Selected works Alygizou Niki Xenia

Selected works

Alygizou Niki-Xenia

Niki - Xenia Alygizou I am a current architecture student of National Technical University of Athens [N.T.U.A], working on the final diploma project, based on networked virtual places among divided cites. I originate from Crete and Cyprus, currently based in Athens, where I study. My so far projects (small, medium, large) include either residential or urban structures, although my personal interest focuses on urban interventions for eliminating every kind of social gap.

CV

Personal Details Nationality: Greek, Cypriot Location: Athens, Greece

Education 2008 to present: National Technical University of Athens (currently working on diploma degree)

Seminars and exhibitions January 2015: TEDx Athens, Chain Reactions Exhibition at Fouskopolis Festival at Limassol,Cyprus where the project of Un Buffer Zone was presented Language Skills

March 2015: Competition | Astronomy Center Redsand by re-thinking

Mother Language: Greek Foreign Languages: English | level C2 (certificated by University of Michigan University of Central Lancashire and National Certificate Language)

Summer 2014: Workshop | Visiting School of Architectural Association of London: UN Buffer Zone, Kato Pyrgos, Cyprus

Spanish | Intermediate level German | Basic knowledge

Participations

November 2014: Workshop | New Babylon Revisited ‘‘Octp-apps’’, Participative installation with Telekommunisten and Errands Awards and Honors Summer 2013: 2nd Honorable Mention Competition | ‘‘Innovative ideas and concepts for sustainable City of Athens” of Employment and Career Structure of NTUA

Manual Skills Sketching, Model Building, Technical Drawing Design Software Skills Expertise: Autocad, Rhino 3d, Grasshopper, V-ray, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustartor, Adobe InDesign, Sketchup

Work Experience

Intermediate: Arduino, Corel, PremierePro

May 2014: Volunteering for Open House Athens

Basic: Firefly

February 2014: Study on the renovation and design of the Folk Museum ΛΜΚ in Argos, Greece (associate architects: ARCOKAT, A. Chrisimou, E. Tricha), that has been approved and will be funded by the program LEADER

Interests/ Activities

February 2012: Practise for NTUA in Systematic Analysis of Vernacular Buildings and Settlements in Mani, Peloponnese, Greece

Photography, Graphic Design, Volunteering, Athletics Master Degree Thesis Seeking for the virtual flaneur, About effect and space in the emerging environment

The project titled Selected Works from the creator Alygizou Niki-Xenia is licensed Creative Commons Attribution Creator-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International.

Contents

P01

Details Project title: New Athens City Museum Reconstruction of Kaniggos Square Project team: Alygizou Niki-Xenia Arbara Sophia Bantouna Daphne Alygizou Niki-Xenia Polychronaki Eleni Location: City of Athens, Greece Date: Year of 2012-2013 Notes: Project 7 | 8 School of Architecture at NTUA

Movement | Graphic representation

Basement

Ground floor

1st

2nd

4th

3rd

Processing | Different usages

Offices Auditorium Restaurant Temporary Exhibitions Reception - Gift Shop Permanent Exhibitions Vertical Movement 3 square connection

Polycarb Semi -Transparent

This project constitutes a proposal for the new city museum of Athens, opposite to the existing city museum. It is placed in the outskirts of the historical center of the city in the ending in one of the biggest squares.

Certainly, the specific square is the ending of a triple combination of squares with a visible axis towards the historical centre.

Intention of this project is to reinforce the role of the square by making a new path into the town, amplifying the wandering.

The created path consists of two more additional squares, inside the given site, and a reconstruction of the central one.

The museum program, is based on the conservation and display of the ancient wall that passes through the site. Main are the exhibition halls (both permanent and temporary) and the auditorium.

All the above follow a single organizing principle with the only element to be differentiated, the auditorium, which has the form of a cube standing above the ancient wall. The created spaces communicate each other vertically while their relation with the external environment is defined by the semi-transparent facade material, called polycarb. This allows the view of the surrounding buildings, creating the same time a pleasant luminous atmosphere inside.

The vertical movements are facilitated by a rigid core, at the upper border. Pertain to the reconstruction of the central square, is based on the diffusion of the flows from the other central squares towards the historical centre. Simultaneously, a main area is created in front of the existing and the new museum, forming the entrance of the museums.

Section

Ground Plan Museum and Square

P02

Details Project title: Athens | The new sea entrance of the city Project team: Alygizou Niki-Xenia Chiou Maria ChryWsimou Aggeliki Location: City of Athens, Greece Date: Year of 2013-2014 Notes: Project 9 School of Architecture at NTUA

urban virus

This project represents an intervention in the new site of National Library, New Opera and park designed by Renzo Piano.

The intervention refers to the elaboration, designing and remodeling of built and unbuilt space, the formation of residential blocks and the urban reconstruction.

The proposal is based on an arising form, using a folding logic. The result of this process is used to create an urban element, a continuous canopy, spread along the north part of the site, triggered by a virus logic. The form interacts with the created blocks and contributes to the delineating of a path along the public Ground Plan

and private places of the residential area.

The design of the canopy is made by superimposed triangles either perforated or not, creating a uniform surface. It can be extended or reduced depending on the needs of residents and it is either hanged from the buildings or based on some thin metal columns. Regarding the facades in front of the park, the north facade using its single skin, functions as a background for the public space of the park and the

Processing | Block vs Canopy

Top Plan

canopy addition. On the left side of the park, the proposal constitutes a linearized facade, self-comported, which is deposited above the city without affecting its active part.

Canopy Types

3d model

P03

Details Project title: Net Lotus Project team: Alygizou Niki-Xenia Charalambous Lefki Hadjikosti Yianna Kyriakou Marinos Location: Kato Pyrgos, Cyprus Date: Summer of 2014 Notes: AA Visiting School

net lotus

The mass population movement in Cyprus, as a result of the Turkish invasion at 1974, happened exclusively on land. But the Kokkina enclave on the north-west coast of Cyprus speaks of a different story. Turkish Cypriots could only, until recently, travel to and from the enclave only by the sea. The concept of escape by water is investigated in that particular project,by looking into situations where water is the only safe passage away from a conflict zone, a passage that it can be crossed efficiently, quickly via the assistance of the UN. The floating assembly components are plastic pipes, a net fabric and some inflatable plastic balls. These elements are attached by plastic joints, made by the same pipe structure. The next assemblage stage is based on a logic of a simple procedure. For better balance more polycabric iflatables are used in a circular array. A mechanism of water bottles allow the whole structure to float safely and pulled back to the coast. Each module has two to three person capacity and before being assemblage can be used as a structure for beach umbrellas. Steps of assemblage: 1. The structure is cited permanently on the beach, as a horizontal element. All the components are buried into the sand and have to be dug up.

2. The refugees start to open the pipe structure and putting the joints in the seamed points. A circle element helps them to have a more stable structure.

3. The net fabric is attached as long as six pocket units that contain the inflatable balls.

Also the linear inflatables are attached.

4. The floating structure is hauled into the sea by the one refugee when the other is into the structure.

5. The mechanism of water bottles semifilled with sand invert the structure and help it balance. The second refugee inserts into the structure.

3 4 5

2

1

P04

Details Project title: Geas to bound Project team: Alygizou Niki-Xenia Badouna Daphni Chrysimou Aggeliki Vergou Nikoletta Location: City of Athens, Greece Date: Year of 2013-2014 Notes: Special Topics in Building Technology School of Architecture at NTUA

gears to bound

The project aims in defining a kinetic interactive structure, affected by external factors such as movement, light, sound.

The achievement of the above purpose is done through processing methods and sensorial mechanisms. It is based on an open source basis that gives more importance to the programming method instead of the used object. The Hoberman sphere was chosen, a spherical object with flexible structure and a great scale variety. The peripheral structure is made after research that allows the sphere to open and close. It contains curved opening pieces by plexiglass and a basic gear that powers by a motor. Concerning the algorithmic modeling, it was achieved by grasshopper, rhino plug-in, and arduino, open-source electronics platform, based on easy-to-use hardware and software.

The interaction with the structure is done through a sensor that captures the movement. So, if the observer starts to walk towards the structure the sphere begins to open and if he fends off it begins to close.

For more details follow the link : https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uxZ1vyRq_JE

P05

Details Project title: Seeking for the virtual flaneur, About effect and space in the emerging environment Project team: Alygizou Niki-Xenia Arbara Sophia

The digital information revolution of recent decades has set new standards both in the way we perceive our environment and in the way we operate in the modernist – postmodernist societies.

During the coming up of the global network, few could have imagined that it will be an invention that would change the working environment and the economic activity, our daily habits, the transportation and the form of modern cities and make us rethink fundamental concepts such as time and space, changes that will affect the future societies in a greater way than the earlier industrial revolution. The position of modern citizen is redefined in the newly material and immaterial space and he is asked to cope directly with these changes. Indeed, modern urbanity is no longer defined by the closely confines of place and its human subject is not simply identified by the spatial - physical limits of the community. As members of the global community, we have managed to go from “here” to “there”, [dasein] , being both here and everywhere, unbundled from the necessity of geographical conditions. Furthermore, the notion of temporality is analyzed by new terms, as it is no longer understood as a single condition, but instead, there are many types of temporality and duration. We have made a shift from the real [real], the potential [virtual], wandering somewhere between these two conditions. This new era is accompanied by the concepts that define it, concepts such as digital, cyberspace and the virtual, which we will analyze in this thesis in order to explain the place, the time and the role of the subject in the new environment.

This paper attempts an approximate delineation of transformational scene, initially explaining the new digital space, and meanings that refer to the aspects of reality, aiming to clarify the situations of the actual and the virtual. Our main focus is the analysis of the subject on this area, both as a unit and as community, to investigate its identity and its establishment as a structural factor in the formation of spatial, temporal and social conditions.

As a part of this investigation we borrow a term already known from poetry and then the psychogeography, that of wanderer [Flaneur in French terminology].

Date: Year of 2014-2015

Flanuer is a literary genre of the 19th century in France after accompanied by different interpretations, as the man of leisure, urban explorer, the knower of the road. Walter Benjamin, influenced by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, was the one who gave scientific interest in this terminology turning the wanderer into an iconic archetype of urban contemporary experience. According to Benjamin, flaneur contributed to the reestablishment of metropolitan experience mainly as an expert of the ‘‘thresholds’’, these intermediate spaces, where the wanderer oscillates in a dreamlike dimension of modern subjectivity. Then he has been an important symbol for artists, writers and scientists. After the introduce of the concept of psychogeography by French theoretical and writer Guy Debord in 1955, is mainly used to describe the modern urban wanderer who is the basic instrument, as he is free to monitor situations and not be bounded by the habit or the past.

Notes: Thesis Project

Although the use of terminology, flaneur has been combined with urban wandering, here the term contains the subject of the emerging environment of contemporary urban reality. Underlying

Location: City of Athens, Greece

this, he is the restless part of the new space, released in any given spatial constant and related to the flow of information of the created system. Therefore, the flaneur, loses its poetic nature and is adopted as the constantly throbbing subject between structured and digital space. It is the key to this work and a special figure for the space being constructed.

Similar to the wanderer of Benjamin and Debore, the flaneur, it is not influenced by the feasibility of his walking, but by experiencing the environment and be active in the domination of multiple images. And here appears - more than ever - released from any spatially constant, detached, concerned and transformable.

In thresholds of this wanderer the intermediate spaces transship between virtual and actual spaces, natural or not, which the new subject is invited to discover and explore in a tour that no longer considered as a need, but as a way of life.

In this method of research we analyze the structure and expansion of the digital world, explaining the domination of the world wide web, and the ,nowdays, transformation of our existence into a constantly need for an on-line connection. This tranformaion has not only changed the way of living but the way we act in our society, giving shape of utopic theories that refer to the metapolis and its future, where the key point of its development, except for natural features, is the software and the immediate response network or specific network - Internet [web 2.0]. The new urbanizations in many cases exhibit biomorphic characteristic and outline an environment verging on hyperreality.

In the post metapolis, where human communities are not only formed by geographical criteria, the cyberflaneur appears as the explorer of sites. The cyberflaneur transforms into the modern nomad and explores places without following a predetermined path, and charts the adventures of his own, unique path. Only here, except that the city has spilled beyond even the physical boundaries, the appropriation is not possible since even on the physical space, the wanderer - nomad, does not return or reside on the same place, as if in a different time there is no longer the same place.

The new subject, characterized by a continuous re-discovery of its self, has a need for constant change, and an admiration for the virtual. In digital space, biological and social status is lost, the user interacts online only mentally, as the natural movement in order to perform specific functions, is no longer a necessary condition. Habitation acquires new meaning - less related to the deposition of the body in material space and more by connecting the nervous system to digital devices.

But even in terms of the virtual space, a redifiniton of “spaces” and “selfs” is possible, since the cyberflaneur can be“browsed” at the same time in different “places” and have multiple identities.

Indeed, the dispersal of the subject into synthetic identities is another feature of the virtual world where the same time can create as many online identities he wants. The wanderer of cyberspace can create even his iconic representation through a mediated representation of the self.

The end