Manolis Stavrakakis was born in Heracleion (Crete) in 1981. He studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University (MSc in Advanced Architectural Design). He has been practising as an architect and teaching since 2005 in Herakleion, Athens and London.
Most would agree that Michael Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B is one of the twentieth century’s great moments of identification. It is widely acknowledged that his discovery was the more remarkable because he was not a professional scholar. At his death some obituaries suggested that perhaps it was something to do with his training as an architect. There the matter has rested. This thesis argues that while Ventris lacked others’ experience in the field, his advantage came not only from the conventional category of his ‘brilliance’; it was also indebted to the forms of analysis, which he had acquired as part of an architectural training. PhD completed in 2015.
