Born to a couple of Greek modernist architects, Aristide Antonas, now in his fifties, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Paris X University and a diploma in architecture. He is an artist, an architect, a novelist and a philosopher. All of his diverse practices are driven by architectural points of view: a building is not necessarily the outcome, but the absence of a building is not a statement nor a pose challenged in his writings or lectures.
Deeply concerned by the dereliction of city centres (the historical centre of Athens, for instance), as areas which cannot be regenerated but can potentially be recycled, Antonas has developed a series of protocols to be used and practiced in various locations and situations. Skinless architecture, as a way of dealing with interiors rather than relying on the gestural architectural of the envelopes, has been one of the methods used by Antonas. A lecturer and teacher in the UK, Germany and Greece, he has dealt with the collective and collaborative processes involved in setting up potential solutions for the increasing tensions in post-industrial Mittel Europa. Recently approached by a number of private commissions in precise locations, he decided to commit himself to construction.
It is known that the art world has been always looked to external voices to help to tackle new topics and new market opportunities, but sourcing architects ready and available without compromise is often an issue faced by organisers, planners and curators. Antonas was fortunately able to participate in Documenta 14.
©Martin Argyroglo / Courtesy of FRAC Centre-Val de Loire
Skinless architecture, as a way of dealing with interiors rather than relying on the gestural architectural of the envelopes, has been one of the methods used by Aristide Antonas.
Seungduk Kim (Kim): Let’s begin with your show, ‘The House for Doing Nothing’ at Frac Centre-Val de Loire, which was your most recent project of this year. Please tell us about this exhibition and how it was organised as the title of the show ‘The House for Doing Nothing’ alludes to the writings of the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Can you expand upon this?
Aristide Antonas (Antonas): Well, I am not scandalised by Žižek’s technique for creating attention; I sometimes admire it. He was suggesting that the attitude of ‘doing nothing’ was that of a responsible intellectual position, to withdraw and study the social sphere from a distance. But in my opinion this distance, which characterised the intellectual of the past, was a lost element. In this sense, Žižek’s proposition could not work: the social sphere was organised around this exact distance and he was proposing the social sphere’s banality as a simple invitation to responsibility.
The bed seemed to be the centre of this system. The exhibition in FRAC museum of Orleans was meant to present the last iteration in this series of works, by revealing an aspect of the contemporary in doing nothing. The occupant of a bed is different today to those of the past. The house for doing nothing is the setting for a bed as a public space today.
Kim: You often refer to the urban situation in Athens, where you grew up, particularly the archeological sites and the empty and abandoned city centre. In what way have those elements become source material for some of your architectural concepts?
Antonas: Archeology is a modern invention of the West. I am interested in modernism as a programme of archeology. We could create an architecture out of the existing urban material of the city. We could create a new city by destroying parts, by digging, subtracting pieces of the modern space, creating new spaces by extracting.
The Open Air Office is composed of 48 tables, 100 stools, 48 reading lamps, 9m of bookshelves, a printer, and a water cooler. The project reveals the strategic use of sponsored urban intervention that is carried out in order to provide a common space for public use. / Courtesy of Antonas Office
Kim: Your architectural approach is to examine and raise questions within a social and urban context. Are you proposing, in a way, that we think differently about the role of architect in our time Naturally, this can raise the issue of ‘protocols as architecture’, which has been a core interest in your practice. Could you explain this further?
Antonas: The role of the architect is not given in contemporary culture. I am interested in architects who invent a frame for themselves in which to act. My frame understands the script as an empty but promising space, from the preparation of an action through texts to the protocols that direct architecture. So in this frame I function as a theatrical scriptwriter. Protocols can be performed as consciously fake interventions in everyday life. I think the consciousness of living in fake narratives will be or is already substituting the main rationale behind the long western quest for truth and authenticity. Architecture will follow this narrative turn in the the long history of civilization.
Kim: Furniture as an architectural apparatus expresses important elements and functions within our daily life. When you said it exists a ‘war’ between a table and a bed, and the table lost. That a bed is a space to withdraw and to reflect, but a space to be connected and a table is a space to get together and to meet. After your observation on this sociological shift, what issues are you trying to raise?
Antonas: I was referring to the waning influence of physical meetings. People are inventing physical meeting protocols less and less. The history of the table is a good example of this defeat of the
social. There is a victory in the determination of the bed over the table. We have come to this defeat of the social through an excess of network sociality.
Kim: It seems the concept of the theatre is quite important to your practice. Could you speak a little more about this aspect of your work? Is theatre related to time-based performance and is the temporality important to your architecture practice? Could you please discuss the concept of the theatrical and temporality in your works?
Antonas: As a young and yet unpublished writer, I started writing play scripts before anything else. But the theatre is always present in architectural discourse, one way or another. There are some
important views of the theatre which I had in mind during my first protocol works. The primacy of ‘truth in construction’ is at the first instance, a theatrical stance. The so-called postmodernist
reinstitution of scenography is second. I distinguished the voice of Aldo Rossi giving a reading of the city as a theatrical performance.
The interesting difference in Rossi’s reading came with his idea of scena fissa: the city was a stable, unchangeable setting in which history would take place before it. Scenography in this case was not something frivolous that would easily be replaced. The city was represented as a permanent scenographic experience, while the plot was ever changing in front of it. Anything could be performed in front of the same stable city settings. It occurred to me that we could no only be the masters of an unchangeable scene, but that we could also think and act within a performance that is played in front of it. My work was introduced as an answer to the scena fissa of Rossi, as an elaboration of techniques for performing the everyday differently. I question the everyday as a given norm and test the ordinary through open invitations to work with scripts that many can perform.
The Principle of Gathering organises the different dispositions of predetermined objects into a system. Its performance is operated by the same repertoire of objects. / Courtesy of Antonas Office
Kim: You mentioned there are more than 1,500 empty spaces in the centre of Athens, and there are many international architecture schools visiting Athens. Could this form the basis of an interesting potential project? What if those empty spaces hosted these schools and were activated as potential institutions? Why are there so many empty spaces in the centre of Athens? What would be the first steps be towards new development?
Antonas: The first step for a new development would be an expropriation under the terms of many of these spaces for the sake of the common good. The Greek state is very fragile and cannot decide to do this in the centre of its capital. The proprietors prefer to sell or to claim rent with the help of platforms like AirBnB. There is such a surplus of cheap empty space in the city centre that I proposed that significant foreign universities could buy property and introduce new Athens humanities branches or departments for city studies. Around 10% of immigrants entering Greece are students, and a university structure would have to include them in its agenda. The city centre of Athens could make a great and lively university campus in the city. However, we will also have to change the concept of what a university is today. The university in its given form is disappointing. It has to be redefined as a different kind of platform. My Empty University and its Sleeping Area point out these problems and hint at some different forms of representation of them: Islands of Objects are intended to lock the dispositions of small-scale meetings. Small-scale meetings are meant to replace the amphitheaters in the university of the future. Athens can be a pilot project for the university of the future, and even pose a new concept for living in the city too.
Kim: Are you joining the list of architects who never build by individual resolution or are you in fact waiting for the right opportunities to begin construction?
Antonas: I read the history of architecture as a system of unbuilt promises. The unbuilt part of history of architecture is in many ways far more interesting to me. That said, I also have a very practical taste for space. Many think architecture is only a successful designed proposal, but I prefer to find architecture where nobody really expects it to be. In this sense I am an archaeologist of good architecture, and I signal my finds.
Kim: The architectural elements you design, and particularly those to be inserted in existing but abandoned buildings, could be seen as a kind of skinless architecture offering a utopian position. Or is it something else?
Antonas: I am allergic to designing exteriors. For me an exterior is mainly an exercise on entering: on abolishing the status of the exterior. I want to design interiors. But when I get there, I am very attracted to the composition of the interior as an autonomous, inviting set of sculptures. Maybe we have to make a differentiation at this point, working on the No Wall House for instance is not the same as working on the Sleeping Area.
There are some similarities which relate to the dismantling of the programme, into the nonarticulated members of a dismembered whole. Maybe there is an important element to observe here, in the difference between different frames: between a desert and the city.
Weak Monumental Square, 2014 / Courtesy of Antonas Office
The Weak Monumental Square has been created by partdemolition, the redistribution and concentration of the deserted areas of the city into one public space, as an extension of Koumoundourou Square in Athens.
Kim: You are teaching in Greece, Germany and now in London. How do you see your teaching within your architecture practice? Is it a way of living without too many contradictions? Or a necessity, to open dialogue with the younger generation and to set up collaborative work?
Antonas: I carry my questions with me, this is my definition of teaching. I do not have answers. Then I try to listen, and this is the hardest task for any educator in my opinion.
Kim: What is your most recent project?
Antonas: I have been commissioned to create a small house in a wood close to the village of Grancey-le-Château in central France. I have to determine the level of intervention in this open field circled by the wooded area. I had the idea that an infinite series of trees can reveal the many possibilities of architecture. The wood is at the same time a basilica and a mosque and a covering system, it is already an architectural rule, and intervening in this space is to establish an exception to an existing order. It is a very difficult exercise in humility.
solo exhibitions on his recent production at the Swiss Architecture Museum, the Vorarlberger Architektur Institut in Austria and the FRAC Centre in Orleans, France.