architektonima, by Maya Christodoulaki, is a creative architectural practice forging a distinctive approach to spatial creation: it is both embedded in the materiality and the making of buildings, as well as, active in research and theory. The space-making methodology is rooted in a profound engagement with mathematical thinking and natural philosophy, and is practiced and applied using architecture, signals and weaving.

SHOW: All Research Building Teaching Weaving Exhibition Photography

Throwing dice for non-gamblers
2024

40th Anniversary Symposium on Cooperation and Exchange between Southeast University and ETH Zurich in Nanjing, China.
Reimagining Architecture: Navigating the Impact of Computing and Artificial Intelligence

Starting with a tapestry from 1959 called Les dés sont jetés (The Dice are Cast) by Le Corbusier (1887-1965), this paper aims to open up the Greek word διακυβεύω, meaning ‘to play at dice with’, or ‘mit Einem würfeln’. Jørn Utzon commissioned the Swiss Architect to create a piece that would hang in the Sydney Opera House. The decorative work with its declarative title leaves no room to connect with the aleatory and statistical prehistories of probabilistic thinking. And yet, since the dice are thrown, they allude to the modernist prerogative of not dealing with uncertainty and ignoring the universe of a yet-to-be-thrown dice. Given the etymological connection of the hazardous with the dice, the paper aims to explore the chances that a non-gambler like Le Corbusier would engage with the probabilistic without the popular apocalyptic para-philology. As a physical object, the dice was shaped by the uniform materials like ivory (Hacking, 1999) that would ensure a certain objective equidistance from the cases to be. As a digital object, that technical material property that safeguards the game is missing, producing a gap, in our relationship with uncertainty. What is the διακύβευμα, the result of throwing the dice, then? Is there anything puritanical in the way we see chance today? What tapestry are we weaving and how do we think within the naughty, self-referential environment of Large Language Models?

Category
Research, Conference, ATTP

Le Corbusier, 1959, Les dés sont jetés, www.jstor.org/stable/community.9485523

The Canvassed Opinions of Frankenstein
2022

www.academia.edu/104812561/The_Canvassed_Opinions_of_Frankenstein

This essay was written for Dixit Algorizmi, a publication on the history of technology and its relationship with contemporary artistic production curated by Sheida Ghomashchi and Space Caviar for the 2022 Pavilion of the Republic of Uzbekistan at the Venice Biennale.

Category
Research, Frankenstein, Venice Art Biennale

Transtextual Invention
2022-2026

The dissertation presents a study of the Early Renaissance sculptor and architect Antonio di Piero Averlino (1400 – c. 1469), known as ‘Filarete’, by examining matters of rhetoric, probability, law and fallibility. The primary goal is a methodological enquiry of architectural writing in the light of advances in non-linear processing. These subjects provide the necessary relational structures to examine the stochastic conception behind the architect’s single literary work, the Libro Architettonico, and connect to matters of probabilistic rhetoricity in data-driven architectural production. The thesis proposes a reevaluation of the theoretical frame of his opus that focuses on formal concerns, and the substantiation of intellectual and mathematical trajectories, like non-linear argumentation, that are fitting to the dialogical narrative and metaphorical drawings of the Libro. The thesis connects the unfavored treatment of Filarete to an emphasis on stylistic concerns that prioritize architectural attribution pertaining to key references like Leon Battista Alberti and instead suggests a wider observational canon of dialogical literature. Recent studies on premodern rhetorics will play a vital role in informing Filarete’s exposure to humanist, neoplatonic and scholastic literature. The principal objective of this project is to examine how Filarete’s persona centered around the idea of virtue relates to transtextual invention and the humanist use of ‘the probable’, as well as how quasi-propositions influence his unique architectonic conception in a manner sufficient to challenge any notion of inferiority as-a-thinker, as well as an-author.

Category
Research, Filarete, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory

The Artificial Waiting Room
2022

www.academia.edu/104617434/The_Artificial_Waiting_Room

The Artificial Waiting Room is a metaphor for the imitation and generation of Architecture with the use of Machine Learning. It summarizes the search for a critical approach that firstly does not appropriate architectural history for the justification of Artificial Intelligence, and secondly one that can review AI’s effect on Architecture.

The work is structured in three parts. In the first chapter, we look at the definition of AI by reviewing not only its public sentiment as a cautionary tale
through the story of Frankenstein, but also its historical and theoretical base and its transition to Machine Learning. It is accompanied with a collective timeline of events from the AI-contributing disciplines that aims to show the flexibility of assimilating machinic architecture in the history of Machine Learning.

In the second chapter, we engage with the hypothesis of a historical continuity of Machines and Architecture and study a selection of recent books/atlases that place the machine as a connector of architectural examples. The case studies range from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to Nicholas Negroponte. In each case, parallels to ML examples are drawn in an attempt to bridge them with the theoretical frame and historical timeline of AI that was reviewed in the first chapter.

Finally, the approach shifts from a case-by-case study to the images of AI Architecture. Having identified machinic architecture as unfitting to critique itself, three cultural flagships are chosen as facilitators of this computationally spatial practice. The AI room is built upon the significance of computational models, three-dimensionality, and playfulness, transforming along expectations and aesthetics. The appearance of the AI room as a known, vernacular, mere object, makes it an obvious and wanted object. Beyond the technological shortcomings of architecture, and with the theoretical arguments of Brian O‘Doherty and Arthur C. Danto, the AI room is compared to the contemporary gallery to observe its persistent deification.

Category
Research, Thesis, University of Innsbruck, AI, Architecture Theory

The Rawmantic City
2015

Two striking New York references, the Eldorado -a luxurious cooperative in the Upper West side- and the Equitable -a classic figure of the Financial District- serve as the design input for this project. By disassembling Manhattan’s core into its own diminutive parts, we aim to loosen the orthogonal integrity that often identifies historical monuments. The pieces are reassembled into units that carve out space through their constructive disjunction.

The design process aims to reflect the changing relationship between architecture and the City nowadays. On the ground level, the building incorporates every existing structure into its circulation, which is served
along with the two prominent towers on each side of the building. The formation of the characteristic facade is part of processing a plethora of structural elements that blend to build up a striking exterior and a dense interior. The relationship of the megastructure to the urban fabric defines the overall form and is expressed externally by exposing the program of the building. The building extends gigantically above the city and disrupts the regular grid of Manhattan. It occludes within the diverse architectural elements that define the island, yet still, afford to mimic the tight architectural vocabulary and differentiate substantially from any nostalgic approach.

Category
Thesis, University of Innsbruck, Urban Design

Space-making through architecture, signals and weaving.