PORTFOLIO
Demetri Gnafakis
Experience:
Plus Architecture, Melbourne, February 2021 – July 2023
Student of Architecture
Queens Avenue Student Accommodation, April 2021 – February 2022: Successful delivery of town planning package for student accommodation project. Including site research and diagrams, architectural plans, sections, elevations, apartment types, and modelled design changes to building facade.
Geelong Conference Centre
September – October 2021: Construction documentation of porte cochere and entry for conference centre project including plans, reflected ceiling plans, sections, and elevations.
Blazey St Office
October – December 2021: For tender drawing set for end of trip facilities within proposed office project. Including plans, reflected ceiling plans, sections, and elevations.
• CAD tasks such as three-dimensional building information modelling, construction documentation, conceptual and schematic design tasks including creating schematic diagrams, completing mark-ups, joinery documentation, design input, review of alternative designs.
• Researching overlays, restrictions and applicable building, zoning and land development codes.
• Assist with the production and documentation of feasibility studies.
• Document existing conditions / site history by visiting the site and making observations, taking photographs, measurements and recording relevant details as required.
• Prepare materials, finishes, samples and colour boards. Produce renders, presentation packages, image collation and hand sketches as required for project submissions.
• Assist with draft specifications and detailed schedules including preliminary selection of building materials with consideration of the quality and suitability of material proposed, construction methods and processes and other project specific requirements.
• Sourcing and collation of products, materials, finishes, fixtures and other samples as required for project specification selections.
• Organize packages of documentation for issue or transmittal.
• Organize and maintain project files and archiving.
• Provide administrative support to assist the practice to function efficiently such as reception duties, answering phone calls, printing, collating, binding, scanning & fax, 3D printing. Organizing / Booking product lunches & CPD sessions
• Organize and present the monthly staff meeting.
• Organize and manage the events calendar incorporating staff events such as morning tea, monthly staff social event, monthly birthday celebration and the office mid-year party. Assist in planning for the office year end Christmas party.
Harvey Norman Thomastown, November 2016 – Present Senior Salesperson
• Consistently surpass selling targets and KPI’s (Top Salesperson of Small Appliance Department 2016-2023).
• Assist in merchandising, customer enquiries and issues.
• Establishing good relationships with return customers.
• Developed an appreciation for the challenges faced in the electrical retail sector, and have learnt to adapt to changing customer attitudes and expectations.
• Gained the knowledge and understanding of brand perception, and always strive to deliver exceptional customer service.
• Train and mentor new staff members, as well as inspire existing members to achieve desired results.
• Have received numerous acknowledgements from customers on my outstanding service.
Skills:
• A “Can Do” attitude with a relentless pursuit of wanting to learn
• Strong ability to remain focused in high-pressure environments and set own goals
• Ability to communicate and exchange ideas to others as well as engage in a team environment
• Well respected and acknowledged amongst peers
• Excellent communication, organisational, planning, and interpersonal skills
Education:
Master of Architecture, First Class Honours
University of Melbourne 2020-2023
Bachelor of Design
University of Melbourne 2017-2019
VCE, Loyola College 2016
ATAR of 91.95
Top 10% of Victoria in English, Health and Human Development, Media
2016 VCE Health and Human Development Units 3 & 4 Award
2016 VCE Academic Excellence Award
Awards / Exhibition:
2017 FOD:R Exhibition, AFLK Gallery
2016 Academic Excellence Award
Software Skills: (Proficient)
Rhino
ArchiCAD
Adobe Creative Cloud
AutoCAD 2D
Enscape (Developing) Revit
Laser cutting + 3D printing fabrication
3DS Max
Referees:
Available Upon Request
0467 257 020
demetrignafakis@hotmail.com.au
OFF(ICE)SPRING | BLURRING OF THE INDUSTRIAL & DIGITAL
Digital: Tied to digital device/white collar workers
Physical: Manual labour/blue collar workers
Natural: Ecological environment
The evolution of digital technology has trapped us in an artificial cycle. The dilapidation of our landscape festers, human relationships isolated to a screen, as the office remains a prison to production of the Anthropocene. We are all digitally connected, yet spiritually disconnected. Artificial intelligence consumes the future of the workplace, where virtual identity has replaced humanity. Profit has maximised whilst natural craft is obsolete, but at what cost?
This obsession of production has not only manifested the dilapidation of earth’s many habitats, but moreover the degradation of human connection, as the notion of ‘work’ is digitally accessible from any remote location.
As our dystopia strays further towards automation, social and psychological isolation plagues the every day worker. The fabric of the ‘office’ needs to be redefined as a collaborative field, rather than merely an enclosure of production. Reborn as a community where the body inhabits space rather than a screen, a link back to the natural. Framed as a typological experiment, this thesis proposes an ‘office’ of cohabitation, where the contrasting conditions of digital and physical work may be able to blur and co-exist across public and private realms to form new levels of cultural engagement. Through reintegrating natural systems as a mediator, differing habitats may be able to reconnect, whilst healing the local community psychologically.
By redefining the office typology towards a collaborative oasis between both physical and digital labour, a new ecosystem of connection may emerge for future generations, revitalising the office as a space that shares both hand and digital craft, without prejudice.
Response:
This thesis aims to explore a new typology for the office, proposing a space of collaboration and regeneration over production.
Built upon the questions of:
How can architecture redefine the office typology from a digital framework of production, to that of a social and cultural community?
How can architecture facilitate cohabitation between contrasting industries of work, whilst addressing societal and environmental barriers?
Natural Mediators are embedded between the digital and industrial to unite opposing workers across the site. Transparent and Enclosed boundaries bleed throughout to providean array of privacy levels for workers from completely open frames to enclosed concrete temples. Due to the flexible nature of the warehouse typology, this collection of realms is able to shift and expand across site as resources grow. As the office evolves, so can the level of regeneration, as exposed fields become solar and urban farms for the local community. At the northern edge of the site, a naturally filtered pool is accompanied by a wetland passage to naturally purify the Yarra River Convey, whilst conveying the importance of local ecology to users.
A Greenhouse and community garden stems outwards from the core of the site, contrasting in form as a central node. This shared zone reunites users to a space of therapy and psychological healing through plant based activities shared between work modes, aiming to forge relationships via local gardening
AUTOMOTIVE WORKSHOP | DISPLAY OF INDUSTRIAL
REALM OF COLLABORATION | PERMEABLE WORK
An enclosed brick shell is hollowed out with as an internal greenhouse. Landscape bleedsthroughout the warehouse from underneath forming an interior garden as light falls through the polycarbonate roofing. An array of work islands hover throughout the vegetation, where hanging curtains are able to form permeable boundaries between workers in the zone. Autonomy is given across users as they control the level of visual exchange and dialogue throughout the form.
Landscape bleeds throughout the warehouse from underneath forming an interior garden due to the polycarbonate roofing. Curtains form permeable boundaries between hovering work islands. Autonomy is given across users.
MASTERS STUDIO JAPAN, MAJOR PROJECT 2022
The Innoshima Interactive Brewery embodies a holistic journey across production shared by the locals and migrants of the island. Inspired by the island’s cultural heritage, it aims to celebrate the industrial context of ship building, and domestic lifestyle of cooking with the Hassaku Orange. Whether travelling between islands, returning home, or working as a local, participation is at the heart of the building, and the island’s agricultural and industrial identity.
The chosen site comprises of an under-utilised ship yard on the south of the island by the Karoto Port, where a lack of cultural engagement is evident, compared to the other dense areas of the island. The site further embraces the shipbuilding history, with many industrial warehouses within the vicinity, and an expansive stretch of land. This offers a space to bridge the gap between the industrial nature of the shipbuilding industry with the intimate moments of the island’s domestic culture.
Each process is layered across the building’s form, where transparent views that bleed from combinations of garden to water, brew house to meal, dining to the sea, are captured via the screens’ bleeding boundaries. This allows for versatility in the building’s layered frames, where on a summer day, the entire space can open up to the expanse of Yuge island, or instead frame specific views such as the courtyard between the experimental kitchen and bar. As the built form meets the edge of the sea, the ground plane dissolves into the open expanse, occupying local activities and events such as live music and cinema.
The steel frame of the sawtooth roof embodies the industrial nature of brew production, whilst allowing diffused lighting into the space. This materiality is directly contrasted by the light filled stretch of garden, framing Yuge Island and the water beyond, merging the two opposing elements through both habitable space and visual framing of the VATS, brewhouse, and dining, as the layers progress.
The Basin forms a set of imbalanced remnants that shift between preservation and dilapidation as the existing civic and environmental interfaces remain segregated and unchanged. The community’s reluctance to evolve the built form, alongside an emphasis on ecological conservation, forms an imbalanced relationship between the civic centre and it’s natural forces.
The project aims to amend the imbalanced interface between the compressed inventory of the region’s civic centre and the expansive plane of the ecological sector. A thread of transparent structures are interspersed across the region, linking the natural (preservation) with the civic (dilapidation) to form a reciprocal relationship between the remnants of the town and it’s natural forces without compromising the protection of the landscape.
The proposed interventions seek to introduce permeability to areas of solidity, transforming existing infrastructure toward an activated threshold between the civic and the environmental. Mediations seek to contribute to the ecological values of the town whilst encouraging community engagement and collaboration with the landscape.
These interventions aim to further establish a psychological connection to the environmental with those who have lost it due to the cyclical torment of natural crisis. A framework of relief, recovery, and reform hopes to mitigate these fears, allowing the permanence of the community to co-exist alongside the temporality of crisis.
Between Valley and Ruin
Basin Masters Studio, Major Project 2020
The existing buildings of the site remain predominantly exposed with the retaining walls providing levels of enclosure. Through the strategy of encasing, the existing site has been wrapped with a veil of water along the integration of retaining walls to allow for security and refuge within a site of predominant exposure. Within these existing buildings, the movement of water has been integrated and encased within the everyday spaces of the site to both guide and heal users, but further embody the site as means of purification through water collection and filtration to the site and Dobson’s Creek.
Once a building of hostility and enclosure, is transformed into a mediating device between the degradation of the site and it’s future prosper, as the building forms a vessel of purification. At lower ground level, to the west, what was once a towering wall, is now a calm body of entry as a courtyard of water spills from the building. When turning the corner, a thin envelope of the existing brick wall remains, as if entering the water when passing the chapel. The centre courtyard has been punctured to provide two levels where the lower acts as an extension of the ground plane above yet as planters for gardening as well as a space of retreat within the core of the building. The southern volume has been hollowed and encased for rainwater collection where re use and irrigation within the site takes place.
The existing northern retaining wall has been deepened and extended as an entry point to the basement level whilst a southern entry provides private entry for newcomers of the program. These retaining walls extend to the footprint beneath the building providing a sense of enclosure from the existing exposure of the site, where they wrap within a bathhouse purified from the building itself. The outer walls are embedded with water, leading to a central core where a field of spas reflects the courtyard above once more. Water filtration and treatment is evident through the slits of the walls, informing users of its importance to the site.
Once an underutilised workshop exposed to the agricultural field, and of most vulnerability is now an aquatic centre encased with layers of water, screen, and timber to protect from the exposure of fire, whilst maintaining privacy and lines of site with nature. The outer field has been retained to slow the uphill spread of fire as well as provide terraced outdoor seating by the flow of water.
The basement level has been hollowed once more, yet the frame of the roof remains as it extends downward creating a sense of enclosure to the exposure of the field. A lap pool extends as it is wrapped by a colonnade of timber, extending to an outdoor frame hosting a wetland garden and observation space for wetland treatment, applied to naturally decontaminate outwards and purify Dobson’s creek.
