Dr Stelios Giamarelos Awarded Publication Grant by the Schwarz Foundation

Dr Giamarelos was awarded the £4000 grant by the Schwarz Foundation, a private non-profit organisation that fosters the exchange of ideas and practices between cultures and countries. The Foundation initiates and supports projects related to southeast Europe, encouraging art production, research, publications and discussions relative to the cooperation between Greece, Germany and other European countries and internationally.

‘Critical Regionalism Abroad: Aris Konstantinidis Without Greece’ (gta Verlag, 2024) examines the life and work of internationally renowned Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis (1913-1993), with particular emphasis on his teaching and publishing in German-speaking countries. The architect’s entire body of work was created within Greece, which contributed to discussions about his work being centred around Greek cultural and creative identity.

Dr Giamarelos’ book will be published by ETH Zürich’s academic publishing house gta Verlag, and will form part of their gta edition series. The series gathers peer-reviewed short monographs that take a fresh and provocative look at seemingly well-known aspects of architectural history, to engage in contemporary historiography and develop architectural theory. The books in the series are published as printed paperbacks as well as open access, online PDFs and HTML files.

‘Critical Regionalism Abroad: Aris Konstantinidis Without Greece’ (gta Verlag, 2024)

Dr Stylianos Giamarelos

Critical regionalism, the influential theory developed by Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Kenneth Frampton, was originally constructed around the work of three architects in Greece. Aris Konstantinidis (1913-1993) is one of these very few Greek architects who became well known internationally, without having built a single project out of his home country. As such, his work has been discussed either in terms of ‘Greekness’ or as a unique synthesis of modernism with the local cultural identity. Owing to the above, the study of Konstantinidis’s work has remained rather inward-looking and confined within the context of Greece. Arguing that this approach has been subtly encouraged by the architect himself, this book revisits Konstantinidis’s publishing and teaching practices in German-speaking countries to reappraise overshadowed outward-facing aspects of his work for a new generation of practitioners and historians. The book covers the Greek architect’s career from his studies at the University of Munich (1931-1936) to the end of his life in 1993. It brings together original research in the architect’s private archive, extensive oral history interviews with his son, and recontextualisations of his published writings to reconstruct a new portrait of Aris Konstantinidis without Greece that was until now latent behind language barriers.

Dr Stylianos (Stelios) Giamarelos is an architect, historian and theorist, with a multi-disciplinary background in architecture engineering, architectural history and theory, and history and philosophy of science and technology. He is Associate Professor in Architecture at The Bartlett, coordinating the Architecture and Urban History & Theory and Architectural Design MPhil/PhD programmes, as well as modules on Architecture MSci and Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1). He is the author of Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism before Globalisation (London: UCL Press, 2022; A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books' 'Favourite Book of 2023'); editor of Suzana Antonakaki, Architectural Poetics: Texts 1959-2019 (Heraklion: Crete University Press, 2023); co-editor of Resilience in Architectural History (Special Collection of Architectural Histories, 2019) and ATHENS by SOUND (Athens: futura, 2008); and co-author of 2 oral histories of architectural education in Greece (The Postmodern in Architecture (Athens: Nefeli, 2018) and Uncharted Currents (Athens: Melani, 2014)).

More information

Find out more about the Schwarz Foundation
Visit gta-Verlag’s website
Visit Dr Stelios Giamarelos’ UCL profile
Find out more about The Bartlett’s doctoral programmes

Image: Aris Konstantinidis, Weekend House in Anavyssos, Greece, 1962-1964 (courtesy: Aris Konstantinidis's private archive)