Teaching architecture is more than teaching students how to design functioning, stable and aesthetically pleasing spaces. It is also about introducing the students into a constant engagement with the shifting conditions of humanity, and about investigating the ways in which their inherent sensitivity and acquired knowledge can be of service to the human condition both in an architect's immediate environment, as well as in the ever-expanding global society.
The posters present a small selection of projects completed for the studio course "Architecture under Extreme Conditions", offered in the School of Architecture, Faculty of Technology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, during the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 academic years; the students were asked to design an emergency shelter or a small medical unit to be employed in a disaster-stricken area. Neither exhaustively presented, nor thoroughly detailed, due to the limitations of space and time, the selected projects do, however, demonstrate the range and scope of the students' ideas, and their imaginative engagement with issues of design, building technology, sustainability and relief efforts, on a brief that is unusual and unglamorous yet very real and deeply human.