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http://kon-zabetas.blogspot.com

SUBJECT: ARCHITECTURAL POLICY

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STATEMENT
POETIC ARCHITECTURE
A spiritualized way for making Architecture.

Making is the Classical-original meaning of the term “poetry” (poesis),

poet is the maker+inventor+designer+planner+constructor and poetic
(poetica) is the construction of the beauty and the beauty of construction.

The poetry of space – Creating quality space

Poetics buildings are all based on a set of basic principles and design
tools. Foremost among these are:
1) A logical analysis of the particular identity of each individual location
and the sense of the surrounding landscape, highlighting the friendly
qualities of the setting, micro-climate and eco-system.
2) The incorporation of the everyday living requirements and desires of
the client – however insignificant – into the individual architectural
components of the building, thereby enhancing the quality of life of
the resident/user.
3) Combination of the most sophisticated technology with traditional
techniques to create a unified construction – a building fully integrated
into its historical setting.
4) The poetic architectural instinct informs every aspect of the design
management – employing construction materials as an expression of
philosophical values.
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5) Calculated improvisation of the various architectural ideas ensures that
human activities are harmoniously adjusted to the environment.

These design tools – which enable the new ekistic reality to be created
within the existing environmental setting – are the primary principles which
underlie all Poetic Architecture.

Poetic Architecture is the art of shaping, combining and assembling

simple, reasonably priced construction materials and providing the right
guidance for ordinary, competent craftsmen to transform – at an affordable
cost – the raw, amorphous materials of construction into a living,
aesthetically satisfying building. It involves management of every aspect of
the project – using the creative, poetic talent of the architect to turn an
empty plot of land into a real, living home.

A Collection of Buildings.
A first group of construction works, scattered throughout a vast urban
area, constitutes a collection of buildings that summarizes and documents a
primary common Architectural Logos. This constructed Architectural Logos
recreates and enhances a collection of construction works and, together with
the distribution of buildings throughout a smaller or larger urban area
creates a web of Architectural Logic that is able to reorganize an urban area
into an urban unit. The above speculation is ultimately formulated in the
phrase “the polis in the building and the building in the polis, flowing
amicably through the environment” that, like an equation, endeavors not
only to explore the theoretical relationship between the three fundamental
dimensions, i.e. the polis, the building and the landscape, but mainly to
ensure a practical mathematical relationship between the above dimensions;
this is because constructed building architecture is the genetic basis of the
polis, while at the same time it changes the self-determined environment
into a hetero-determined landscape that surrounds the building. The fact is
that currently, a building project constitutes a multiple point of reference
because a resident/user perceives the landscape as the view, is related to
the polis and its services, is included in the built historic environment, uses
contemporary technology and approaches himself and others in his home
and through his home. This reality re-determines fundamental values that
during implementation are also perceived as design tools, as follows:

1. Logical analysis of the sense (perception) of environment.

Environment, always sensual even in its most Spartan form of stone
and light, stimulates the senses and offers an emotional basis that is
valuable for architectural design. Logical analysis of the sense of
environment is in fact a methodology applied for extracting, denuding and
projecting this emotional basis as its presence surrounds the building
diachronically. Therefore, in order to transform the environment into a
landscape, a landscape surrounding the building, its three basic components
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are analyzed and recorded as architectural design parameters; these are its
topography, its microclimate and its ecosystem. The result of the analysis is
to build a shell-filter that, through its structural resistance is able to
eliminate the destructibility of natural elements and, through its
penetrability, to transform the initial introvert sense of protection and safety
into a final extrovert sense of friendliness towards the natural environment.
It is precisely this extrovert sense of amicability that impels the
resident/user to participate and return, after completion of the project, to
the emotional basis, which the poet-architect sensed and recorded at the
beginning of the project. The return of a resident-user that is due to an
emotive relationship developed as a result of a masterful architectural
solution constitutes a basic element that ensures continuous protection and
conservation of key environment components.

2. Transformation of daily biotic needs and the most trivial

desires into architectural components.
Being the solution to design problems posed by the biotic needs and
desires of a resident/user, building functionality is commanding but
transcendental, from the point of view of building poetics, which in this
instance is the ability of building components or indoor and outdoor spaces
to communicate with the resident/user by addressing the latter by means of
an architectural speech that is unuttered but tangible (comprehensible). This
speech goes hand in hand with project design; it is inscribed in the plot
during project construction and the structural elements and architectural
components of the building are the means by which it is inscribed. Thus,
through this practice, an aggregate of spaces ensues that, simultaneously, is
a three dimensional text narrating, describing and proposing something.
Spaces experienced in the past, which have determined the preferences of a
resident/user, form an appropriate narration theme; present biotic needs are
a description theme and desires, past, present and future, are a proposal
theme. Specifically, narrative architectural speech is expressed using
identifiable morphology, architectural components that are able to reproduce
memories. These components are formulated by types of phrases that
determine places-texts, memories of a living building that remembers and
reminds the resident/user of his/her native places. Descriptive architectural
speech is expressed through structural elements whose functional role is
evident, in a way that they ensure building functionality and also transpire
the certitude that through them the resident/user enjoys the comfort offered
by modern technology. Last but not least is suggestive architectural speech;
it is expressed through architectural components that have an abstract or
complex geometrical shape; it acts negatively creating obscure spots in the
affirmation of past traditional morphology and contemporary technological
functionality.
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3. The combination of advanced technology and traditional

techniques in an integrated construction.
The historic course of a polis is a summative record of a sequence of
construction techniques and morphological results. Some of these
techniques remain at the level of skilful improvisation and others are
industrialized and transformed into construction technology. Two
construction possibilities, two construction properties and a poetic result
ensue from the combination of traditional techniques and advanced
technology in an integrated construction. Specifically, the built history of a
polis furnishes the poet-architect with a rich palette of expressive structural
and architectural means which moves from one extreme – construction
possibility of masterful artistic improvisation on the building site – to the
other – construction possibility of transporting pre-constructed structural
technology and incorporation in the body of the building. However,
simultaneous juxtaposition of different techniques and construction
technology impresses the polis’ historical path on the building’s body and
renders its construction a vessel carrying two properties, historical time that
is realized in the present through old techniques, and global area in which
the building is included by incorporating industrialized technology. Clearly,
incorporation of the building in the historic environment and simultaneous
correlation of the building with contemporary developments is assigned
more to construction practice and less to the morphological result that the
practice produces, because the morphological result that is now a poetic
result exceeds the traces of construction practices without eliminating them,
by permeating the building with the nostalgia of utopia. This signifies that
the building, although built using various methods, acquires a single
architectural character when it transmits an intangible nostalgia to the
resident/user, either through memories of his/her childhood polis, or by
relating it with the contemporary present polis, or through approaching
cities that the resident/user wishes to visit. In this way, architectural
morphology ceases to be ornamental and becomes a vehicle for the
resident/user’s mental visit to the past native polis, the present
contemporary polis and the inaccessible desired polis.

4. Architectural-poetic instinct, a pilot for managing the various

elements of a project.
The multitude of building materials, either structural, ornamental or
used for technological installations, available to choose from, and increased
building equipment requirements pose an immediate management issue.
Thus, due to the very large number of different building elements foreseen
to ensure that the project responds to basic structural safety specifications,
architectural functionality – aesthetics and contemporary technological
equipment of installations, there is now a need for inspired technical
assembly, a procedure that incorporates the design of the structural frame
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and that of technical installations in the broader architectural design of the
building. The poet-architect is concerned by two basic and required
properties with respect to structural building materials, mainly those that
concern the structural frame and the technological installations; these
properties are their diachronic nature and their indissoluble relationship with
the service networks of the polis. Indeed, the specific elements of the
building that constitute the its substance per se, by design and
requirements, have a very long life that greatly exceeds the narrow time
limits of the design period, the life of the resident/user and the current
perception of the built environment. It is thus considered appropriate to
inscribe on the building’s body, which is destined to exist historically,
philosophical ideas of resistant authenticity and diachronic values, values
worthy of being handed down to future residents/users of the building. It is
the philosophical ideas and diachronic humanitarian values that change and
improve techognosy (know-how) on statics and the energy behavior of a
building, and that modulate a cooperative connection with city infrastructure
networks and services that have particular and prominent properties,
dialectic dependence and selective building autonomy.

5. Pre-designed improvisation of architectural proposals.

The means used to describe and portray architectural proposals have a
horizon that determines the end of their capabilities to express and to
render comprehensible the new architectural reality that they promise. In
this way, the design and modeling of the building to scale during the study
phase can portray, analyze, align and present the technical characteristics of
the building but they are not able to transmit the sense of a built space to
project factors. This happens because during the design phase, Man is at a
greater scale and surrounds the model of the building, while at the
construction phase the building surrounds Man. The result of this intrinsic
study weakness is that project factors on the one hand cannot feel the
poetics of the components and spaces and on the other cannot comprehend
the perfection of the building. As the poet-architect is aware of this fact,
he/she lends two properties to architectural design, flexibility and plurality.
This precaution is rewarded during the construction phase on the work site,
when project factors begin successively to sense and understand, while
study modifications appear inevitable. Thus, pre-designed alternative
solutions are understood as improvisations, while the poet-architect checks
their ability to function by bringing about (challenging) prior impression of
human activities that will occur after project delivery.

Like primordial values, the above design tools with which the new
ekistics reality is built in the existing environmental entity create the concept
of poetic architecture. And it is poetic architecture, the construction action
that shapes, matches and assembles humble and common building
materials, under the inspired guidance of craftsmen with current skills,
which aims within a logical cost framework at the transformation of
amorphous building material into an attractive building and ultimately a
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living building as achievement, while management of project elements, by
poetic license, modifies the area place habitable to domestic.

This is not a manifesto, not even a proposal for a name. It is only a

restoration of the original meaning of the word poetry (poesis). I hope, it is
good to know that in the beginning, poetry (poesis) was a Classical
Architectural term. Poetic architecture is just a description. There are
thowsends of descriptions such as, interactive architecture, ethnic or
transethnic architecture, pure architecture, free architecture, or whatever.
For all architects, the word ‘’architecture’’ is enough and every description is
painfull.

For and on behalf of

Konstantinos Zabetas

Principal architect U.I.A. – dir.