Constantinos Gallis

Constantinos Gallis
Cambridge, MA & Athens, GR

Hello, my name is Constantinos. I am a Greek-Swiss artist, musician & student based in Cambridge, MA & Athens, GR. I am currently pursuing a Master in City Planning & a Master of Architecture at MIT, & am a recipient of the Onassis Foundation Scholarship. I hold a BA in Urban Studies from Stanford University, where I graduated with departmental honors & distinction, & was awarded the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research.
Through academic research, teaching, large-scale installations, performances, & audio-visual investigations, I have explored the effects of urban change on the natural environment & society. My work has been exhibited in Athens GR, Cambridge MA, Stanford CA & San Francisco CA.
I have honed my skills in planning & design at firms in London, GB, New York, NY & Athens, GR, working as an Architectural Assistant at Foster + Partners, an Urban Design Intern at WXY, a Neighborhood Strategies Intern at the NYCEDC, & as an Architectural Intern at Potiropoulos + Partners.
Alongside my partner, I develop work for Oo-PS, a collaborative research & design practice working across scales to produce narrative-driven artwork, writing, music & objects as ways of anticipating future socio-environmental challenges & designing theoretical methods to meet them.
I write, record, produce & occasionally perform music under the alias Shrinking Violet, a project that moves between ambient, dreampop & indie rock in an effort to create music about spaces, distance & uncertainty. Performing solo & alongside bandmates, I have opened for artists such as The Hellp, French Cassettes, & Illuminati Hotties.

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MoreContact Information & Links
cgallis@mit.edu Instagram

Oo-PS

Shrinking Violet

Influences
Posters

Selected Work Across Disciplines

Urban DistortionAthens, GR
A series of dense pen drawings reading Athenian apartment buildings through Robert Venturi's Complexity & Contradiction. The works capture the visual disarray of exposed cables, graffiti, & layered posters, alongside the sonic discomposure of the city, anchored in clusters of splayed lines that evoke its energy.

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Atmospheres For WindhoverStanford, CA
A one-time live ambient performance of three thirty-minute sound pieces composed for Stanford's Windhover Contemplative Center. It was the first & only solo performance to take place at the Center. Named after Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres, the work combined drone & generative music with shoegaze & post-rock, with much of the texture left to chance or fully improvised.

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Elastic FuturesStanford, CA & Peristeri, GR
A multimedia honors thesis examining whether modernist Athens can be reprogrammed for climate resilience & demographic decline, focused on the densely populated municipality of Peristeri. The project produced a restructural toolkit for short-term interventions & a destructural framework for long-term change, synthesizing critical regionalism with metabolist methods, & received the Firestone Medal For Excellence in Research, & Outstanding Urban Studies Thesis Award.

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Center for Constructed GroundBoston, MA
[w/ A. Kenna]
An environmental & cultural center on Boston's Fort Point Channel, designed to inhabit unstable, increasingly inundated landfill terrain. Drawing on Lacaton & Vassal's practice of using lightweight structures over durable cores, the project pairs concrete anchors with a demountable timber system that yields over time to a semi-constructed landscape of walkways, kiosks, & follies.

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ConfluenceSan Francisco, CA
[w/ E. Petersen, K. Han, A. Adriano, L. Laugharn]
A week-long ambient light installation atop the Salesforce Tower, designed for Jim Campbell's 11,000-fixture LED projection system that reaches across the Bay. Behaving as a hyperobject perceived as part of the city yet with no physical form, the work illuminated images of water, movement & organic life. The installation was paired with an original soundtrack I created entitled Atop This Weathered Tower [12:27], which follows the sequence of visuals.

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VariscapesStanford, CA & Berlin, DE
A loose collection of landscape and cityscape drawings, ranging from a multi-layered view of rural farmland from an airplane to a single-pen rendering from inside Berlin's TV Tower, to a mixed-media study of cracked concrete. Despite their differences in scale & material, the pieces are fundamentally united by an emphasis on depth and perspective.

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Third PlacesBerlin DE & Brooklyn, NY
A collection of twelve sound-art compositions derived from twelve distinct points in Berlin, produced during an independent study supported by the Chappell Lougee Scholarship. Drawing on Murray Schafer's understanding of sonic environments as "huge musical compositions" & Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as a structural anchor, the project maps audiovisual environments through music informed by & informative of place.

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Athenian UrbanismsStanford, CA & Athens, GR
A self-developed & independently taught course [URBANST15SI] that examined Athens through eight overlapping profiles, reading the city as a site of multiplicity. Guided by Calvino's Invisible Cities & Kevin Lynch's What Time Is This Place?, the class mediated between Athens' past, present, & predicted future through a mix of lectures, conversations, & guest contributions.

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Monuments of TransmutationCambridge, MA
A family of concrete micro-monuments that treats destruction as a mode of construction, with chipping, smashing, carving, & casting cataloged as vital moments in each object's material life cycle. Drawing on Gordon Matta-Clark's Building Cuts, the work was made while reflecting on the patchwork quality of Athens' concrete fabric alongside the ongoing destruction of war, considering repair as a parallel act to ruin.

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Murmuration of LightStanford, CA
An installation that manipulates sunlight through two interplaying patterns of blue translucent & yellow reflective acrylic squares, vulnerable to the elements & swaying in the wind. Following Brian Eno's advice to pursue gardening rather than architecture, the fluttering effect matters more than the structure itself. The work has remained installed across Stanford's campus, slowly discoloring, for the last four years.

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Looking At Each OtherCambridge, MA
A proposal for MIT's School of Architecture & Planning split into two masses, an archive rising from the ground & a research center descending from the sky, facing each other across an empty courtyard. Drawing on Aldo van Eyck's "Productive Void" & a productive misreading of Diller & Scofidio's Slow House, the project treats knowledge production as something that happens between parties rather than inside a single building.

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AcropoliticsCambridge, MA & Athens, GR
A seventy-page anthology & glossary that reframes the Acropolis as a political instrument, tracing a counterhistory through five operative conditions: ruination, fragmentation, deselection, appropriation, and interpretation. Inspired by Forensic Architecture, the project treats destruction & restoration as parallel political operations, presenting the monument as an active site of cultural negotiation rather than a stable Classical ideal.

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Experiences in a Changing CityAthens, GR
A debut album capturing two years of urban exploration across ten neighborhoods of greater Athens, with each song composed in response to a different place & lyrics drawn from conversations with residents across Athens. Packaged as a CD & book pairing accounts with original drawings, the album launch raised over €2000 for a local children's charity.

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Greyscale CityAthens, GR
A series of black-&-white drawings that celebrate the organized chaos of Athens, demonstrating an implicit uniformity within the city's group form. Borrowing from Fumihiko Maki's Nurturing Dreams, the pieces use skewed perspectives & multiple or absent vanishing points to evoke a sense of endlessness, with linework foregrounded by the absence of color.

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Only Passing ThroughCambridge, MA
A deconstructed chapel along Cambridge's Broad Canal, shaped as a series of discretized rooms connected by a snaking boardwalk that privileges procession over arrival. Inspired by Homer's Tomb and Pikionis' Acropolis Pathway, the project dissolves any single sacred location, & was developed alongside original songs written to sonically predict the character of each space.

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Generation LossStanford, CA
A tape-degradation experiment revisiting an ambient song from my EP The Fourth Way, recorded onto cassette & then re-recorded across ten successive generations until each tape was more distorted than the last. Cassette inserts were assembled from hazy outlines made by laying on pieces of photographic paper, arranged in proportion to the degradation of each tape. The piece was released on Spotify & added to an editorial ambient playlist.

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Memory PavilionStanford, CA
[w/ E. Petersen, K. Han]
Selected from nearly 100 projects for the 2023 Frost Arts & Music Festival, themed Sacred Spaces. Built from semi-translucent fabric panels and simple domestic artifacts, the pavilion explores ritual & memory through a woven enclosure, with each collaborator claiming a material tied to their own past: redwood for Marin, canvas for the Aegean, & Maine blueberries for the dye.

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MultiplicationAthens, GR
A series made in the lead-up and aftermath of Greek national elections, driven by themes of crisis, prosperity, & political polarization. Influenced by Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, the work captures a feeling of hopelessness through dense, disorderly imagery of simultaneous evolution & abandonment, with color used to reflect the two duelling political sides.

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Changing Too QuicklyHydra, GR
[w/ N. Vitoraki]
An album conceived during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the abrupt end of my final year of high school opened up time to write. Co-written with Nefeli Vitoraki & recorded in a primitive studio we set up on the island of Hydra, the songs trace our relationship while forced apart, alongside the anxieties the pandemic exacerbated, Nefeli's parents' recent divorce, & the loss of both my grandfathers just before we began.

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The EphemeralStanford, CA
[w/ Twenty Collaborators]
A collaboration with twenty students that straddled architecture & structural engineering, using slender hardwood dowels & Amaike Super organza to create a membrane tensegrity system. Arranged as an archipelago responding to the natural oculus of the grove, & sited near Andy Goldsworthy's temporally affected work, the structure slowly degraded over the course of a week.

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Stair To ForeverCambridge, MA
A three-week response to the riddle "a stair to there, a stair to nowhere," conceived as a staircase made of one continuous surface that perpetually loops around itself. Initial concept models were folded & scored from single sheets of paper, then translated into a concrete mold designed to cast the form in one fell swoop, without multiple components. The final object is entirely concrete, treating mass as a two-dimensional surface that emulates the angles & gaps of folded card.

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Sand JamArles, FR & Cathleen Stone Island, MA
[w/ S. Shen, J. Wan]
A rapidly deployable structure made to withstand extreme wind, made entirely of sand & fabric. Inspired by principles of In-Situ Resource Utilization, the structure is made of lightweight canvas, & filled with sand found on sight. Following a reversible process of filling three 6-foot columns, jamming them using a tensioning system, & then attaching a lightweight enclosure to the columns, the team deployed the structure on Cathleen Stone Island, MA during 30 mph winds. Previously, a different arrangement was deployed in Arles, FR & withstood 55mph winds.

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Vinnytsia Transport Plan Vinnytsia, UA & Cambridge, MA
[w/ B. Sula, P. Chiri]

Vinnytsia is at a crossroad, both literally as a nexus between Lviv, Kyiv & Odesa, & figuratively as it positions itself as a regional logistics & innovation hub in the coming years. In both a post-war scenario & in a more pessimistic protracted period of uncertainty, the historic town needs to become better integrated with its newly consolidated eastern settlements to ensure efficient passenger & logistics flows.

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Various SinglesAll Over The Place
A body of ambient releases spanning from Shrinking Violet (2018), a debut EP inspired by Eno's Music for Airports, through soundtracks, generative experiments, & collaborative reworks. The collection includes audio degradation pieces, single-sitting improvisations, & ongoing reinterpretations of work by friends and collaborators.

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