Xanthi, Greece

29 March - 3 April, 2025

The spirit of material: Building sustainability

An internation student workshop on sustainable design, "From Sustainable Design to Circular Economy and Talking Buildings", bringing together students from three architecture/design schools in Israel, Cyprus, and Greece. SINCERE will participate in the workshop by introducing the Talking-Building methodology, which will be applied as a complementary tool in all working groups.

Workshop description

The workshop focuses on assembly, disassembly, and deconstruction of buildings. How the materials of a building - historic or industrial - that may be renovated or restored for new uses and energy upgrade, or may be demolished for urban renewal, become the raw material for the design of new construction, new structures, a pavilion, an installation, a seating area in the public space, or other ideas that may evolve during the workshop.

The workshop focuses on the Tobacco factory EOK in Kavala, a deserted 1950s exceptional modernist building that has been designated for protection and restoration. As a point of departure we will focus on this building as a 'materials bank'. As a source of urban mining and circular design. The building parts, doors, windows, machinery, bricks from the historic section of the factory, etc. will be the basis for new design proposals, which will be developed by the student teams in the workshop, and which will be presented in drawings and scale models.

During the workshop, we will visit this and other historic buildings in Kavala, Xanthi, and Komotini. We will visit the Municipal Center for the reuse of bulk waste in Kavala, to learn how in practice these processes are managed and successfully handled by a Municipality. Finally, we will attend free-hand sketching sessions to learn to identify the potential for reuse of existing materials, before a building is restored, renovated, upgraded or demolished.

The workshop will introduce the "Talking-Building" game as a methodology for analysing the needs and potentials of buildings, developed in the EU Horizon program SINCERE. For example, we will explore provocative questions posed by architect Louis I. Kahn, such as "What does a brick want to be?", and will expand on the concept of how a material can become the source of inspiration for new design and new structures.

The Talking-Building game

The main assumption behind the SINCERE's Building-Stories platform and the Talking-Building game is that the process of giving a voice to buildings can reveal important aspects of their condition and potential future. It produces also very playful and inspiring outcomes that can attract attention and stimulate creative engagement.

The Building-Stories platform will be soon launched and it will collect stories from cultural heritage buildings across Europe, documented in simple web blog sites maintained by local actors. Every post will correspond to a "speech act" by the building and we believe that it is best if these speech acts are produced by groups of people in a participatory setting.

This is the role of the "Talking-Building" game, which invites participants to 1) Observe carefully a building through all their senses, 2) Choose a specific part of this building, and 3) Narrate a story through its own perspective.

We will experiment with different observation prompts, framing scales, and storytelling mediums, and discover all together what the building and its small or big parts have to say about the past, the present, and the future.