Extracts from an interview given to the local media on the occasion of the exhibition ANAMORPHOSIS - TOTAL DESIGN held in the city of Canea, Crete in July 1998.



Media (M): Why 'anamorphosis'and 'total design'? Does the term total design refer to a general all-inclusive design philosophy or is it a concept engaging with a deeper problematic?

Anamorphosis Architects (AA): First of all the term Anamorphosis ® reflects something more than the hidden image in the painting as known in the perspectival tradition. It is actually a more performative employment of the term - as it appears in the Lacanian psychoanalysis - and refers to the dialectic of spatiality as an analytic and synthesising operation beyond the visual or anti-visual discourse. Total design ® does not imply a 'Gesamkunstwerk' ideal (ie an ideal combination of arts and crafts, or a wholehearted emotional involvement of the creator or user); neither does it imply a comprehensively applied style. Instead it manifests the ability of employing space as a design method in a range of fields including urban planning, buildings, objects, film making, graphic design, advertising, illustrations of texts (from macro to micro...). It is also a spatial technique of bridging the gap between architecture and art, thus integrating artwork with the dialectic of the real, specific environment. The theoretical basis of the above concepts can be found in Nikos Georgiadis research on 'space and psychoanalysis'.

M: How do you employ "space as design method" ? Is it just a practical term or does it involve a broader conceptualisation?

AA: Space, as conceived by Anamorphosis, is not as an abstract canvas or a host of free symbolic or artistic expression; it is a field of real problematics open to scientific research, methodology and practice.
    In our work we employ spatial experience both as analytic and design technique, in other words - in a psychoanalytic manner - as method of mapping and then reintroducing, but in an inverted form, the question at issue. Indeed, space has a psychoanalytic dimension.

"We regard the incorporation of critique into real projects as prerequisite for sustaining a healthy critical debate within the architectural and artistic community at an international level."

Our spatial critique is addressed to the late postmodern eclectic hypercommunicational condition, and more precisely against its very logic of fragmentation and segregation of disciplines concerning the environment, architecture, art, communication, media etc. In that sense, space could unite all these fields by affording a common environmental (in the strict sense of the term) politics of resistance to the oppressing hypersymbolic all-inclusive condition of our time. Generally speaking, the main theoretical and practical 'opponent' of Anamorphosis is the new psychologism - ie the latest postmodern condition according to which the symptom is recycled in conscious statements and appropriated as thesis rather than as field of further investigation. The first victim of such a condition is history, the world of objects and real space whose only recognition occurs at the level of 'leftoverness' or 'post-use'. The whole philosophical trend of deconstruction is based on that analogy. In fact it is remarkable, how systematically deconstruction has hidjacked, misread and brutally damaged the critical rigour of the radical discoveries of Freud, Nietzsche and Marx.

M: How do you incorprate criticism in your work at a practical level ?

"In a way real criticism is synonymous with design."

AA: Strategically speaking, the work of Anamorphosis progresses, in the course of specific projects, as critique of various established trends taken from the field of architecture and the visual arts; so our schemes are produced as effects of such critiques which thereby lead the design. For example, the project for the New Acropolis Museum was processed as a critical response against the ideas of 'folies' and 'negative space' (B.Tschumi and D.Libeskind respectively) and also the unfortunate contemporary usage of Baudelaire's notion of 'flaneur'. We regard the incorporation of critique into real projects as prerequisite for sustaining a healthy critical debate within the architectural and artistic community at an international level. Besides, seen in that context, critique plays the role of a test-design, so to speak, which surely improves the quality of the actual designed product. In a way real criticism is synonymous with design.

M: Recently Nikos Georgiadis, founding member of Anamorphosis, guest edited the March 1998, issue of Architectural Design magazine to which he introduced the title 'TRACING ARCHITECTURE'. Was this the result of your engagment with theory and research?

"Above all 'Tracing Architecture' gave Anamorphosis the chance to create links with a number of architects, artists and academics at an international level, over a problematic (Trace) with which the team has already been preoccupied for a long period of time."

AA: Research, theoretical work and experimentation are incorporated in the regular activities of the practice of Anamorphosis. As in many other practices outside architecture, systematic research is regarded as the only way of creating new methods of design as well as new concepts and debates to a proper academic standard. Systematic research on Open-Air Cinemas and more generally on the question of real space in filmmaking (part of which was published in Architectural Design magazine, issue on 'Architecture and Film' 1994) reflect the opening of the team's work to disciplines outside architecture and the welcoming of a broader debate on theoretical and practical matters. Also, the recent specialisation of the team on projects with historical interest (eg museums, exhibition halls) creates links with the fields of archaeology, history and anthropology. Above all 'Tracing Architecture' gave Anamorphosis the chance to create links with a number of architects, artists and academics at an international level, over a problematic (Trace) with which the team has already been preoccupied for a long period of time.~

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