Colloquia
Aristotelis Dimitrakopoulos
Autobiographic Urbanities vs. Scalar Archetypes: domus as city; as labyrinth; as cosmos
Aristotelis Dimitrakopoulos (N.T.U.Athens ‘98, M.Arch. Yale '00) is an architect and urban designer, educator, design consultant, writer, and theoretician with multifaceted professional and academic experience in multiple countries and regions. He is a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Yale School of Architecture and a Trumbull College Resident Fellow. Dimitrakopoulos is also an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, University of Ioannina, Greece.
In ancient Hellenic literature, yet also etymologically, the polis is not defined as material substance but as living, transforming our perception of an urban physis. A composite of biographies, the alive urbs may be recognized as a bio-grapheme; transcribed autobiographically. In the ‘magical’ La casa de Asterión (the projected memoirs of a reformed Minotaur), author Jorge Louis Borges bridges the individual scales of spatial entities stereotypically perceived as autonomous—house, city, world—through notions of the Dedalian labyrinth—a realm of uncanny castigation, thus negating distinctions of size or further scalar processions. Adopting autobiography as a stochastic genre and insisting on the labyrinth’s premise, Aristotelis challenges illusory distinctions of quantification, simplistic analogies, and elemental binaries of smaller vs. bigger, while cases of scalar diffusion or permeation are examined in the work of artists, architects, writers, and thinkers (namely: Le Corbusier, Dalí, Magritte, Nietzsche, Malaparte, Tafuri, Scully). Questioning Alberti’s fundamental theorem—for the city as large house and that mansion as small city—a nascent theory of smallness is instead suggested.