Invited to Join: “The Past of the Present is the fruit of the Future.”

It is with gratitude, happiness, and honor—but also with genuine creative curiosity, rooted in my ongoing exploration of interfaces and collaborative processes—that I respond to Potiropoulos+Partners’ invitation to contribute to their microsite and their “p+ Research & Design” network of collaborators.
It has meant a great deal to me that, on many occasions in the past, the distinguished architect Dimitris Potiropoulos has expressed his admiration for “Liquid Sky”, my site-specific sculptural installation/bar, commissioned and realized in 2010 for the inauguration of the Onassis Cultural Center.
It therefore felt only natural that my first contribution would be to present this piece, and how architecture itself—understood as a living system—has shaped it.

I’ve prepared a presentation in which the reader is navigated through an oscillating, interfolding landscape of thought and making.

I hope it speaks meaningfully to both architects and engineers, as well as to the broader public.

Please find the full project presentation HERE, and the video presentation HERE.

The full project presentation in Greek can be found HERE.

The process of revisiting the piece made me realize, and more deeply accept, that ontologically a work is “present”—it exists—even when no longer materially extant. Once it communicates, it is seeded in Memory—fluid, abstract, and yet so tangibly retrievable by those who carry it in the heart.
As an artist, I tend to perceive time and space as interwoven—a vision I have expressed through the phrase:
“The Past of the Present is the fruit of the Future.”
It is an evolving, in-folding continuum—a concept that has long formed the core of my work, and which I will elaborate further in this presentation.
So when I am invited to create a piece, I always take into account the full set of surrounding conditions—the formed and given dynamics.
In this case, when I was first approached by the president of the Onassis Foundation—of which I was once a fellowship recipient—Mr. Anthony S. Papadimitriou, he asked whether I’d be interested in doing a piece “at the bar,” acknowledging, with hesitation, that it might not appear a fitting context for my work.
I replied that I didn’t see why not, since I understand aesthetics as deeply intertwined with functionality. To me, “aesthetics” corresponds to what in Greek we call αισθητά—perceived information—which is never simply decorational, though it may include that. It externalizes the inner structure of all kinds of structure.
The piece was subsequently approved by the board as a site-specific intervention, and I proceeded.
At the time, the building was still under construction—still just concrete and rebar.
I asked for the plans, visited the site, and studied the detailed architectural maquette of the future Onassis Cultural Center—presumably provided by Architecturestudio, the original designers of the building, now known as Stegi.
I remember sitting for hours at the Onassis Foundation offices on Amalias Street, where the model was displayed, comparing what I saw with the plans I’d been given—trying to understand and intuit what the work needed to become.
Intentionally, I chose not to study Architecturestudio’s body of work in advance. I wanted to develop a sense of the structure purely from the data before me—from what was αισθητό.
I was drawn to the maquette—it reminded me of my school years, of scenographic model-making, where I would enjoy looking at other people’s work and observe how small details created entire imagined worlds, created space and meaning. How intention and craft together formed another reality.

What struck me most was the core of the building: within its parallelepiped volume, there sat an ellipsoid, an oval enclosure—crafted to glow like a “golden egg,” or a “lantern,” suspended in the structure’s heart.

It had clearly been imagined as golden, lit by daylight from above—its form, as suggested by the meticulous maquette, to be constructed using thin timber formwork resembling a vessel-like wooden skeleton, shaped through steam and pressure: thin planks of wood, carefully bent one by one, each responding to a unique curvature, then mounted onto a scaffold specific to each vessel.
This ancient boat-building technique—laborious, fading, even in some cases persecuted—is an artform in itself.

This vessel-like ellipsoid enveloped the performance halls and was designed to admit natural light through skylights above, making the form appear lit from within.

Light would strike the ellipsoid tangentially—revealing and illuminating its geometry.
During the day, the form would glow through the marble louvers of the façade, allowing the interior to radiate outward, rendering the façade almost transparent.
And at night, of course, it would radiate from within.
I thought I got it!
And yet—when I visited the construction site, I saw that the curvature had not been realized with this meticulous painstaking wooden mold technique that was suggested in the maquette. Instead, it was constructed using large drywall panels, shaped as two truncated opposing cones, stacked one on top of the other.
This changed the slope of the curvature. Light was not to be entering the same way.
Yet, I felt that my idea of sculpting light was, still, rather appropriate…

Thank you,
A.
Aemilia Papaphilippou, visual artist, 2025