monstro-ct

Architecture In Excess:
Places Of Information, Pleasure And Desire

Architecture and the process of its production, especially outside academia, struggles to perceive elements that would normally be dismissed or overlooked. These elements might be ugly, non-designed or random artifacts of everyday life that do shape the space around us. However, humans historically named these disturbances or irregularities of order as monsters. “Monsters are real”, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt explicitly state. It is almost ironic, how an analysis of modern politics can be applied (and I am referring to the terms “monster”, “monstrosities”, etc) flawlessly in architectural theory from aesthetics and the question of beauty, to deep and slow processes of space production. The above mentioned elements, that tend to be overlooked, are architecture’s monsters. The hypertrophic modern state’s need for total command is in a constant conflict with the alternative path that these monsters propose.

Architects, by definition care about space. The space of conflict between the modern state and architectural monster is of highest importance. Greece has to offer an ideal example of such a conflict, as well as inspiration for innovative space production protocols.

Southern countries and Greece in particular, present extremely high rates of private home ownership, compared to the countries of central or northern Europe. After the greek crisis of 2009, the rates of private home ownership in Greece began to decline dramatically.

High taxation and high maintenance cost are some of the reasons for this decline. Subsequently, many private properties were sold during this recession at a ridiculously low cost. It was made clear, that austerity measures included firstly an attack to home ownership. The project is agnostic of whether home ownership is a good or a bad thing that can lead to a major financial crisis. It dinsticts, however, that in this conflict, there is a lot to be said about what it means to occupy / own a space, the relation with objects / non human agents that are found in this particular space, and the memories that everyone carries of such a space.

By putting together a toolkit of 3D reconstruction routines, pointclouds creation and manipulation we came to propose an approach on creating housing units by simply replicating existing living spaces and apartments. By recording and reconstructing 12 actual apartments (of really patient friends) we created a dataset of primal matter for further synthesis. As one can imagine, the error in space recording was present, a notion that we used in the reconstruction in order to explore the spatial qualities of living space.

Year
2016

Team

Iliana Papadopoulou, Dimitrios Chatzinikolis, Georgios Grigoriadis

Medium
3D Scanning, Photogrammetry Pipelines, Sensors and Cameras, Fabrication



© Georgios Grigoriadis 2026