Divercity Architects

The architectural team Divercity (Nikolas and Dimitris Travasaros, Christina Achtypi), based in London and Athens, has within fifteen years grown into an international practice with a strong Greek character, undertaking highly demanding building projects around the world. Despite their accumulated experience, Divercity maintain the same curiosity about the phenomena of contemporary life in the built environment as if they were encountering each project for the first time. Perhaps the secret of their perspective on the world is exactly that: each new challenge is nourished by their initial foundations. We spoke with the firm’s founder, Nikolas Travasaros, about this unique team, which is continually enriched with new faces and new projects in new locations.

SM: How did the practice begin and where is it today? What are the roles of the different partners within it?

NT: The name Divercity was to a large extent coincidental, like many beautiful things in our lives. At our beginning, in 2005, we found ourselves in a time of transition: while previous generations were used to working in an environment with more rigid boundaries, suddenly more and more large and small projects were being carried out in Greece by architects from abroad. Beyond the outward-looking spirit and optimism of the country during the initial phase of globalization, at the same time, in the era of the internet and low-cost air tickets, it became easy to collaborate with an architect from anywhere in the world.

At the same time, the personal, atelier-like structure of architectural practices, centered around the lead architect, seemed unsustainable as a model in the new era. I always believed that the vision of a younger generation of architects, who were then coming into the field, would find space for expression within more open structures, offering greater opportunities for ownership to their members. Starting out as young architects, we chose a name that was not personalized but instead reflected the diversity and flexibility that would go on to define our way of working and become our hallmark.

Furthermore, in 2008, when we made the leap to London, we wanted to participate in the global conversation from an international hub, with all the risks and rewards that entailed. Today, Dimitris runs our Athens office as Director, while Christina Achtypi is Director at our London office, where Daniel Silva and Marios Triantafyllou are Associate Directors. My own role is more of a coordinating one, between the two offices and our projects around the world.

SM: You are a practice that hires young architects from Greece and abroad. What problems do you identify in the transition from education to the professional environment, drawing examples from across the globe?

NT: Speaking personally, based on my experience both as a student and as a (former) teacher of architecture, I perceive the environment of architectural education as a dialogue balancing theory and practice. Architectural teaching must be mutually informed and enriched in meaning by the theoretical, research, design, or built work of the educator -only in this way can it be understood, and not as an autonomous, isolated act.

In Greece, in the absence of public architecture, a very large part is lost that could otherwise highlight a new Spaniard or Portuguese. At the same time, architects themselves remain rather detached from society.

Over the past twenty years, architecture schools in Greece and internationally have multiplied, making it increasingly difficult to staff them with educators who can at least partially meet the above condition. As a result, architectural education has become more and more nebulous and vague, devoid of real meaning. Inevitably, we live in an era of painful disconnection -a “rupture”- between the academic and professional environments.

An optimistic development, however, comes from the younger generation’s turn toward new design techniques, such as parametric design. Thanks to impressive technological advances, it has now become possible -mainly through digital fabrication- to realize such work. Through this process, more and more opportunities will emerge in the coming years, inevitably marking major and significant changes in architecture. The situation resembles the early 20th century, when with reinforced concrete a new way of designing and building was discovered and gradually dominated, ultimately changing society and our lives. If, in the meantime, we sought architectural innovation perhaps more than was fruitful in the wider field of related social sciences and theories, it seems we are now gradually returning, in a more focused way, to a field of research at the very core of the architectural discipline.

SM: Your practice is structured around the dynamics of diversity. What role do clients play within this model?

NT: For us, the client is a co-creator of the project. Especially in Greece, we often (and mistakenly, in my opinion) speak in architecture of the “user” -and this is a sign of our detachment from society. A “user” is granted rights of use of one’s intellectual creation, but not the right to intervene. In this way, a crucial factor in the creative process is lost.

From the beginning of our career, we were fortunate to collaborate, in projects such as the house in Psychiko or the Kinsterna Hotel (to mention a few indicative examples), with clients who possessed a high architectural vision. Such clients, who move in the tradition of the “patrons of the arts,” carry the weight to understand and actively support an architecture focused on creation and innovation, enjoying the vindication of their choices over time.

There is, however, another parallel reality, which has now also taken shape in Greece, especially in the tourism sector. Here we encounter a different type of client, governed by an entirely different framework, requiring other rules of collaboration and, of course, leading to a different outcome. In this scenario, the personalized client is absent -the project’s funds now belong to investment groups, which seek through architecture to generate added value based solely on quantitative criteria, choosing to ignore the qualitative aspects that are harder to communicate and perceive in the short term. Inevitably, the manager -the client’s representative tasked with this responsibility- bases decisions mainly on eliminating any potential risk, and thus any innovation, preferring the safety of the average and the repetitive. I feel that we, as architects, are still searching for the tools to navigate this new condition.

Read the full interview in ek issue 245 | March 2020.