Doma Summer School 2025

Overview

The week-long 2025 DOMa Summer School in Andritsaina studied “populist architecture” in the literal sense of the word – spaces that people love. The premise was that spaces that people love – whether they’re “designed” or not - hold power, and architects can learn from this power and these places. Students were asked to engage with village residents to ask them to describe and show us their favorite spaces in the village. Learned assumptions or principles about what is “nice” or “good” in architecture were suppressed.

Conversation and the desire to speak to each other is automatic and not specific to architecture – it’s a basic social mechanism. Students engaged with village residents with earnest, curiosity and generosity of spirit. In turn, residents of Andritsaina opened their doors to the students, invited them for coffee, gave them sweet treats, and shared both stories about the past as well as about their day-to-day lives in the mountain village.

The outcome is a series of photographs taken by students, showing spaces that village residents described as meaningful for some reason. Paired with each photograph is an extract from the conversations that the students had with the villagers. These pairings, made carefully and tutored over the course of the summer school, act as single-page excerpts from longer stories, stories in which spaces and landscapes act as much as subjects as the villagers themselves.

The approach to looking carefully without judgement and engaging socially with residents was supported by guest lectures given during the summer school by architectural photographer Florian Holzherr (Germany), architect and teacher Oleg Bilenchuk (Ukraine) and the artist group Idoine (France) who have pursued the conversation as an artistic medium for 10 years now.

The work was shared with the community at the end of the summer school, in the kitchen of the old pastry shop “Andritsanes” which had been closed for years, and required two days of cleaning by the entire summer school crew.

The body of work relates closely to the way that Davidson Rafailidis approaches architecture, first and always through observation, suppressing the itch to “do” or to change something, but rather studying existing conditions, spatial and social.

With the financial support and under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture