Alexis Piponides

Alexis Piponides

‘They say that wanting to be an Architect is innate; it chooses you. Having always been a wanderer, an explorer of my surroundings, the world around me has opened up with a new sense of purpose and meaning through recording and sketch.’

This was my thought process before I started my degree, and now near to the end of my part one bachelors, I can not only sketch and absorb my surroundings, I now have the skill set to bring my sketches into life and developing a set of projects that have a sympathetic understanding of the built environment, its cultural and social sensitivity and my pure emphasis of simple and sustainable design.
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The Balloch musical retreat project takes on a sustainable approach towards designing two new facilities: the residential retreat and a public performance hall stretching along the River Leven. Strategies in my design such as architectural amphitheaters along the banks of the river, elevated pathways, and integrated walls leading to ‘secret gardens’ pose a heightened sense of curiosity, wonder, and nostalgia for my target audience; youths from Sistema Scotland. Together the two spaces form a new language voicing a safe haven and are set to inspire creativity, performance, and foster social interaction within its custom environment.

‘between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only, vague and ephemeral deformations of the corporeal space, but the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world.’
Merleau-Ponty, M (1968)

Mackintosh School of Architecture
BArch, 2020
Stage 3