MArch Urban Design, Bartlett, UCL Diploma in Architecture, NTUA Athens
Professional practice: Prior and Partners
Aecom Urban Design Studio Wright and Wright architects
Guest Lecturer at University of Westminster Member of Academy of Urbanism
Odysseas Diakakis Dip. Arch, MArch, ARB
65 Finsbury Park Road, London N4 2JY
M: 07598398778 E: odydia@gmail.com ARB 086533H
Urban Designer and Architect with 10+ years experience in Masterplanning. I have been working in a range of projects, from public spaces to complex masterplans in the UK and abroad. I value creative, ambitious proposals and enjoy working in inspiring teams with positive attitude. In every stage of a project, I focus on the future users and their experience.
I had the chance to see Prior + Partners grow from a small start-up into one of the world’s leading masterplanning companies. Over the years, I’ve contributed to a number of major projects, including a Masterplan for Google in California, Euston Station Masterplan, Silvertown Quays, and Thamesmead Waterfront, working alongside talented colleagues, inspiring client teams and consultants.
Overall In my role, I develop design ideas and narratives, create presentations and documents, and foster collaboration with both internal teams and external consultants. Whether working on early-stage concepts or detailed design guidelines, my focus is on shaping people-friendly spaces for future users.
My key responsibilities include:
- Collaborating with the Project Director to define project scope and design direction.
- Overseeing the delivery of key documents, such as a Technical Proposal and a Concept Masterplan Report.
- Coordinating internal team workflows and assigning tasks.
- Managing communication and collaboration with external consultants.
- Creating storyboards, presentations, and mock-ups where the team can contribute.
- Reviewing design outputs and providing design direction.
Beyond project work, I actively contributed to the company’s growth by organizing studio events, facilitating project reviews, and leading monthly urban design meetings.
Aecom
Urban Designer 3/2015-6/2018 www.aecom.com
Within the Urban Design (UD) studio at Aecom, I contributed to several high-profile projects, including the Oxford Station Masterplan, North West Cambridge, and Expo 2020, where I was involved in both design and team coordination. Working in this multidisciplinary environment provided me with valuable experience in understanding the processes behind large-scale projects, including coordinating across multiple departments and specialists.
My work spanned various stages, from concept development to detailed design, and encompassed a wide range of scales, from regional planning to plot-level and architectural design. I was responsible for generating design ideas and conceptual strategies, supported by compelling presentation materials that included drawings, 3D models, collages, diagrams, and physical models.
Wright a Wright architects have an impressive portfolio of cultural and educational projects such as St John’s college in Oxford, Geffrye museum and Lambath Palace.
My responsibilities at Wright and Wright included:
Education
MArch Urban Design Bartlett, UCL - Merit 9/2012-9/2013
Thesis: Intervention in the tower blocks in Algiers
Suggesting a secondary network that works between the towers and the self-built areas mending the territory, creating the necessary infrastructure, connections and space qualities.
Tutors: Beth Hughes (OMA), DaeWha Kang (Zaha Hadid)
Diploma in Architecture NTUA, Athens - (Hons) 9/2002-9/2008
A five-year course in architecture covering a broad range of subjects, from history and theory to studio work in architecture, landscape and urban design subjects.
Thesis: Waterfront Redevelopment - Tutor: Prof. Vassilios Ganiatsas
Erasmus Exchange studies Faculty of Architecture, RomaTre 2004-2005
Relevant Activities
Westminster MA Urban Design program - Guest Lecturer
Over the past two years, I have actively engaged with Westminster’s Master’s program in Urban Design, preparing and delivering lectures, reviewing student work during end-of-term presentations, and providing one-on-one feedback during studio sessions.
Academy of Urbanism
As a representative of Prior + Partners, I have coordinated with the Young Urbanists, supporting their events and fostering internal engagement within our practice. I co-organized two successful events hosted at the Prior + Partners offices: “Post-Covid Lessons for Our Cities” and “The New Young Urbanist Agenda.” Both events encouraged active participation through workshop sessions and interactive discussions, creating a platform for insightful dialogue.
UCL Grand Challenges - First Prize
As part of a multidisciplinary UCL team of PhD and MA students, I contributed to a research project focusing on social disconnection in public spaces. The project explored how social connections could be choreographed through architectural gestures in non-places, leading to innovative ideas for enhancing public spaces.
Software Skills
Proficiency with: Rhino, Autocad, Adobe Suite, Google Workspace
Familiarity with: GIS, Grasshoper, Esri City Engine
Other Skills: hand drawing, model making
English: Fluent speaker, TOEFL ibt 103
Italian: Fluent speaker, IT-L2 Livello avanzato superiore
Languages References
Graham
Groymour Principal Prior+Partners
Juan Oyarbide Associate Director Prior+Partners
French: Intermediate (B2)
Greek: Fluent speaker (mother tongue)
(further contact details upon request)
Claire Wright Architect Former employer
Google Campus Masterplan
Masterplan lead: Prior + Partners
Landscape: West 8
Client: Google
2018 - ongoing
In 2018 Prior and Partners was commissioned to lead the master plan for the transformation of a significant Google owned land in Moffett Park, Sunnyvale (CA).
The disparity between the economic prosperity of the Tech companies in the South Bay area and the scarcity of both, quality affordable housing and active and vibrant urban centres, require a complex and exciting coordinated journey of land owners, companies, local authorities and many different professionals.
The briefing and vision exercise has been a long and fruitful exchange of ideas and expertise in order to identify “what kind of place”, what kind of mixed use community and place will thrive in Moffett Park. In alignment with the aspirations and objectives of the City of Sunnyvale, Ecology, Climate awareness and action have a foundational role on the vision of the new Specific Plan for Moffett Park and the Masterplan. Innovation is here an equally strong partner, as with world leading Tech companies on site operating as a catalyst, there are all the necessary component to foster innovation clusters that can bring educational institutions and attract other innovative partners to the area to continue the successful economic story of Moffett Park.
Thamesmead Waterfront
Bid proposal - last stage (second finalist)
AECOM with Morgan Sindall
Principal Director: Jonathan Rose
Our Strategic Vision and Placemaking proposals envisage a major new river-front Town Centre for Thamesmead and Southeast London, delivered phase by phase over the next 20+ years. Responding to Peabody’s key objectives, the Commissioning Brief and Preliminary Masterplan proposes:
• 36 Ha River-front Park; a new destination park for the whole of Thamesmead linking into extensive high quality public realm network including new Town Centre and Waterfront public spaces.
• 11,500-12,000 high quality new homes; including 35% affordable, 25% Build to Rent, 40% for sale, creating a new market for housing at Thamesmead, delivering on the key principle of affordability.
• Between 80-100,000 sqm of mixed Town Centre uses; organised within a new futurelooking High St, Lakeside and Park-side character areas. This includes a flexible mix of retail, café/bar restaurant, workplace, community and other amenity spaces.
• Making the very most of the Thamesmead Waterfront location and proposed new landscape and urban settings, a wide variety of new types of homes; including 35% for families around shared garden courts at various, appropriate densities.
new London riverfront park
Enhancing East London networks
and green paths in the Thamesmead
Life cycle and housing requirements
360º Connections
Canning Town
Woolwich Arsenal
Barking
Riverside
Abbey Wood
Thamesmead Waterfront
Euston Station Masterplan
A fine-grained highly connected city quarter, with great streets and spaces, ease and clarity of local movement on the surface, while leveraging Euston’s unique strategic public transport network;
The introduction of HS2 and the consequent redevelopment of Euston presents a unique opportunity to create a new mixed-use sustainable community, founded on learning and creativity. With one of the worlds bussiest transport interchanges at its heart, Euston will merge together education, research, creative, cultural, commercial, residential and civic activities to create a new kind of place, and more than just a place.
Over the coming decades Camden will emerge as one of the world’s most important centres of research and development. World class institutions clustered together with agile start-ups, powered by local businesses and leading firms in pursuit of the new economy. Enabled by a compelling, diverse urban environment that attracts and develops the best and the brightest.
The Euston development will exploit the hyper connectivity of the Euston station, and transport networks, capturing the energy of passing people and drawing and holding them in a new city quarter the equal to any in the capital.
The long development period will allow for the incubating and exploring of ideas and opportunities with local people as we jointly curate a new piece of city and a world class destination embedded in the wider Camden scene, vital and relevant to local people and newcomers alike.
Prior + Partners with Grimshaw and Urban
Principal: Graham Groymour
From barrier
To urban grid
Armenia Ethnographic District
AECOM - Urban Design, Landscape and Economics
Principal Urban Designer: Neha Tayal
The main objective of the project is to showcase Armenia’s architectural heritage in order encourage tourism in the country and bring forward ideas and interventions that have the potential to become catalysts in the creation of new destinations.
The vision for NOAH Ethnographic District is inspired from Armenia, its sky, mountains, landscape and architecture. The District will be a showcase of everyday life (culture and traditions) which we have symbolized with the sky, the mountains that form most of the terrain, the landscape and morphology of its existing and historic cities, and its architectural heritage. At the same time, the District is designed to be progressive and looking to future, with a flexible programme and contemporary intrepretations of architectural typologies.
NOAH Ethnographic District will be a country-wide destination for tourists and locals alike. The District is envisioned as a part/extension of the city of Yerevan with site edges planned with hotel and residential uses, whilst the interior is relatively more mix use and active. This strategy is designed to respond to city context, keep the more private uses to the edges with more active, public uses towards the middle, drawing people in.
Oxford Station SPD
A distinctive new gateway to Oxford
Project leaders: Graham Groymour, Anagha Potbhare Aecom departments of Urban Design, Planning and Transport
Opportunity for a holistic approach
The Oxford Station Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) is a significant opportunity to bring together development proposals for the station area with an overarching vision for creating a truly integrated transport hub which serves as a distinctive gateway to Oxford.
Oxford’s unique historic character attracts many more visitors than most towns or cities of comparable size. In this context, the proposed redevelopment of Oxford Station is a unique opportunity to provide an improved gateway to the City for visitors, the workforce and residents. Oxford Station and the Oxford Rail Corridor provide for interregional passenger connectivity through Oxfordshire, with Oxford being the main traffic destination. However, the station and its immediate surroundings do not currently provide visitors, commuters and local residents with an experience befitting Oxford’s reputation for excellence.
Oxford City Council (OCC) has commissioned a Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) to promote and guide the redevelopment of the station area in line with planning and design objectives established through the previous masterplanning exercise completed in July 2014.
Promoting walking and public transport
Transport Orientated Development locates development in close proximity to ‘transport hubs’ / transport corridors and in walking distance of amenities, services and employment which can in turn successfully justify reduced car parking provision at both origins and destinations.
To ensure these principle privale swithin the masterplan given that the complementary land uses are situated within the boundary of the station, the level of car parking for residential and employment uses is a major factor to ensure the ability to influence the use of modes of transport other than the private car is inherent in the design of the development. residents with an experience befitting Oxford’s reputation for excellence.
Station and Station Square East design principles
Corner development and station entrance design principles
Reducing local car dependency is of paramount importance. This should therefore be commensurate with the reduction of parking allocation for all land uses: residential areas as well as activity/leisure/ shopping centres and offices, importantly in tandem with well-planned and frequent public transport and high quality options for the regular use of active mode for both commuting and leisure.
The office, hotel and residential uses should be car-free development save for the provision of blue badge spaces where deemed required, to comply with the parking standards in the West End AAP. Due consideration should be given to operational and servicing access requirements of development for both the operational railway and commercial uses
Land use mix design principles
Public realm and amenity space design principles
North West Cambridge
AECOM - Urban Design, Landscape, Sustainability
Coordinating with group of architectural firms such as Alison Brooks, Meccano, and Stanton Williams.
Principal Urban Designer: Jonathan Rose
A new urban cluster
Occupying 150 hectares of university-owned greenbelt land, the new urban district and extension to the city is centred on a mixed academic and urban community. It will be a place that is sustainable and long-lasting, and that will enhance the city and the university. It will accommodate the growth needs of the university, enabling it to attract and retain staff, and provide vital accommodation.
Along with 1,500 homes for its key workers, accommodation for 2,000 postgraduate students, 1,500 homes for sale and 100,000 square metres of research facilities, plans also include a local centre with a primary school, community centre, health centre, supermarket, hotel and shops. There are also parklands, playing fields, sustainable transportation and an extensive cycle network. The scheme has attracted a raft of wellrespected architects with proposals from Mecanoo and MUMA, among others, now entering the planning phase.
The design and planning team developed a scheme that reflects the collegiate urbanism that is Cambridge’s trademark. This new scheme is rooted in and reflects the city’s urban character and qualities, its layout, streetscape and green spaces.
Ridgeway Development
As part of the Phase II of the project our team developed a number of detail design studies starting from masterplanning to detail unit plans - which meet very specific requirements. Working in multiple scales - and keeping a high level of precision while maintaining conceptual massing and streetscape principles - was one of the projects’ design challenges.
Our team developed a number of housing typologies responding to the reviewed housing needs of the University. Single and double aspect units, walk-ups units and townhouses are placed strategically across the plots formulating shared courtyards.
Ridgeway Courts neighbourhood - Housing Development Parcels
Olympicopolis
Competition entry
AECOM - Urban Design, Architecture and Landscape
Coordinating with group of architectural firms such as Heatherwick Studios, Alison Brooks Architects, Haworth Tompkins and Stanton Williams. Principal Urban Designer: Jonathan Rose
A new culture and education quarter Olympicopolis will provide an exciting new destination on Stratford Waterfront at the gateway to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It will showcase London at its cultural best, bringing together outstanding organisations with exceptional programmes in the performing arts, fashion, visual arts, craft, science, technology and cutting edge design.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, Sadler’s Wells and University of the Arts London are partners in this new development. University College London is also a key partner in the wider Olympicopolis scheme and will be building a major new campus adjacent to the Stratford Waterfront site, allowing for unparalleled collaboration in education, training and research.
The two-stage competition, which is supported by competition specialists Malcolm Reading Consultants, was launched in September 2014 with interest registered by some 1,000 architects, master planners, engineers and landscape designers from around the world.
Jamsil regeneration
Competition Entry, supported by Aecom UD
Working team: Young Joon, Iulia Fratila, Stef Sebald
Client: City Council of Seoul
City, Infused
Traditional Korean architecture embraces and opens up to the surrounding landscape, helping to create a strong visual and psychological connection to nature. As one of the most fundamental spatial and cultural concepts, this Master Plan strives to create and enhance this condition throughout the urban fabric, architecture, and landscape. The regeneration of Jamsil is a unique opportunity to redevise this architectural concept on a larger scale with the aim to reconnect the area with the existing and newly established environment. Based on this overarching concept, four design principles address the problems facing the existing site.
Infusing Public Access
Currently used as a parking lot with poor connectivity to its immediate surroundings, the existing boundaries to the neighbouring districts wίll be perforated with pedestrian and cycle paths. Six pedestrian bridges across the Tancheon and a ferry connection across the Han encourage integration into the immediate context and invites visitors to enter the site.
Infusing Program
Α wide variety of new cultural, sports, commercial, and recreational activities are introduced onto the site and mixed strategically. This creates a pattern in deliberate contrast to Seoul’s typicalland use lay-out. Pairing of complementary functions creates dynamic and symbiotic relationships that encourage 24 hour, 365 days a year usage and provides for a wide range of user groups.
UCL Behavior Change Challenge
UCL Grand Challenges
Project led by Dr Claire McAndrew and Dr Sonali Wayal (, in collaboration with Dr Anna Mavrogianni and six postgraduate students: Nikhilesh Sinha, Odysseas Dlakakis, Emilie Glazer, Manu Savani, Keith O’Brien and Sarah O’Farrell.
Awarded the UCL Grand Challenge of Human Wellbeing: Behaviour Change Month Research Prize 2013, this research project sought to explore how social connections could be choreographed through a refashioning of the architectural gestures of nonplace through the examination of the potential of design interventions in urban spaces to enhance social connectedness, create a sense of wellbeing and change the way people connect with the space and with others in it. The project takes Marc Augé’s (1995) notion of non-place as its starting point.
This assumes that highly transient spaces produced by supermodernity and used only for their functionality, deny the opportunity to create relational, historical or personal identities. The negative effects of ensuing social disconnectedness are striking, with loneliness and social isolation known to predict a number of physiological and psychological conditions. Drawing from principles of behaviour science and design research, strategies for enhancing social connections in urban spaces were identified. Our group was consisted of nine UCL member with different backgrounds: Masters students and Phds from faculties of Architecture, Medicine, Anthropology, Perceptual and Brain Sciences and School of Public Policy.
A design call that embodied these strategies was developed and the commission awarded through a competitive process to Ivana Petrusevski and Deyan Nenov for the design concept sPins. Euston Square Gardens in close proximity to Euston station in London provided a case study for this field experimentation.
Choreographing Architectural Gestures in Urban Space
Inspired by the natural instinct of brushing long grass, sPins translate the gesture of touch into an interactive architectural performance.
19 – 20 October 2013 10:00 to 20:00
EUSTON SQUARE GARDENS
Designed by Ivana Petrusevski and Deyan Nenov (MSc AAC, The Bartlett, UCL) commissioned through the UCL Grand Challenges funded project Social (Re)Connection.
Hammersmith Town Centre
Project Phase: competition
AECOM - Urban Design and Planning
Principal Urban Designer: Graham
Groymour, Neha Tayal
A masterplan should be grounded in the unique character of a ‘place’. Every place is different with its own context, constraints and opportunities. A study of the workings of Hammersmith Town centre, detail constraints and opportunities with regards to transport, public realm, townscape character, mix of uses, uilding form, local economy, local assets and the community that lives, works and recreates here will help ‘shape’ the town centre masterplan.
Hammersmith’s close proximity to the Riverfront and conservation zones such as the Barnes centre visible across the river makes it even more unique. However, the existing road infrastructure around the Town Centre currently creates an environment that is - in places, hostile to pedestrians and separates the centre from its residential hinterland. This commission offers the opportunity to define how this might be best overcome, building on work carried out by Fly-under feasibility study.
Hammersmith’s connectivity is currently constrained particularly by the A4 Flyover and the gyratory system around the bus station. Hammersmith is a major interchange and termination point for London buses. Hammersmith Broadway, situated at the heart of the Town Centre, is an island site surrounded by roads in all directions.
Thesis Project
Algiers: Intervention in the tower blocks
Studio Tutors: DaeWha Kang and Beth Hughes
The lack of planning and the ad-hoc implementation of large-scale housing projects, has created the fragmented urban territory that is Algiers today. The ever expanding and under connected urban and suburban periphery is underserviced and still completely dependent on the city centre for jobs and facilities.
To meet the ever increasing housing demand the government has turned to China to implement vast quantities of housing quickly – the solution is a series of repetitive residential tower blocks with no facilities, concern for the urban environment, street condition or quality of life. The lack of housing has also created vast self-built neighbourhoods that operate without adequate infrastructure or connection.
Each cluster has two conditions: the external perimeter that refers to the broader city, larger scale commerce and companies, and the interior that supports local artisanal production.
Geffrye Museum Masterplan
The Geffrye Museum, built exactly 300 years ago and converted to a museum 100 years ago, has the extraordinary quality of a building which has repeatedly undergone reinvention. The resonance of its original fabric is retained, with subsequent layers enriching this wonderful museum, creating a rich heritage experience. The museum of the home is in an aptly domestic building, which itself is in an entrancing setting.
It was not ever thus. The interiors of the buildings are much altered from the tiny rooms of the almshouses. The surrounding Victorian streetscape has been swept away, replaced by lovely gardens, with only the derelict Marquis of Lansdowne pub as a memory of Victorian times, sitting alone on the edge of the museum’s site which it overlooks.
It is hardly surprising that the museum is so popular, especially with its extraordinary award-winning learning programmes, tailored to meet a very wide audience that includes the most isolated in the local community, such as vulnerable older people and hard-to-reach audiences eg. Asian women’s groups. However, all this has reached a critical moment: the museum desperately needs much better, less congested facilities, which are fully accessible.
Wright and Wright architects Principal architect: Clare Wright Design Team: Malcolm Reading, ABA associates, Max Fordham.
Ecological Park
2011-2012
Project architect: Agnes Couvela
Our design follows a dilatory strategy. Specific arrangements and forms cause an intentionally delayed presentation (dilation) of expanding space to the visitor, leading to an extension of the stopover time. Dedicated to park services, four small buildings house the community office, the kitchen and the sanitary and storage facilities. Their interrupted facade provides a strong visual presence of the park on the main street. Passersby, though, become conscious of the green core through the voids between the buildings, thus heightening their anticipation. Composed of single cubic volumes, these solid “urban boxes” are firmly rooted in the flat land, their roofs ending to similar heights. Their physical appearance reflects the landforms of the nearby Hymettus hill through the use
of low relief curved stripes of three different plaster finishes. Textures and colors recreate the forms of the stratigraphical waves of the cliff section, enabling the structures to stand unobtrusively before the hilly backdrop in view at a distance beyond the park. An overhang shade structure extends above and beyond the built zone. This pergola of metal rods and thin wooden beams unifies the four volumes and amplifies their sculptural appearance. By providing shelter, it both reduces solar heat gain and encourages outdoor seating. Strictly rectangular, it contrasts against the organic geometry of the open-air park arrangements. The strong wood expression acquires a dramatic presence at night as light shines through its breached surface.
Public Square in Athens
2011-2012
Architect: Agnes Couvela
Architect’s assistants: Odysseas Diakakis, Nikos Agoropoulos, Sofia Papadopoulou
In this project the plot was situated in an undeveloped urban block, designated to be a public square, along with the existing church of the Holy Trinity.
A solid base paved with marble creates a courtyard for the ceremonies, while a ramp leads to a lower level closer to nature. A shallow pond serves as a symbol of spirituality and precondition of life. On the other side, a small trail with bushes, recalls the mountain of Imitos, located close to the site. These spaces provide the necessary environments for the functions related both with the church and a public square. A mediation through ramps for pedestrians, suggests a smooth transition between the two levels.
