Research

  • Athens Projects
  • GRANTEE
    Point Supreme:
    Konstantinos Pantazis &
    Marianna Rentzou
    GRANT YEAR
    2016

Point Supreme, Varvakeios Square, 2019. Courtesy the artists

Athens Projects is a series of proposals for the post-crisis city; against scarcity and limited economical resources, the projects are born from what is found and invent ways to repurpose it, revealing reality's hidden potential and proposing new ways of seeing. They argue that utopia doesn't need to refer to idealized non-existing cities but instead can refer to transforming our cities with optimism and imagination. In each proposal, the existing city is observed and recorded obsessively, making it the protagonist. Public space is turned back into a destination. The architecture is inclusive, ordinary, intentionally non-alluring—what matters is what happens around it. The city becomes a systematically exploited experimental field; the interrelated projects form a series and vary from radical to immediately realizable. They stimulate broad public awareness of architecture through images that feed the collective subconscious and produce a new, public, and critical imagination.

Konstantinos Pantazis founded Point Supreme with Marianna Rentzou in 2008 after studying architecture in Athens, and urbanism at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. He worked for offices such as Jun Aoki in Tokyo, OMA, and MVRDV in Rotterdam and 51N4E in Belgium. Point Supreme was included among the 20 most influential personalities in Greece by popular Greek newspaper LIFO. They regularly publish self-initiated projects for the city of Athens where they are based. Their work has appeared in Collage and Architecture, as well as Athens Projects, their first monograph, published as part of the Treatise Series (Graham Foundation, 2015). They currently teach at Columbia University in New York.

Marianna Rentzou founded Point Supreme with Konstantinos Pantazis in 2008 after studying in Athens, London, and Eindhoven, and working in Rotterdam (OMA, MVRDV). Point Supreme was included among the 20 most influential personalities in Greece by popular Greek newspaper LIFO. They regularly publish self-initiated projects for the city of Athens where they are based. Their work has appeared in Collage and Architecture, as well as Athens Projects, their first monograph, published as part of the Treatise Series (Graham Foundation, 2015). They currently teach at Columbia University in New York.