JEMS Architects. Amid

The title of the exhibition casts light on the character of our endeavours which always oscillate between broad-based contexts and attempts at noticing the intrinsic, self-contained potential of architecture... 

Our buildings emerge from the background and usually themselves become a background. On principle, we distance ourselves from buildings which are monumental in their expression. This does not mean seeking exclusively a "neutral" architecture dominated by context (if something like this exists at all). Instead, we embark on continuous efforts to realise that, irrespective of the level of expression delivered by our projects, we fall in line with a cultural continuum. What architects from our practice, who manifest different creative temperaments, have in common is the attitude to history and the present time as one living, albeit complex and not always continuous, process.

We are less interested in the practical purpose, in short-term requirements of life or events that are not always predictable, than in the prospect of a building's long existence.
For years, we have been working on several architectural themes and motifs, modified, developed, running through projects with different scales, budgets, uses, universal enough to offer an opportunity to reflect on 'architecture as such', on its potential to create places that lend meaning to human efforts... We focus on the framework, the material structure of the building rather than the detail which we try to derive from the idea of the whole, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the sketches displayed at the exhibition, which render the overall image of our intentions through their implicit statements.

The exhibition will also present a selection of buildings constructed in recent years as well as projects that have not seen their implementation. These are mainly public buildings set in a diversified cultural and social context.