Socrates Stratis

Biography

Making explicit the political dimension of architecture and urban design has been my priority through teaching, research, curating and practice. Since 2006 I have been teaching several courses mainly urban design studio and theory and an elective course on the public role of architectural practice. The aim of the courses is how to encourage urbanity through a diversity of scales, to understand the actorial dimension of design and the associations between human and non-human actors. Since 2010 I have been the main advisor in students' diploma projects. Their objectives are to negotiate liminal conditions in urban environments, by encouraging new forms of coexistence. I am also the main advisor of two doctorate thesis which deal the first one with design as an open source of engagement and the second one with issues of planning in contested spaces, such as the city of Famagusta, Cyprus. Since 2000 I have been collaborating with AA&U For Architecture, Art and Urbanism of which I am a main founder. AA & U addresses mostly issues of publicness at urban-architectural scale, using projects as a vehicle for creating knowledge which is constantly feeding back the making of the projects themselves. The AA & U spatial practice is bound by an horizontal approach across architecture, urbanism and support structures which become the indices of performance for all projects. My involvement in Europan Europe in different ways (Europan 4 winner, Doctorate Research, Member of the Scientific Committee) has given me the possibility to compare a diversity of architectural and urban design practices across Europe

Research Interest

My research lies on establishing connections between teaching, research and practice in architecture and urbanism. Such hybrid structures of research/action could incorporate social and political issues in the sphere of architectural creativity. In this way there is an emphasis for architects to seek a new public role within a broader system of institutions dealing with contemporary urban environments. Through such methods of research/action, architecture could become on one hand a vehicle of revealing existing conditions between spatial and social /political contexts and on the other hand, an agent of initiatives for public engagement of individuals and institutions concerning urban issues. I study project based actions in cultural environments produced by relations between physical, temporal and pragmatic contexts. I use as vehicles for such studies the notions of "contested", of "agency", of "publicness", of "urbanity" and that of "translocal".