Elisavet Kiourtsoglou
Elisavet Kiourtsoglou
Position: Assistant Professor
Academic field: Design and Sound Studies
ΦΕΚ Γ’ 2309/15.09.2022
Email: ekiourtsoglou@uth.gr
Tel.: +30 24210 93055
Personal website:
Research Interests & PhD Supervision Topics: Analogies between Arts and Sciences, Theory and History of Architecture, Architectural Design, Sound Studies, Design Narratives, Architecture & Music, Sound Studies, Sonic Environments, Acoustic Space, Atmospheric & Sensory Studies, Embodied Spatial Experience, Critical Disability Studies, Representational Practices (textual, visual, sonic), Architectural Epistemology, Architecture & Media, Cultural Imaginaries of Space, History of Post-war Greece, 20th-Century Architectural & Cultural History, Interdisciplinary Design Studies
I am an architect-engineer and researcher with a deep interest in the intersections of architecture, music, the arts, and the sciences. I hold a diploma in Architectural Engineering (University of Thessaly) and a postgraduate degree in the History and Theory of Architecture (NTUA). I completed my PhD at Université Paris 8, where I was awarded scholarships from the French Government, the Leventis Foundation, the Michelis Foundation, the Foundation for Education and European Culture, and the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY). My PhD dissertation on the relationship between music and architecture in the work of Iannis Xenakis received the Prix de la Recherche from the Académie d’Architecture in Paris (2017). I am the author of the monograph On Rhythm in Architecture: Iannis Xenakis (Nefeli, 2022) and co-editor of The Sound of Architecture: Acoustic Atmospheres in Place (Leuven University Press, 2022, with Angeliki Sioli). I have published in international peer-reviewed journals and have taught in several architecture schools in France. Since 2019, I teach in the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries.
I investigate how design narratives emerge through theoretical discourses, sensory practices, representational techniques, and cultural frameworks. A key focus of my work is the intersection of architecture and music—including rhythm, structure, sonic perception, and listening—as a way of understanding how spatial meaning is produced. I examine how sound, music, acoustic environments, and atmospheres influence the imagination, representation, and lived experience of space. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies, I explore how different embodied and sensory modalities—hearing, listening, multi-sensory perception—are integrated into or excluded from disciplinary accounts of design. This perspective foregrounds questions of normativity, access, and sensory difference in the shaping of architectural knowledge. I also pursue an interest in the history of post-war Greece, analysing how design practices, material and sonic infrastructures, media representations, and cultural imaginaries reconfigured spatial and sensorial conditions in the post-war decades. Across these areas, I approach design as a dynamic field where knowledge, embodiment, the arts (not least music), and media continually reshape the ways in which space is produced, narrated, and inhabited. I am particularly drawn to writing and storytelling as means of producing theory and rethinking how knowledge about space is constructed.
I supervise PhD theses that examine how design narratives are constructed across theoretical, sensory, musical, technological, and historical frameworks. I am particularly interested in the relationship between architecture and music, and in the role of sound, listening, atmosphere, and acoustic environments in shaping spatial experience. My work also incorporates Critical Disability Studies, as well as my interest in the history of post-war Greece, understood as a site where design, memory, and cultural imaginaries intersect. I am especially drawn to projects that explore how knowledge, embodiment, the arts, and media influence the ways we imagine, describe, and inhabit space.
