Long ago…

…a collapse of the energies necessary for the construction of modernization has caused the general rejection of the project, the disappearance of social forms of architecture, as well as the possibility of influencing the design of the habitat.

An important part of the progressive strategy that saw in intellectual innovations a fundamental element of its evolution and its ability to adapt to mutations has been repressed.

Architectural forms are recovered as a mask, as an exceptional and metaphorical episode within a contrary system, seen as hypothetical forms of resistance and negation or as a representative symbol of the empire’s economic power.

Instead, it is again possible to imagine a project of City, an urbanization which start from the constructive criticism of rationalism and supersede it.

Desiring an architecture that becomes part of an active thinking about life.

The idea of an architecture that fragments itself, fluidifies, becomes something else, is still valid and progressive, to hypothesize new urban scenarios.

The Out Of Lab is an experimental project with architecture, art and design and landscape, as points of departure that intermingle while informing each other continuously. Ideas on inside and outside and their thresholds are fundamental spatial concepts to our research.

We are using the expression Out of by interchanging its twofold meaning, as: a derivative from, and/or as: having run out of something.

The Out Of Lab – T.O.O.L. is a collaboration project between two architects, Maria Kassola (Athens, 1975) and Francesco Fontanella (Rome, 1977). It begun its course in 2016, responding to our common desires including a theory and practice of an expanded dimension of architecture. The Out Of Lab is in a perpetual state of flux while observing and forming crystallizations on subjects of our interest. It has been drawing its inspiration from research on the landscape seen as a ground of exchange between centers and peripheral areas.
We live and work between Athens and Rome.