Rena Sakellaridou

Rena Sakellaridou (, born October 16, 1955) is a Greek architect who, along with Morpho Papanikolaou, is founding partner of the Greek architecture firm SPARCH. The author of Mario Botta: Architectural Poetics and Sea Voyage: Photography by Erieta Attali, she is a professor of Architectural Design at the School of Architecture of The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is known for her research, writing, and design focusing on form, space, and composition. Sakellaridou has been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe and arcVision awards for women in architecture. She also was featured in the exhibition "Frau Architekt" at the Goethe Institute in Athens in the spring of 2021, recognized as a female architect who "has made a mark on the evolution of Greek architecture in the past 100 years." SPARCH, like Sakellaridou, is well-recognized, having received numerous international and national design awards, including by the Hellenic Institute of Architecture.

Early life and education For Sakellaridou, architecture emerged as a profession over time. As a child, she remembers her non-architectural dreams of being a captain on the seas, as she was born in the port city of Pythagoreion, as well as her later considerations of law school in light of her father being a judge. Still, a sense of space has been important to Sakellaridou since her earliest experiences.

Career Highlights and Design Rationale Sakellaridou sees architecture as the poetics of space and form, organized into an integrated whole through architectural order, materiality, and light. Botta's approach that skillfully integrates new and old is seen in Sekallaridou's own work of the expansion of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Library, which she designed along with Papanikolaou and with Anastassios Kotsiopoulos. With the growth of the university and the need to expand the library, the decision was made to locate much of the expansion space underground, following a larger university strategy of underground construction that aimed to restore the campus's urban fabric. The result is a building described as an inspiring invention containing majestic space and providing calming comfort for students.

Large Projects and Innovation One of Sakellaridou's foremost works is the 30,000 m2 Agemar Headquarters for the Angelicoussis Maritime Group of Companies in Athens, completed in 2018. The fluid geometry of the shape suggests a form flowing on the sea. The reinforced concrete building houses five floors of open-plan offices, bridge and engine simulators for maritime use, an amphitheater, a ground-floor library, a company museum, roof gardens, a vertical garden, a restaurant, and a gym.

Another of SPARCH's larger projects is the NBG Insurance Headquarters complex in Athens, which represents a collaboration with Botta. The office complex features two main solid forms arranged around a public square, facilitating views of the nearby Acropolis, and an atrium filled with glass skywalks. The project, which lies substantially underground so as to minimize the impact on the urban fabric, emphasizes movement and light by transforming masses to voids. Sakellaridou highlights that the project is typical of Botta's style in its symmetry, geometry, and solid form. The collaboration of Botta and Sakellaridou is notable in light of the latter's scholarship about the former in Mario Botta: Architectural Poetics.

Additional Works Electra Palace, Thessaloniki, 2020 (renovation) Iaso Thessaly General Hospital, Larissa, 2009 Astir Palace Gate & Entrance Canopy (for 5-Star Hotel complex), Athens, 2008 Horizontal House, Thessaloniki, 2008 NBG Cultural Foundation Bookstore, Thessaloniki, 2007 Limani Business Center, Thessaloniki, 2003 New National Bank Office Building, Thessaloniki, 2002