The Excursus is an open internet archive on the architecture of hospitality. It consists of texts and plans by architects, professional and amateur photography, advertisements, extracts from newspapers and periodicals, extracts from books, visitors’ impressions, workers’ recollections, audio-visual material, and any other relevant documentation. We invite you to contribute to the formation of the Excursus by sending relevant material to . A necessary condition for publication is a reference to the source. The Excursus, as it has taken shape by 20/11/2016, will be presented in the Room18 exhibition at the Benaki Museum.
Yannis Aesopos is Professor of Architecture & Urban Design and former Chair, Department of Architecture, University of Patras, Greece. He is the Principal of Aesopos Architecture, Athens since 1997. Aesopos holds a Master in Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (1991) and a Diploma of Architecture with Honors, National Technical University of Athens (1989). He was Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York (2015 and 2014), Visiting Professor, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (2012-13), Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, Princeton University (2009). Aesopos worked for Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York (1992-95) and Santiago Calatrava Architects, Paris (1991). Since 2002 he is an Independent Expert for the Mies van der Rohe European Union Prize for Architecture. He was the Commissioner and Curator, exhibition Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece, the official Greek Participation to the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – Venice Biennale, 2014 (also presented at the Acropolis Museum, Athens, 2015), and editor, Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece (English and Greek, Athens, 2014, 2nd revised and expanded edition, Athens, 2015); Joint-Curator, exhibition (Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, 1999) and co-editor, Landscapes of Modernization: Greek Architecture 1960s and 1990s (in English, Athens, 1999, in Greek, Athens, 2002); Co-editor, The Contemporary (Greek) City (English and Greek, Athens, 2001), Landscapes of the Intimate (English and Greek, Athens, 1996). He has published extensively in Greek and international architectural reviews. The work of Aesopos Architecture was shown at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition – Venice Biennale, 2012.
Georgios A. Panetsos (Athens, 1960) is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and chairman of the Department of Αrchitecture of the University of Patras, Greece. He teaches design studios and lectures on architecture theory. He has published seven monographs and more than sixty scholarly articles on design, history and theory. He has been advisor on architecture and urban design to the Mayor of Athens (1991-94), the City of Rotterdam (1993-95) and the Greek Government (2003-4). In 1996 he published a plan for the urban restructuring of Metropolitan Athens. He has been the curator, and also the designer, of more than twenty architecture exhibitions, including two on the Parthenon and the Acropolis Restoration Works, shown, among others, in Osaka and Berlin.
He received the DiplArch from the National Technical University of Athens (1984, summa cum laude) and the MArch from Harvard University (1986). He was the recipient of numerous academic fellowships and awards, including the Herder Fellowship of the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. (1987-88) for a scholarly residence in Vienna.
His architecture firm, founded in 1986, has received numerous honors for design projects, including 10 prizes in architectural competitions. His architectural and urban design work has been exhibited among others in Venice, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Paris, Lausanne, and Frankfurt, and published internationally.
He is the editor of the international architecture review Domés and the founder of Domés Architecture Awards and Domés Index, a digital archive of Greek architecture.
Memos Filippidis (1967, Athens) is an architect that co-founded the office MPLUSM together with architect Marita Nikoloutsou in 2001. Their work distills international influences while investigating the individual character of each project and its anchoring to local sensitivities. Curator of the international architectural exhibition Big Brother: Architecture and Surveillance at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2002). Curator of the architectural exhibition +-40: Athens Now (2003) on the work of 22 leading Greek architects, an exhibition held at RIBA, London. Curator of the architectural exhibition Invisible Hotel (Athens, Thessaloniki, New York, 2005-2006). Curator for exhibition The Education of an Architect (2006, Gallery Kappatos, Athens). In 2006 he was the guest curator, invited by chief curators Rena Sakellaridou and Morfo Papanikolaou, for the first national participation of Cyprus entitled Porous Borders for the 10th Architectural Biennale in Venice. In 2013 he curated GREAT – Greek Architectural Talent, a competition of diploma and post graduate projects by Greek students internationally, as organized by the Athens Concert Hall and Heracles GCCo, member of Lafarge Group.
Yorgos Tzirtzilakis is architect and curator. Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly and artistic advisor to the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. He has also edited a series of documentaries on modern and contemporary architecture in Greece. He recently published the book Sub-modernity and the Labor of Joy-Making Mourning. The Crisis Effect in Contemporary Greek Culture (Kastaniotis Editions) and co-curated the exhibition Ameτρια (DESTE Foundation, Benaki Museum).