"It is the way of poets to shut their eyes to actuality. Instead of acting, they dream. What they make is merely made." (Martin Heidegger)

I consider my sketches and paintings to be a synthesis of a free, intuitive approach towards reflecting on architecture by means of architecture.

They express a pleasure found in learning and exploration and are ordered by memory and the imagination...

"Imagination is but another form of Memory." (Paul Bowles)

These varied compositions of familiar types and forms arise from a quick application of pen and wash, the juxtaposition and superimposition of different drafts, and the irremediable marriage of paper, ink, water and ideas...

The oil and tempera paintings are more laboriously constructed on quickly carved linoleum plates. They result from innumerable layers of thick color applied with miniscule brushes and allude more solemnly to the permanence of place, of memory and archetypes of human habitat.

The architectural subject creates its own space, landscape and atmosphere as a fundamental part of its essence....The union of the sky and the earth and life is expressed in the genesis of architecture and the city, articulated through the analogies and metaphors of the pictorial process. The eerie silence and dreamlike atmosphere of the sketches and paintings, in a context of "Magical Realism," refer to the specific realm of a virtual reality to be inhabited by life, and definitely not to some unbridgeable distance between ideality and reality.

"Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling." (Martin Heidegger)

I like to look on these sketches and paintings as furtive and partial reflections on the eternal nature of architecture, or as mysterious fragments of its immutable essence...

Post-Script

I am a practicing architect and an educator and I do acknowledge fully the extraordinary opportunities of computer graphics and design.

However I like to consider these excellent contemporary design tools as an enrichment to, and a further extension of, our mind and our hands; rather then as a substitute to the development of our manual and intellectual skills.

I myself like to cultivate and improve my artisan skills, as well as to increase my practical knowledge of new technologies, and to operate within appropriate choices of combined tools for the most appropriate and efficient results.

I consider freehand sketching, painting and graphical experimentation as essential tools of the design process and particularly of that wonderfully complex elaboration of a more and more comprehensive synthesis, from first conceptual diagrams to final design proposals.

I don't believe that the design should work from abstract schemes to more and more figural ones through an additive process of analytical investigations...

The synthetic character of the design process cannot be fragmented and should be enhanced in all design phases.

The figural and pictorial, the typological and the morphological, the compositional and constructive, the functional and symbolic qualities of a design should immediately and fully invest the design in a powerful simultaneity like a rich and dense canvas offering diverse options of order, life and beauty.

Sketching and Painting

...have always been privileged instruments of architectural invention.

They offer sublime potentials of reconstructing memory and of exploring the imaginary, as well as of discovering new territories of the Real.