Ioulia Lazou + mikrotexnima

Ioulia Lazou is an Athens-based architect, jewelry designer, and multi-disciplinary creator. She views architecture as the centre of an expanded field of experimentation, spanning from large-scale building construction to miniature wearable pieces.

Her professional career begins from her student years and includes graphic design, jewelry, furniture and building construction. Ioulia’s multi-faceted engagement with various forms of expression results from perceiving architecture as the center of an expanded field of experimentation. She is the creator behind Mikrotexnima, where she applies architectural principles to jewelry. She defines jewelry as “the minimum architectural matter that can exist in space,” using geometric abstraction to translate urban landscapes into wearable forms. In her projects she “plays” and experiments with scale, materials, end-user and function, adapting each of these elements to the conditions of each study. Because of her architectural path came her preoccupation with jewelry which completes her search around scale and material as she defines jewelry as the minimum architectural matter that can exist in space.
The architectural jewel is the spatial transcription of an incessant, inner drive generated by her wandering around the city and interacting with its people:                                                     it’s the product of an endless process of observation, research and experimentation. It’s a composition of diverse fragments governed by a single geometrical consistency, a consequence of the reading of the built landscape and the personal need to translate this to a tangible, intimate and more human scale.