DOMa Summer School

In the context of DOMa Summer School 2025 we accepted the invitation from the publishers to accompany our long-standing collaborators Orama Minimal Frames – the Summer School’s main sponsor – on their brief presentation to the workshop participators. Students from Greek architecture schools spent a week in the mountain township of Andritsaina, birthplace of notable figures of the Greek Independence and in the vicinity of the temple of Epicurius Apollo. The workshop was tutored by Davidson and Rafailidis, two bright architectural minds based in the US but with strong links to Greece. We were more than happy to join the happy crowd of curators, tutors and students that – on top of everything else – were residing at the former Xenia Hotel (now Theoxenia), a unique example of the “Xenia” Greek Tourism Program from the 1960s.

But first, business. Roleplay’s architecture team had the initiative to take a different path on what a sponsor’s corporate presentation could look like. Since Orama is all about window frames, our introduction took a dive into the origins and philosophical roots of what it means to have an opening on a wall – and what the frame represents. Images from Magritte, Tadao Ando and Gordon Matta Clarke blended with stills from Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and Tame Impala’s “The Slow Rush” album cover to give another perspective on the business of window frames.

On our time-off, we took the chance to stroll in the historic village, enjoy the local taverns’ delicacies (mainly goat and lamb), jam with incognito tiger dancer Degear0001 at the Xenia veranda, and take the dirt road down Alfios river for a ceremonial dip into the cool waters. Above all we enjoyed mingling with the small society of architecture students, tutors and curators that DOMa Summer School 2025 had brought to this remote corner of southern Greece called Andritsena. Most notably, we enjoyed the small pop-up photographic exhibition – the workshop’s outcome – held at an abandoned shop on the village main street gathering visitors and locals alike in an emotional moment for all sides. The unofficial closing party at forest-immersed Comfuzio club, at the outskirts of Andritsaina, will mostly go undocumented.

Our ties with Andritsena are now more bound, especially after discovering the 1968 Urban planning study undertook by NTUA professors right after the disastrous 1965 earthquake. We were kindly allowed to review an original, fabric-bound copy by the Municipal Historic Library of Andritsaina and we admired the hand-made quality of the plans and drawings as well as the potential of a place that didn’t make it in implementing it. We’ll surely be back!