Terra Artiphycialis

The consideration of material as a dynamic element in the design, aims at developing an interrelation between the natural landscape and the built structure. The form of the building is constantly transforming over time, evolving as a designed probabilistic event through the interaction of matter and the environment.

This project gave us the opportunity to speculate on a number of issues and to investigate personal tools of design and expression. Questioning the process of design and guided by personal visions and fantasies we arrived to a chain of queries.\nAmong others, our main queries were the following: Can there be a material driven design? In what way can the physical elements interact with the artificial. What takes place at their meeting point? Is there an interrelation between digital and analog? Which qualities arise from the equation between matter and form? Is there a necessity for permanence of an architectural form? Can virtue be the result of necessity? \nIn the realm of a post-digital condition, a strong desire arose· Our desire to redefine the primordial, the indispensable, the authentic. On this basis, we attempted to give answers to the above issues through our design, while aiming to fulfil our personal architectural visions.\nOur research was ignited by rethinking an architecture that is somehow primitive yet contemporary, familiar yet alien, simple yet complex. An architecture less sterile and driven by form, less emblematic and spectacular and instead more essential and genuine. An architecture brutally direct and naturally simple. Unblemished by mimetic intent, showing nothing but itself, through its material manifestation. An architecture, that arises as a product of our inner necessity instead of a materialised version of abstract graphic imagery. By ensuring its existence and interaction with human need and desire, until the latter ceases to exist. An architecture capable of interacting with its’ environment, while at the same time being incorporated among it, as a part of a whole larger system, pursuing in this way, something from the intelligence of the natural.