Polykatoikia is a Greek version of the typical, modern, generic, multi-storey apartment building. The project, a 1:20 dollhouse, is an inhabited architectural section. Each room is a scene about a polykatoikia, its occupants, and their—stereotypical—reality. Unlike a plan, a section reveals the complexity of aggregated living. Unlike abstract architectural models, only with an obsession on materiality and details of occupancy, can we see how ordinary domestic interiors embody a good life.

The Berlage Thesis 2016

Thesis advisors: Thomas Weaver, Ido Avissar, Salomon Frausto

Guests: Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Momoyo Kajima (Atelier Bow-Wow)

Film expert and advisor: Mauricio Freyre

Photos by Peter Tijhuis

Thesis Documentary: https://vimeo.com/152309318

Project Description

For the Greeks, good life is a ''Grand Life.'. Overabundance of stuff.  Mass education. Cosmopolitanism. Home Ownership. Polykatoikia is the Greek version of the typical, modern, generic, multi-storey apartment building. Initially designed by architects in the 1930s as a modern, urban dwelling type; in the post-war period, its design was banalised, massively reproduced. Since 2008, an increasing vacancy, due to the crisis sets the polykatoikia as primary figure for urban decay. Today, Greek city is a “City of Repetition,” and polykatoikia its unadmitted monument. This project celebrates its banal architecture, because it is emblematic of a massive opportunity for  good life; a truly democratic way of planning, designing and building a city.

Yet, a distinction must be made between contemporary polykatoikias in suburbs, where opulence dominates design, and polykatoikias of the 1960s, which both by design and politics propose a socially inclusive model of collective living, in form of vertical social differentiation. From a vibrant street and a bourgeois entrance hall, over to a typical, middle-class apartment, neighbour to an old high class family, over to a loft, and a student's mini-apartment, back to a young couple's open-plan, renovated apartment, and an Albanian's third floor house, to a semi-basement occupied by six Pakistanis, under a 24/7 groceries shop. All these stories represent relationships that make this generic building type specific, but are always absent from its architectural representations.

One basic floor plan is often enough to construct a polykatoikia. However, only through a building section, can we understand what different spatial conditions facilitate this variety of occupants. As a critical contribution to the Greek post-war city's scholarship, my project inhabits an abstract section with rhetorical, aesthetic and cultural stereotypes. Can we design this absurdly banal type as utopia beyond crisis, by employing humour as tool and by adopting a new aesthetic iconography?

The project, a 1:20 dollhouse, is an absurdist rhetorical device, critiquing abstract representations of life in architectural projects. Split in two parts, a representational dialectic is made obvious between an architectural polykatoikia model (white, abstract, empty, generic, repetitive) and  a dollhouse (colourful, material, inhabited, specific, varied).  Each room is a scene about a polykatoikia, its occupants, and  their—stereotypical—reality. The scenes recall Perec's ''Life, a User's Manual''. From Victorian Dolls' Houses to a Barbie Dreamhouse, a dollhouse typically represents idealized views of domesticity in a minute scale. Apart from a representational exercise, the dollhouse speculates on the polykatoikia’s evolution. Vertical repetition is replaced by diverse arrangements extending both horizontally and vertically. The dollhouse exaggerates interior differences that eventually modify facades to backyard or to lightwells. Huge, almost empty rooms, next to tiny ones, object-packed. A barely-lived living room, next to a living room after a party. A messy bedroom, under a collector's neat bedroom. The roof as both a residual space, accommodating infrastructure, and an extension of domestic interiors.

As a whole, the dollhouse is an inhabited architectural section. Unlike a plan, a section reveals the complexity of aggregated living. It reveals on what collective existence is based -be it today mechanized systems of infrastructure. It makes obvious spaces share by people who may not even know each other and material conditions that become object of conflict in our everyday life. Unlike a plan, through a section can one understand urban architecture. Unlike abstract architectural models, only with an obsession on materiality and details of occupancy, can we see how ordinary domestic interiors embody a good life.