ARISTIDE ANTONAS

Testing the Ordinary

The questions and answers that Aristide Antonas deals with as an greek urban planner and philosopher for his native city will soon have to be tackled throughout Europe as a whole. His meticulous observations in Athens could provide an opportunity to find a way out of our dilemma. Although a modicum of his findings are immediately utilized, implemented, or even built, while being simultaneously questioned, archived, and put up for discussion, his primary mission is the revaluation of precarious locations in public space and their asymmetries, faults, and asynchronicity. He thins out history and its contextuality to shed a particular light on possible future urban processes and settings, exclude the destructive, and to repair the existent, in order to (re-)create value. Within this interplay architecture arises: architecture with ready-made character, based on the participation of the local population, architecture that sets an example for engaging with the city, especially in light of the economic and financial crisis that has plagued it since 2009. From that year, at the very latest, architects around the world have been forced to rethink and reevaluate their professional roles and to expand architecture to include a social dimension. In response to Antonas’s artistic proposition to reconsider the social conditions of living amidst the constraints of the global system, we should not only view it from the proper perspective, but thankfully accept it as our duty.

DER KONTERFEI 038 / Paperback / English / 60 pages / 300 copies