About
Elena Stavropoulou Architects’ design portfolio includes villas, single-family homes, the refurbishment of apartments, wineries and small industrial buildings, exhibition design services and retail spaces in Athens, all around Greece and abroad. The design work also extends to interior design, landscape architecture and environmental consulting.
Specialized in bioclimatic design we emphasize the application of these principles and strategies in relation to the project’s site. The practice leads the total design process from concept design stage to the detailed structural design phase. We take on a managing role in the construction procedure & supervision to ensure the realization of each project according to the design principles.
Our approach to design involves the use of physical models and one-to-one scale mock-ups in order to verify the proposed concept. The office working process is not linear; it involves working simultaneously on different scales, focusing on the detailed designs while still working on the concept phase.
The participation of specialized consultants, acoustical, lighting or landscape, engineering or electromechanical, according to the specific requirements of the project allows a holistic approach whose main goal is to implement the brief in the most sustainable way possible. The practice’s experience ensures collaboration with competent and specialized suppliers and craftsmen, enabling the meticulous realization of the architectural concept.
Our practice still believes that architecture has the power, through innovative, timeless and sustainable design, to improve our environment, our lives and consequently our future. For us the main design components that follow the total design procedure are the client's requirements, aesthetic & technical innovation and the implementation of bioclimatic principles.
CLIENT'S REQUIREMENTS
Considering that every project and brief is unique and has to satisfy the users’ requirements we aim for a close collaboration, in essence teaming up with the client, from the beginning of the project till the completion of the total design process in order to assure that the best solution is adopted for the particular situation.
AESTHETIC & TECHNICAL INNOVATION
Bioclimatic concerns and sustainability should not be a limit to the imagination in the course of the design process; on the contrary they should be incorporated into it in a way that contributes to the architectural inspiration. The main architectural challenge for our practice is to create an innovative poetical space through aesthetic and technical research, whilst always aiming for a cost and resource conscious realization.
BIOCLIMATIC PRINCIPLES
Leading on from our conviction that the parameter of green design is always part of good design, our work’s approach includes consideration given to the building’s impact on the site’s ecology and its use of energy and materials over its life-cycle.
One of our main concerns is the harmonious relation of the building to its immediate manmade and especially its natural environment, ensuring that architecture can achieve the best possible integration with the project’s surroundings.
Bioclimatic design acts as a methodology that defines the correct management of climatic parameters. Most of the principles of sustainable architecture are part of an ancient body of knowledge that in the past has been successfully implemented in all parts of the planet. These rules are related to fundamental and generative drawing factors, such as the appropriate orientation of the building and its individual spaces and the selective application of simple bioclimatic strategies such as solar heating, ventilation, heating and cooling. At the same time it shoud be taken into account that green standards evolve according to technological change, requiring continuous training and research on the part of the designer.
Bioclimatic design acts as a methodology that defines the correct management of climatic parameters. Most of the principles of sustainable architecture are part of an ancient body of knowledge that in the past has been successfully implemented in all parts of the planet. These rules are related to fundamental and generative drawing factors, such as the appropriate orientation of the building and its individual spaces and the selective application of simple bioclimatic strategies such as solar heating, ventilation, heating and cooling. At the same time it shoud be taken into account that green standards evolve according to technological change, requiring continuous training and research on the part of the designer.
ECOLOGICAL DESIGN
The nature of the materials or construction components selected can lead to a totally coherent ecological design. The choice of materials is made according to rational parameters such as climate, availability and cost and according to sensory ones such as texture, color and reflectance and implementation of traditional methods of energy management. The factors that determine the depth of ecological considerationsin a project are
the multidimensional evaluation of the materials chosen according to their embodied energy, the sustainability of the natural resources that are used for their production process, the degree of their potential reintegration into the environment or their ability to be recycled and the avoidance of direct toxicity for the user or indirect toxicity for the environment.