PJ Dick Innovation Fund Project Grant: Unmapping State Monocultures

Unmapping State Monocultures
Theodossis (Theo) Issaias, Special Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Architecture

Collaborators: 
FATURA Collaborative, research and design collective
Vicky Achnani, Associate Studio Professor, Carnegie Mellon Architecture
Eray Çayli PhD, Professor, Institute of Geography, University of Hamburg
Alexandra Vougia PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Stamatis Pasopoulos PhD, Professor of Ethnomusicology, Department of Music Science & Art, University of Macedonia
Aristotelis Maragkos, Filmmaker
Balkans Beyond Borders

This research and design project begins on the edge of a disappearing lake, in a border valley shaped by salt, birds, earthworms, and the long afterlife of forced displacement. At its center is a timber-frame shelter built in the 1920s by the League of Nations, part of a vast refugee resettlement program that followed the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Türkiye. Designed by Bauhaus architect Fred Forbát and contractor Adolf Sommerfeld, the structure stands today in the village of Mikrokampos—one of many settlements established across former wetlands and swamps, drained to accommodate a vision of nation-building through demographic engineering and monoculture farming.

The shelter is one of the few remaining examples from this period. Reactivated through this project, it becomes a site of public engagement—hosting workshops, discussions, and ecological interventions that gather residents, activists, students, and visitors around the shared urgencies of displacement, depopulation, and drought in the southeastern Balkans.

By bridging academic scholarship, spatial practice, and ecological advocacy, the initiative contends with the material legacy of humanitarian architecture while imagining new futures for the land. Central to the project is the rewilding of adjacent wheat smallholdings and the regeneration of degraded ecosystems surrounding Lake Pikrolimni—a hypersaline body of water and critical stopover for migratory birds, now under threat. Computational methods, such as digital mapping and ecological modelling, will trace the site’s historical transformations and open new pathways for collective action in the face of climate breakdown.

Image: A village of shelters designed by Fred Forbát for Danziger Hoch- und Tiefbaugesellschaft mbH, Central Macedonia, circa 1925. Dokumente aus dem Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Band 5 hg. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.