Mentor Voyatzakis (He/Him)
Winner
GIA Student Award for 3rd Year, Nomination: RIBA Bronze Medal Award
In the design process, social and environmental sustainability are a consequence of the appropriate ethos. A sensitive attitude, with listening and empathy as foundations. A process of observing narratives, receiving questions from the context and debating their value and future relevance.
Designing is therefore discovering through discussion.
Conceived with detachment and accuracy. Manifested with boldness and plasticity.
With origins from Greece, Switzerland and Italy, I completed my secondary education at a British school in Athens. I am currently residing in Glasgow, where this year I completed my RIBA Part 1. Through the studies i am particularly drawn to the poetics of construction and materiality; Where spatial richness lays in the interaction between our senses and the external world, delivered through sound, humidity, colour and light. Despite the primarily rational steps undertaken in architecture that address needs, an emotional component is also present. In a subconscious language of the everyday architecture speaks the unspoken. This influence has the responsibility to reflect and enhance: Our relationship to ourselves and our sense of being. Our relationship to each other and how we live together, form our society. Our relationship to the earth, collectively how we respond to the climate.
Fascinated with the named potential and responsibility, I am exited to contribute and apply them in practice.
Framing and Containing
Narratives, invisible yet present. The scheme’s purpose is to extend and facilitate overarching events. Events that may be read in the gathering nature of themes throughout space and time, but are not necessarily experienced directly.
Building a residential retreat and performance hall, Stories in Balloch, a harbour town by the banks of lock Lomond are confronted by the ethos of Sistema, a charity organisation helping children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Unravelling sequences of events that took place in Balloch is necessary to realise its significance. Namely geographic phenomena, a human historic response and present local culture as a consequence.
Appreciating Sistema’s ethos is the first step of empathy, in order to cultivate and grow their values. Building a community and giving meaning to children through playing music.
Place and People are bounded together through material intervention. Energy facilitates, but is not limited, to basic needs of forming the stage. Transcending the notion of energy for physical to spiritual, structure and construction aim to trigger an emotional response to its users, to set the scene.
Essentially, the scheme is a reminder, through the use of metaphors. It is articulated by a series of basalt splaying columns and perpendicularly arranged timber beams, with the roles, of framing and containing.
This is half you.
John Locke, 1632-1704, was an English philosopher and physician who claimed that our minds process the external world with either ‘primary’ or ‘secondary qualities’. The ‘primary qualities’ are size and shape, the way they exist in the external world is the way we perceive them. Colour, texture, smell, and sound are all part of the ‘secondary qualities’. These qualities are compromised by both the features of the external world and our senses.
The secondary qualities have an intrinsic relationship with the receiver; The human being-in-the-world. Therefore, they belong both in the external and internal world; Thus are the common denominator of atmosphere, external and mood, internal. They create a bridge, making us one with our environment.
This is half you.
