Stavros Tselemegos

A B O U T - Biography

Facts and background

  I was born in Greece, more than half century ago, in a house by the sea near Patras in the Peloponnese. I lived the first five years of my life in this house, accompanied by the sound of the waves splashing on the beach. After these years, I lived most of my childhood and adolescence in the city of Patras (a gray provincial town in my memories), except few years in Pireus and Athens. I made the obligatory scholarship and finished lyceum in Patras. During my adolescence I was a very unquiet spirit, devoted to both artistic and scientific studies, concerned deeply to both spiritual and materialistic meaning of life. This dualism accompanied me always and until now is part of my way of living my creativity and my life.
  At the age of nineteen, after having finished lyceum, I was admitted to the Polytechnic University in Athens, but dictatorship, as well the general decadence of greek society and cultural life at the time, pushed me to leave Greece and go in Italy, Florence, in order to have a different life from one part, and more open and complete studies from the other part. It was the right choice in that moment, because permitted me to open more my mind and be creative either with my studies, either with my life.

The choices

  My first choice as an adolescent leaded me to meet with a new cultural and material life in Florence, but also made me meet in that time with all the revolted society of the western world in the 70's, that Greece was far from percieving, closed in the chained barriers of a dictatorship. My studies in the Architectural faculty of Florence University were much more free as a course than can happen today. I was studying architecture in very different ways: an extreemly artistic vision from one part, a very scientific and historical vision from another part, a completely humanistic and functional to human needs analysis from a third part, as well as a completely materialistic analysis over economical predomination on nature, environment and architecture in the modern world. All this gave me a particular background and a way of considering architcture not as an Utopia, nor simply as an atistic illusion, neither as a part of the construction industry: for me architecure is the art of realizing a human shelter, is the creative process of forming human spaces in nature, altering nature's configuration with respect to nature itself (humans are part of the nature), following the ancient (lost today) human knowledge about ecological balance between human activity and nature itself.
  After finishing Architectural faculty of Florence University I decided to continue with a master on monuments' restoration in Univrsity of Rome, in order to get more information ad analysis on how humans were building in ancient times. I finished the studies, but never got the diploma ... my target was completed without it and I couldn't efford the financial cost for the diploma anymore.
  At this moment I decided to return in Greece (Athens) to live. I was missing the sun and the nature of Greece since too long allready. In the beggining I stayed in Athens and I got involved in pubblishing sector, creating a magazine (with art and comics) and other editions, because I didn't want to be involved in the construction industry. Soon I was frustrated from modern metropolitan greek society of Athens (as well from personal events), so I tried to find some exit in France (Paris) and Spain, where I passed a couple of years without having found finaly a suitable place to live being creative and (relatively) free. So Greece seamed to be the only alternative. It was not Athens that gained me though. Going arround the islands I discovered Leros, an island where i could feel confortable and in the same time with oportunities for my Creativity and my Life.

Island as a choice for Creativity and for Livivng

  It was a coincidence that brought me to this island, and from the first visit i felt "home". This permited me to have a gradual adaptation and an as possible objective vision on what the place could offer me. And substantialy this island could offer me Quality of Living on one hand and untrammeled Creativity on the other. This particular small community could give me more simple and uncomplicated human relations, as well as close contact with the sea and the nature on one hand, while on the other hand was much unformal and uncomplicated, far from mental and intellectual sclerosis and taboos that put prerequisites, obstacles and brakes to creativity in modern metropolitan societies. Not that negative aspects do not exist, but the overall balance for me has been extreemly positive.

Architecture in an island as part of a discussion over Architecture as a human Art

  All the above gave me the oportunity to carry out my own personal research and experimentation on architecture, which in most of the cases not only was succefull, but gave also significant results. I am talking here about architecture as a human art and not as an industrial process, as a process of the human activity inside nature and not as violation and rape of nature. Architecture as a music inside nature (as "frozen music" using Goethe's words), as a playfull organisation of human spaces (or shelters) that don't alter nature but have a complementing function, architecture as an intervention on nature's configuration without any subversion of it's balance, without interruption of earth's magnetical stream and primordial vibration, without the arrogant pretention of modern society to overcome nature itself creating buildings like exact replicas of human arrogance. This kind of activity I would never be able to have it in a metropolis or a big city!
  In the begginig I was working learning. I was studying all details of the old constructed environement trying to find the cardinal points of difference and apply them in the small projects of simple houses for particulars that I was designing. This permited me, when the opportnity for a more substantial and important project arised, to be ready for the qualitative step.
  And the qualitative step came when a client with similar ideas as mine accepted the challange to build a modern house using the old traditional way of building, implemented with some of today's technological achievements and amenities. This construction was a big lesson for me, as well as a big lesson for the people that worked with me. I found the only crew on the island that had the experience of building stone houses in the traditional way, like in the past. They were aged and they had learned this mettier from generation to generation. I was giving instructions and with a big surprise I noticed that they were building in the same exact technology that I had studied years ago concerning the ancient monuments ... a millenaire knowledge was apearing in front of my eyes like in a travel "back to the future"! And from them (the crew) I recieved the first most significant compliment in my professional life: After finished the construction, making the point on everything, the master builder told me that from the beggining in the crew they were moking of me for my crazy ideas and my obsession on constructions that they themselves were considering outdated, but now they "understood" and that they are happy, because they arrived to use their original mettier as an art and together with me create something bigger than they could imagine. Since then I realized several projects, more or less succesfully, but this experience determined my relationship with architecture: definitely "big" architecture with utopic design and ostentatious forms are not my cup of tea. My architecture is an architecture with simple function and still complicated realisation, a colourfull and playfull creation of natural forms, a poetic extention of nature, a musical intervention on natural environement, a timeless creation of the self-mastering humans, a temple of human divinity.

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A B O U T - My Specialisations