Platon Issaias (he/him, Athens 1984) is an architect, researcher and educator. From 2018 to 2023, he has been Head of Projective Cities: MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design programme at the Architectural Association, where, together with Hamed Khosravi, he ran Diploma Unit 7: Fluid Territories in the MArch ARB/Part II Diploma Programme. Prior, he has been a Tutor/Visiting Lecturer at the School of Architecture/RCA (MA Architecture, MA City Design) and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Architecture, University of Westminster. He has also taught at the Berlage Institute/Rotterdam, the MArch Urban Design/Bartlett-UCL, the University of Cyprus and Syracuse University, London Program.
He studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece (AUTh, 2007) and holds an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University (2008) and a PhD from TU Delft (2014). His thesis Beyond the Informal City: Athens and the Possibility of an Urban Common, supervised by Pier Vittorio Aureli, investigated the recent history of planning in Athens and the link between conflict, urban management and architectural form. Platon’s research interests in architecture and urban design explore architecture in relation to the politics of labour, economy, law and social struggles. He has written and lectured extensively about architecture, urban design, and the politics of urban development in Greece and the Global South. The are numerous references to his work, more recently at Keller Easterling’s Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World (London: Verso Books, 2021).
Since 2009, he has been a founding member of Fatura Collaborative. Fatura is developing projects across a wide range of scales, from intimate objects and performance, to architecture, urban design and planning. We are interested in architecture as social infrastructure, in developing collective equipments, in the design of spaces of care, empathy and welfare. We design and research expanding new problematics about ecology, the domestic, everyday life and the city. Their work has received multiple awards in Greece and internationally, most recently the 3rd prize for the redesign of Lycabettus Hill Theatre Public Space in Athens. From 2015 to 2020, they have been developing an incremental housing project based on alternative cooperative models in Da Nang, Vietnam. Their work has been presented and exhibited widely, most notably in the 2015 Venice Biennale, the Benaki and Acropolis Museums, and the 10th and 5th Biennale of Young Greek Architects.
In 2018, he co-curated the exhibition Islands of Exile: The Case of Leros in Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy, which presented the findings of a four-year-long interdisciplinary project on the island of Leros, Greece and its history as a place of displacement, detention, and control. As Hamed Khosravi’s collaborator, Platon has worked on a retrospective exhibition, a publication and a conference for the work of the painter and founding partner of OMA, Zoe Zenghelis, that was presented in London (AA Gallery, May/June 2021, AA Publications 2022).
His pending book publication, Athens as a Project (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2023), in collaboration with Yiorgis Yerolymbos, will present his research and design work on Athens and the Greek city. The book will include primary archival work, study of examples, and design proposals, together with an extensive photographic essay.
Research Interests:
Architecture and Urban Design, City, Politics of Labour, Economy, Law, Social Struggles, Autonomy
