Alexandre Pavlidis designs an underground house on the Greek island of Sifnos with an atmosphere of calm that invites contemplation

The island of Sifnos, with barely seventy kilometres of coastline, retains the arid, mountainous landscape typical of the Cyclades: hills covered in cultivation terraces, dry-stone walls that hold the earth in place where the ground falls toward the sea, and a handful of villages —Apolonia, Artemonas, Kastro— that barely alter this geography of stone and light. A Greek island, full of peace, hard to imagine. In this landscape, far from the island’s more travelled routes, Alexandre Pavlidis Architect has designed Fysika, a house that gives up building itself on the hillside to build itself, instead, inside it.

Of the retaining walls that structure the land, one disappears, and in its place the house rises, taking on its function and continuing underground the agricultural logic that already existed there. There is no volume added to the hillside; there is a substitution. The construction occupies the gap left by a wall, is covered again with earth and vegetation, and lets the landscape close back over it.

The house merges with the site and reveals its essence within

The result, seen from outside, is an almost invisible intervention. Of the whole, only the old shepherd’s hut that already occupied the plot remains in view; everything else —walls, terraces, planted roof— still reads as the same agricultural land as always. There is no façade to recognise, no volume that stands out against the skyline. The architecture has chosen not to compete with the landscape, but to continue it. This gesture of disappearance connects, in fact, with the project’s own name: Fysika comes from the Greek φύσις —fýsi—, meaning nature, but also the essence of things. The house plays with both meanings at once: it dissolves into the nature of the place while revealing, once inside, the essence of inhabiting it.

The entrance is a staircase at the foot of the shepherd’s hut, which takes the visitor underground and, step by step, draws them away from the direct sun of the Cyclades. From there, the house reveals itself through the sequence of its spaces. Masses of stone, narrow passages, courtyards and occasional openings unveil the house in fragments, alternating moments of compression with rooms that suddenly open toward the sea and the islands on the horizon.

“It’s a project of desire. Underground, protected, it’s a place that doesn’t reveal itself easily. The eye constantly tries to guess what lies behind each of the masses of stone it encounters; the project remains wrapped in silence and mystery,” says Alexandre Pavlidis.

This sequence responds to an interior organisation built around large blocks of stone that act as support —bearing the concrete slab and the earth that covers it— while also housing the house’s service spaces, leaving the main rooms between them free, continuous and open to the landscape. The section of the house thus works on two simultaneous registers: solid volumes that bear the load, and a habitable void that flows between them.

“The boundaries between inside and outside blur. You can never fully anticipate the shape of the next space, or the light it will hold at different times of day,” says Pavlidis.

The materials underline the character of the architecture

The materials follow this logic throughout the intervention. Stone and exposed concrete build the structure and most of the surfaces, underlining the idea of a house carved into the earth rather than built on top of it. Against that mineral rawness, the oak joinery and furniture, designed specifically for the house, bring the domestic warmth that the rest of the project deliberately leaves in the background.

Light is the instrument that makes that mass of stone habitable. Courtyards, skylights and circular openings in the roof carry it to the centre of the plan, where it composes different atmospheres depending on the hour: a square courtyard open to the sky, a sheet of water that casts the reflected sun against the ceiling, olive branches moving in the air. These are small gestures that bring calm into an otherwise mineral, compact whole.

“I think one ends up falling into contemplation of these lights, which spread in ever-changing ways through the calm of the spaces, as if responding to the infinite variations of the light on the sea before us. I hope that there, one is more present than usual, in the moment,” says the architect.

Project: Fysika. Dentro de la tierra.
Location: Sifnos, Cícladas, Grecia.
Architecture: Alexandre Pavlidis Architect.
Completed: 2026.
Floor area: 450 m².
Plot area 10.000 m²
Photography: Simone Bossi y Alexandre Pavlidis.
Source: Alexandre Pavlidis.

Alexandre Pavlidis

Alexandre Pavlidis is a Greek architect based in Paris, founder of the studio that now operates under his own name, Alexandre Pavlidis Architect. He trained at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), completing his Bachelor’s in Architecture between 2011 and 2014 and his Master’s between 2016 and 2018, with a professional period in between that proved decisive to his formation.

In 2014 he joins OMA, in New York, where he spends eight months working on façade design, massing, concept development, model making and imagery, under the direction of Rem Koolhaas. In 2015 he moves to David Chipperfield Architects, in Berlin. Both experiences —the ability to think architecture at large scale without losing precision, and a discipline of material and formal restraint— become references he will later recognise as his own.

Back in Paris, he founds Pavlidis Architectes in 2015, the first step of an independent practice that becomes Office Muto in 2018. The studio keeps that name for several years, before recently renaming itself Alexandre Pavlidis Architect, with offices in Paris, Athens, Lausanne and Milan, and Sifnos as a singular outpost within its Greek geography.

Between 2020 and 2023 he combines professional practice with teaching at ENSA Paris-Val-de-Seine. The same concept that guides his architecture —what makes a space endure— also defines his work as a teacher.

This idea of permanence defines his position as an architect: spaces capable of suggesting action and imagination through the precise definition of quiet, ordinary elements, set apart from the expressiveness that characterises much of contemporary production, and conceived to age with dignity. It is also the title of the book Pavlidis is currently writing: L’Architecture, Art de la Permanence.

This trajectory has received sustained recognition: the Europe 40under40® Design Award in 2024, the Architecture Masterprize in 2023, and nominations for the Équerre d’Argent in 2020, the Greek Architecture Awards in 2023 and the International Piranesi Award that same year.

Project by Alexandre Pavlidis