Inhabiting fragile territories > a little story for a little house.Psaltis Stelios

Nature in its entirety, as a wider site of action, is seen both as an imaginary creation and at the same as an “other” and “strange” territory, upon which the material existence and life are depending. Following this bipo­lar interpretations, nature conceived either through its peculiar, bizarre and wild development, or through its vulnerable, delicate, fragile and gentle fertility. From this perspective the sublime, the mystical, the emotional, even the irrational, the experiential or the subconscious, and how these notions “filter” a natural interpreta­tion, are sought. Within this “manufactured” personal environment, the importance of architecture is evident in its participation as a means of emergence of a new relation between knowledge-technique and imagination-natural indeterminacy, raising challenges for possible ways of inhabitation within its cumbersome and even pathologically inevitable materiality. An architectural construction constitutes an organism, which performs a specific number of basic functions. An organic composition, a kind of an artificial parasite, sensitive to the dynamic changes of the surrounding territory, humbly adapted and “floating” with tenacity within a fragment of the earthly crust, mobilizing architectural elements to succeed to “survive”. As the moral architectural issues are surpassed by default, the architectural construction is treated as the main survival apparatus, “demoted” in its absolutely natural utilitarian role (that of survival instinct), complied with the brutality of the surround­ing territory’s survival instinct. Thus, the value of such an architectural “creature” lies in its ability to assimilate the dynamic mutations and processes of the surrounding territory, creating a new context of a heterotopian symbiosis (co-existence) and aiming to the mutual improvement within the territory in which it exists.
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