Working in section
A four-page essay on why we do not draw plans first, and what the section tells you that the plan cannot: where the load goes, where the light comes from, and how much of the ground you have to move.
Alkmini Roussou
Journal
Process notes, project notes, and studio notes. Written by whoever did the work, published when it is finished rather than on a schedule.
Pelion House: the morning of the cantilever pour
Eleven photographs from a single day in October. The pour started at 04:40 and finished at 11:15, and the fins were struck fourteen days later.
Ektoras Vlachos
The 134th model
Hydra Hotel at 1:50, in balsa and card, built over nine days. It is the last shelf on the archive wall and there is no room for a 135th, which is a problem we have been putting off.
Pavlos Skondras
Why we do not render until week 18
A render answers a question nobody asked. By the time we make one, the building is decided and the image is a record, not a proposal.
Alkmini Roussou
Three projects we did not take
Two villas and a coastal hotel. We have written down why, because the reasons are more useful than the commissions would have been.
Ektoras Vlachos
What a 200mm wall costs you in floor area
On a 140 square metre apartment plate, the difference between a 200mm and a 250mm external wall is roughly four square metres of living space. We ran the numbers on six of our own plans before we started arguing about it.
Ektoras Vlachos
Reading list, winter 2025
Eleven books that stayed on the long table this season, three of them about drainage. The studio buys two copies of anything worth arguing over.
The studio
Notes from a crit at NTUA
Twenty-two fourth-year projects in one afternoon. The recurring problem was not the drawing, it was that almost nobody could say what the building was for in a single sentence.
Alkmini Roussou
The courtyard tree stays
The survey put a ninety-year-old mulberry two metres inside the footprint. We moved the footprint. The revised plan is smaller, costs the same, and is the reason the courtyard works at all.
Ektoras Vlachos