Every new beginning unsettles the fact of reality.

A first year course in architecture is, on the one hand, a general introduction to society, culture, the environment and, on the other, to the nature, role and context of architecture. In the Department of Architecture at the University of Patras, a first year's experience is both focused research and intuitive discovery.

During the first semester students reconsider facts and search for their connections through a series of sequential projects: recording the thresholds of their homes as both common ground and potentially unpredictable spaces; discovering and mapping the city as a route between two randomly paired thresholds; and finally intervening at a critical point of the route, in the urban territory.

Students discover conceptual coherence and the impact of a design proposal; their architecture becomes a log for their first months at university, and drawing -in section, axonometric, and time- a key tool for discovering and understanding their passage into an entirely new state of mind.