About

Our approach

We believe that creativity has the power to inspire and instill pride within people regardless of race, nationality or circumstance and we use architecture, design and enterprise as tools for relieving poverty and transforming lives. Our build projects focus on the process of design and construction rather than just the final product. We believe this process is a powerful tool for affecting social change and empowering people through the sharing of skills and knowledge on site. With a strong belief in the power of enterprise to affect social change, we work on projects and with partners that support and drive the local economy. We engage local resources and women in construction to create high quality built spaces that promote health, education and equality.

Team

  • Jai Mexis

    is an award-winning architect and one of the leading young social entrepreneurs in Greece. Jai is the Founder of Olon Architects, a Greek architecture company, and Co-Founder and Director of Odyssea, a humanitarian startup in Greece focusing on up-cycling, digital fabrication and design. He was awarded the City of Glasgow Eimear Kelt Medal for Architecture 2014, as well as several other architecture prizes. Jai specializes in the intersection of social design and architecture for humanitarian relief. His practice is already completing the design & construction of a large 4000m2 community center in the outskirts of Athens as well as a school for 800 orphan children in Enugu, Nigeria amongst other humanitarian & tech architectural projects.

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  • Loukas Oikonomakis

    was born in Athens and studied civil engineering in NTUA. He has an MSc in Structural Engineering from Imperial College London and has worked for a big architectural firm in London. He is specialised in optimisation, parametric design and computational analysis and he likes to read about machine learning and algorithms, trying to keep up with the latest advances of AI. In his free time, he likes writing code on data analysis, hiking in the mountains and thinking about the future of society and engineering.

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  • Mike Gkouliamakis

    was born in Athens and completed RIBA part 1 at Kingston University in London, UK. After a placement year in a small architectural firm in the center of London, he went on to complete his studies in Politecnico di Milano, Italy. In his thesis, he first identified and then explored the satisfaction of human needs both within the house and the neighborhood and his main interest is in human scale Architecture and specifically housing. Furthermore, he specializes in 3d visualization where he is always on the search for new tools to bring renders closer to reality

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