Author
Maria Michou
Location
Athens, Greece
About
About
Maria was born and raised in Athens. She studied Architecture in the UK, where she also acquired an MA in Architecture & Cultural Studies. Since 2006, she lives and works in Athens, both in the commercial and design sector, as well as in teaching and researching. In 2015, she completed an MA in Space - Design - Culture at the Athens National Polytechnic, School of Architecture and is now a PhD Candidate in the same department. Her research focuses on the notion of 'homeland' as it is constructed in personal and collective forms of narratives (from symbolic objects to testimonies) in relation to the traumatic loss of a physical-symbolic place.
Focusing on architecture as lived experience, both her commissioned and study projects dwell into private and public spaces as places people use, desire, remember, shaping and shaped by their particular location. Architecture hence arrives as a practice between the sensing body and the material site this encounters. She has worked on renovations and new constructions both of commercial / office spaces and private homes.
Her research interests explore notions of heritage, material and immaterial, as these incorporate and manifest cultural notions of the sacred and the profane, its various forms of remembering and reconstituting, giving form to our identities as individuals and as members of particular communities. The Greek Key: Unlocking Athens practices a learning process that, via experiencing and reflecting, allows individual cultural identity to surface within a critical yet creative comparison between familiar and unfamiliar culture and spaces.
