ivi
Unapologetically fat: Voluptuous Architecture
2013
Postgraduate
Princeton School of Architecture, Princeton, NJ, USA
Professor(s): Liz Diller, Michael Meredith
Architecture must finally become unapologetically fat, Voluptuous. The term is itself charged with historical and cultural significance: It stands for a counter-aesthetic notion of resistance to the infinite quest for thinness. It refers to seeking beauty through imperfection.
Forming a proposal for architecture to become voluptuous, is about reimagining antiquated notions of kallos revolving around ideals of metrics and proportions, questioning ethics of reduction and hyper-articulation, liberating architecture from its longstanding battle with gravity and specificity.
That does not mean that the line is jettisoned, or the curve embraced. Rethink architecture as a bottom heavy construct -- barely escaping symmetry, succumbing to gravity and being legibly informed by its forces. Seeking an extremely balanced aesthetic condition, incessantly negotiating surface and massing, austerity and lavishness, the complex and the monolithic, the beautiful, the weird, and the grotesque.
* Some Great (non-Greek) Architectural Talent made the production of these models possible: Matthew Bertsch and Gabriel Fries Briggs (large scale office tower), Yshai Yudekovitz and Trudy Watt (dress), Debbie Chen (office tower iterations), and Antonia Weiss.
CV
Ivi Diamantopoulou was born in Athens in 1985. She studied Architecture in the University of Patras, Greece (Architect Engineer Diploma, 2008) and received her Masters as a fellow at the Princeton School of Architecture in the US (Post - Professional Masters in Architecture, 2013). She is currently practicing in Athens and New York."