athens

source: iangifiblogspot

Liangi, born in Athens, 1988. Graduate of UCL, the Bartlett school of Architecture, RIBA Part2 with a Distinction and the Sir Banister Fletcher’s medal. Shortlisted for the RIBA Silver medal 2012.
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source: adaprojectscouk

Ifi graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2012. At the moment she is working as an Architectural Assistant at Alford Hall Monaghan Morris in London and as an external animator and graphic designer for the Rainwater Harvesting Systems in the Greek islands. She has previously worked for the architectural practice, Klab in Athens. She is interested in architecture and storytelling, which was the core subject of her diploma project at the Bartlett which was shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Silver Medal. She has previously taught design and computer programs as an external design consultant at the Bartlett and has taught students at foundation level for art and architecture courses.
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source: liangifi

In Athens 2013, a primary school inhabited by 300 students
has formed its own ways of ruling one of the most devastated
neighbourhoods of the city, and is about to expand its boundaries in the following years. The school’s architectural rules
demand obligatory cooperation between the neighbourhood’s
inhabitants for the production of a jam made from oranges found
on neratzies, trees that grow throughout the city and that can
withstand its pollution.

Obligatory cooperation is applied equally to each of the twelve
political teams formed within the school. Motivation for the
school’s rules to be obeyed comes from the potential unlocking
of closed playgrounds, guarded by the giant tree-man. These
playgrounds are supported by the columns of the National Bank of Greece, which now make watermelon ice cream.

Allegory is researched as a tool for an anti-propagandistic
approach to socio-political criticism in uncertain times, and is designed through a porous, ruinous and magic realist approach.

The notion of porosity is expressed in the unstructured boundaries between the private and public realm, while the ruin is seen as an essential fragment for the appropriation of the present. In order to design for a city in crisis, I am using a magic realist narrative: this is not a detailed projection of the future, but a socio-political poetic critique of the present, forming potential ways of dealing with it through possible but improbable realities.