Form Follows Climate 2020

Konstantinos Labrinopoulos was born in 1970 in Athens, Greece. A graduate of the School of Αrchitecture, National Technical University of Athens (1994). He received his Master's degree in SCI-Arc, Los Angeles in 1996 In 2001 he co-founded Klmf and at 2007 he founded KLAB architecture. In 2006 he was one of the co-founders of the movement ‹Athens 9› In 2008 Wallpaper magazine has included KLab as one of the most upcoming architecture practices in the world. He has given lectures and taught in workshops in Europe and in Israel and his work has participated in many architecture exhibitions in Greece and abroad as the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2012 with the work “urban cubes”. He has been visiting professor at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, a visiting critic at the Hochschule fur Technik Stuttgart Architecture School and he was teaching until 2018 at the Architecture School of the University of Patras. His work has been nominated twice for the Mies Van Der Rohe award, shortlisted for the Piranesi award among others, and in 2012 KLab architecture won the prestigious award best commercial project 2011 for Placebo pharmacy at X International Awards by Domus Russia. KLAB architecture work has been published widely in architectural magazines and books internationally.

With an education in aerospace technology I was and still am, after 30 years, kind of an outsider in building engineering design. Whereas the typical approach to engineering design, my approach over this period has always been from physics to systems and concepts. Then use existing (or new) components to make the systems work. Challenging the assumptions that our traditional design are based upon is crucial to bring building engineering design into the next century, a century governed by smart use of advanced design tools creating interactive personalized environments. Buildings that will do much much more for it’s users with much less material and energy. Through the years this has been my mission, designing buildings that exhilarate people not just architecturally (visual aesthetics) but as a full sensory experience. This way we have managed to create several projects that stand out through a combination of high societal output with low economical and ecological input. All these projects and more became possible through using common sense, challenging the assumptions but most of all by learning from best practices from over the world and through time. So for my full personal benefit I am more than curious to see new innovative ideas to help valorizing them in practice as well as helping the forward with my experience with unconventional design in a world that seems to have two principals: this is how we always do it and we have never done it that way.