The symposium: Dimitra doesn’t want to move: aging in-place, localized communities and the adaptive re-use of traditional building typologies in villages in Northern Greece will be held on February 14th, 2023 and involves an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Canada, the US, Greece, Sweden and England, spanning disciplines of architecture, architectural history and theory, ethics, sociology, gender studies and journalism. The symposium is integrated with a design studio being taught collaboratively between three universities: The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada, and the University of Ioannina, Greece. The event will be held as a Zoom webinar and is free and open to the public.
The symposium is meant to provide a discursive foundation for a studio about Dimitra. Scholars will present on themes such as the sociology of aging, institutional long-term care facilities in a US context, the origin of the polykatoikia and antiparochi, gendered relationships to the polykatoikia interior, caretaking and gender, and architecture in relationship to communities, including a specific look at the self-built housing project Walter’s Way and Segal Close designed by Walter Segal.
Symposium presenters include:
Myrto Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, Linköping University, Sweden
Panos Dragonas, University of Patras, Greece
Laura Funk, University of Manitoba, Canada
Alice Grahame, journalist, England; author of Walters Way and Segal Close and Walter Segal: Selfbuilt Architect
Willa Granger, Florida Atlantic University, USA
Konstantinos Pantazis, EPFL, Switzerland; Point Supreme Architects, Greece
Ioanna Theocharopoulou, Cornell University, USA; author of Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens
Panel discussions will be moderated by Georg Rafailidis (State University of New York, USA; DAVIDSON RAFAILIDIS) and Nikos Patsavos (University of Ioannina, Greece).
The event is free and open to the public; please register here or by emailing dimitra.symposium@torontomu.ca.
The symposium is made possible by a Global Research Innovation Grant from Toronto Metropolitan University.
