Athens Archipelago by Iliopoulou Christina

THIS IS NO T A M A NI FES TO ATHENS ARCHIPELAGO

Politecnico Di Milano Architecture And Urban Design 2019 This is Not A Manifesto-Athens Archipelago

Professors : Croset Pierre-Alain Authors : Aspasia Mitropapa Christina Iliopoulou Yunus Alperen Basak

A sweet hour. Athens sprawls like a hetaira offering herself to April. Sensuous scents are in the air, the spirit waits for nothing any more. The silver of the evening’s eyelids droops, grows heavy up above the houses. Queenlike the Acropolis puts on the sunset’s crimson like a robe. The first star rises with a kiss of light. A zephyr by Ilissus falls in love with quivering laurels, rosy nymphs. A sweet hour of delight and love, when small birds chasing one another raise a wind that beats upon a column of Olympian Zeus… -Kostas Karyotakis

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION II.

STOA: THE STORYTELLER OF THE URBAN EXPERIENCE

i. STOA: BETWEEN FORM AND INFRASTRUCTURE ii. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE STOA AND ITS PLACE IN SOCIETY iii. THE EXISTING STOAS OF ATHENS: REFLECTORS OF SOCIAL PHENOMENA III. ATHENS AS AN ARCHIPELAGO i. READING THE CONSTELLATION OF ATHENS ii. SPACE OF COEXISTENCE: ATHENS OF ARCHITECTURAL SPECIES AND EXACERBATED DIFFERENCES iii. CONTAINING EVENTS: IMAGINATION AS A SOCIAL CRITIQUE iv. METHOD OF LECTURE AND ANALYSIS FOR EACH ISLAND IV. ABOUT ARCHITECTURE (…OR THE LACK OF IT)

i. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF ARCHITECTURE ii. WHICH TRUTH DO YOU WANT TO TELL?

V. THE ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS: DREAM MACHINES (DON’T BE AFRAID OF BAD DREAMS)

i. THE STOA OF DESIRES ii. THE APPARATUS STOA iii.THE NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC STOA iv. THE STOA OF SOLITUDE v. THE STOA OF HEALING vi. THE UN-INTERRUPTED STOA vii.THE STOA OF TIME viii.THE STOA OF REVOLUTION ix. THE VERTICAL STOA

VI.CONCLUSION: SEDUCING THE STRUCTURES OUT OF THEIR CONTEXT

I. INTRODUCTION: MAN IS NOT BY NATURE AN ATHENIAN ANIMAL

ATHENS. Even the word alone wakes up a multitude of associations, mythical, philosophical, historical and architectural. When one thinks of Athens, surely the first image that comes to the mind is that of the Acropolis, perched seemingly weightless, floating above the city, one dreams of ancient agoras and theatres and of mystical temples, in which Gods recline. And, sure(!), Athens is all of these things. It is impossible to take a stroll in the historical triangle without being reminded of its glorious historical heritage. However, Athens is also much more than just this. It is so much more than just its ancient heritage. It could be characterised as a historical and cultural fusion, combining elements of the oriental and occidental world, a product of war, social unrest, engaged in an eternal battle against time.

Usually when one visits Athens for the first time, one expects to see an urban and architectural scenography almost identical to the one of Rome, but in reality Athens as an image of the city is much closer to Latin American capitals, rather than its European counterparts, due to the fact that (like Latin American capitals) it is a city that has developed mostly in the last 150 years. Athens is always hovering between being the epitome of antiquity and the epitome of modernity. During our contemplations and discussions about why we were interested in doing our thesis in Athens, it always burned down to the same subjects: its diversity (social, architectural and otherwise), its identity and its complexity. We were interested in looking at the city as a whole, but we were also anxious to discover another image of Athens, other than the one that we already had in mind. Today there are three comprehensive and synthetic images of the city: The poly-centric metropolis, the urban archipelago and the generic city, seem to be pervasive in a vast panorama of narratives and discourses ranging from the geographer account to the spatial-development policy document, from the architectural criticism to the design summary. All these theories can be applied to the context of Athens which can be read through multiple theoretical lens and still make sense as a city. Another important factor that we wanted to integrate into our project was a description of the narrative that is Athens through our own eyes. To communicate with images what is Athens and find an opportunity to show all its facets hidden and unconcealed. We were interested in conceptualising land territory and defining problems to be addressed and to explore architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place in regard to these problems. In particular we were searching an occasion to confront some of the social problems that are currently ravaging the Greek society (economic crisis, immigration, conservatism) and provoke some kind of meaningful discussions and use architecture to make a social critique. However, we were also interested in creating some kind of new architectural typology or, rather push the concept of architectural archetypes in order to produce new forms.

Secchi, Marialessandra. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Three Images of the Contemporary City.â&#x20AC;? 2013

Therefore, we thought long and hard about the architectural typologies that run through the athenian urban fabric and through our exploration we discovered the typology of the stoa, which runs throughout the city and is materialised through many architectural expressions. Ancient (Stoa of Attalus), neoclassic, modern and so on. Seen as the stoa is an architectural expression, but at the same time and urban tool we set out on a quest to explore these two big notions that are architecture and urbanization and possibly with the help of the stoa develop a dialogue between the two.

II. STOA: THE STORYTELLER OF THE URBAN EXPERIENCE i.STOA:BETWEEN FORM AND INFRASTRUCTURE

The central idea of the project would be to explore, re-establish and reinvent the urban fabric of the Athenian centre using the architectural typology of stoa as an urban tool (gallery, passage). Let’s start by the definition of the so-called stoa and its general role in the Athenian urban fabric. Stoa in Ancient Greece was ‘‘a portico usually walled at the back, with a front colonnade designed to afford a sheltered promenade... In Greek architecture, a free standing colonnade or covered walkway of public character; also, a long open building with its roof supported by one or more rows of columns parallel to its rear wall. Stoas were lined marketplaces and sanctuaries and formed places of business and public promenades”2 Stoa in the context of contemporary Greek urbanism is the commercial gallery that penetrates the block. Usually (but not always) these passages create alternative routes to connect two or even more axes of the city. The ones not connecting streets usually lead to the heart of the block, which due to legislation and complicated relations of ownership and tenure between the owners of the buildings composing the blocks are usually spaces in lamentable condition. The contemporary stoa can be characterised as a fusion of public space and market space. Our decision to study and use the stoa as an urban tool lies in the fact that it helps reveal the complexity of the urban network and all its hidden facets. In these hidden, secret places lies the magic of the Greek city. In a diffused and condensed network of interstitial spaces at the very small scale that outline the section of the city where everyday life takes place. Tiny streets, arcades, small squares, backyards and residual areas. In a constellation of empty plots and terrain vagues. Yerolympos when talking about the passages of the city of Thessaloniki states. ‘And it is strange that, so far, a fascinating aspect of its urban space, a multitude of informal, sometimes hidden pathways that follow parallel circuits to the official street network, remained relatively unnoticed, maybe because it was so intimately integrated in the urban fabric. Impressed by the pure geometry of the plan in the historic centre of the city, people considered the frequent presence of interior passages as no more than small trivial incidents that still enrich the daily courses with alternative choices. […] These pathways compose a grid of narrow alleys, unexpected openings, dark humid backyards and they may lead the flâneur 3 to unexpected microcosms or simply nowhere; a topography that encourages wandering in much the same way that the undulations of the brain mislead the ideas that reside in it; and sometimes they guide them to a wide boulevard, or they abandon them in a blind, dark alley.’4 This same exact description could easily apply to Athens. A fluctuation between private and public, space and time. 8

Free Merriam Webster Dictionary, Encyclopaedia Eleftheroudaki, Athens, 1927

Term coined by Walter Benjamin, the wanderer

Yerolympos, Alexandra Invisible Itineraries, in Eneninda Epta97, 1966

ii. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE STOA AND ITS PLACE IN SOCIETY

The name used for these urban object of the passage or galleria in Greece is stoa, an ancient Greek word still alive, that indicates “an ancient Greek portico usually walled at the back, with a front colonnade designed to afford a sheltered promenade...In Greek architecture, a free standing colonnade or covered walkway of public character; also, a long open building with its roof supported by one or more rows of columns parallel to its rear wall. Stoas were lined marketplaces and sanctuaries and formed places of business and public promenade”.5 Our context is Athens, a city always enslaved to its history, so there is no way we can avoid talking about Stoa of Attalus, which is the prototype for the architectural typology of the stoa. Typical of Hellenistic art, the stoa is a large-scale building. It has two floors: the ground floor belongs to the Doric style and the first floor to the Ionic style, the two levels are connected by two staircases located at the ends of the building. There is a row of rooms behind the colonnades on both floors. The architectural typology of the stoa in ancient Greece always was associated with a commercial function. What is interesting about the marketplace typology throughout is that the market is the place where existing social, ethnic, religious,or class framings loose ground and sociability can be deployed.

Yerolympos, Alexandra Ancient Typologies and Modern Plans, Market Streets and Passages in the Contemporary City,2012

Geist, Johan Friedrich. “Le passage.” Un type architectural du XIXe siècle (1989)

Regarding the modern passage today, one would say that it is mostly based on the concept of the Parisian passage. In 620 pages, Johann Geist gave a most precise, comprehensive and rigorous definition of the European, namely the Parisian passage. Indeed according to Geist the passage is an architectural typology of the beginning of the 19th century, that developed in the specific urban fabric of Paris, during the precise period of intense capitalist growth. For him seven properties define the passage: as access to the interior of the block; as public space on private property; as asymmetrical space (having the same street fronts on both sides); as roofed space lighted from the top and protected from bad weather; as system of distribution of movements; as space of transition linking two streets; finally as system of organisation of the retail commerce, along with bazaars,‘magasins de nouveautés’,‘grands magasins’, where new fashionable articles, -clothing or household furnishings -,and luxurious objects are sold.6 In Greece the stoas would be a fusion of the Parisian passage and the tradition of the Turkish covered market, while simultaneously combining local particularities. The ‘rediscovery’ of the passages in Paris in the 1970s and their regeneration resulted into their conversion into places for expensive trade, giving them back their original function. Concerning the initial construction of the passages in

Paris In the 18th century, the popularity of metal as a construction material was one of the reasons the passage became so popular as an architectural typology, because their size and monumentality allowed architects to promote this new material and its capacities. The passage also played an active role in the emergence of the middle class in 18th century France. Luxury goods until then were only available to a very small minority of the population, the so-called bourgeoisie, who used to make their purchases in small exclusive boutiques. The beginning of industrial (or mass) production marked the creation of the passages, their social factor and their function. The passages were open to the public and their character was purely commercial, selling industrially produced goods, thus making all kinds of products available to a much larger part of the population, than before marking in this way the emergence of the middle class. Therefore, we could conclude that the stoa were a political and social trigger. The emergence of various types of passages in Greece is due to a dual heritage, western and oriental. In Thessaloniki for example the interest of investors for these places in the 90s, years of economic growth, resulted in their gentrification, transforming many of them in extravagant wine bars, elegant cafes etc. In the 1990s activity in the passages was vivid. A revisiting of the area in 2012 confirmed notable change. Business of all kinds in the passages including recreation, just as the commercial and service firms everywhere in the city, is in severe recession. The gates to the spontaneously transformed corridors are locked; many shops are closed in the Bazaar, while entire urban blocks are empty and in the worst stages of decay. As the passage in Greece historically addressed the demands of the small economy/the small capital, one would expect that the restarting of the Greek economy could be based, among other factors/ parameters, on the revitalization of small business, a field where Greeks have always been particularly resourceful; the passages could then be the places to launch a new start for the suffering Greek economy.7 There is an ambiguity in terms of the identity or legal status of the stoas in Greece, stressing their condition of availability and indeterminacy. The modern stoas of greek cities have no spatial relation with the Stoa of Attalus. Along the sides of long corridors, crossing backyards, occupying mezzanine floors, staircases or basements, tiny cafes and all kinds of workshops were established, along with micro-services of the market such as barber shops, raki shops, petition writers, photocopiers, sewing and mending ateliers, buttonhole makers, shoe repair /fixers, miniscule retail stores with colorful silk ribbons, shining beads, elaborate artificial flowers and old-fashioned hats, zippers, hand-made laces and embroidered handkerchiefs, all kinds of products that cannot afford the high cost of rents or the large dimensions of shops on the street front.8 During the surveys we saw that the modern stoa is usually a bricolage of cheap architectural objects very rapidly put together, which reflects the general attitude towards architecture during the second part of the 20th century in Greece. A very large number of the 80 stoas that we visited are of lamentable spatial quality, with bad lighting, non-existent ventilation. a pile of architectural elements thrown together with little regard to logic or aesthetics.

7, 8

Yerolympos, Alexandra Ancient Typologies and Modern Plans, Market Streets and Passages in the Contemporary City,2012

iii.THE EXISTING STOAS OF ATHENS: REFLECTORS OF SOCIAL PHENOMENA

The goal of this thesis would not be to propose a (much-needed) type of renovation for the existing stoa, but to study them, understand them and include them in a greater scheme that would integrate them in the urban narrative of the Athenian urban mechanism. When Doxiadis talks about a city narrative he talks about composing a plot and combining an aspect of its ideology, in the same way characters are constructed in a novel. The street for him is a character in a narrative about a city. The stoas can be represented in that same way and become the storytellers of the urban experience. Same as the streets of Doxiadis, the stoas in Athens are a catalogue of the social and urban conditions of the city. They take the form of social enclaves very clearly capturing the condition of the block and neighbourhood they are situated in. When doing the survey of the existing stoas we were confronted with such a diverse number of actors and social realities that we were shocked. The stoas have been considered cities in the city throughout time and although theoretically we were very much aware of this, we truly discovered the truth of the depth of this description or statement. They are also the proof of the spatial and physical segregation that marks Athens. In the centre in the neighbourhood of Kolonaki the stoas are composed of fancy boutiques and brands, whereas in Omonoia for example there are stoas composed almost entirely of immigrant enterprises. Chinese and Pakistani people selling mobile phones, or electronic accessories and the rest of the stoas represent all the shades that exist between these social groups and functions. In Greece, public space is habitually generated by one single element: the table. When Point Supreme architects talk about the greek city they call it the city of tables. It is as if the Greeks are magnetised by the presence of the table, they immediately float to it and the stoas are no exception to this rule. Most of them are aligned by tables, even in a very informal manner and not in the context of a restaurant or a cafĂŠ. Even though the architectural quality of most of them is ambiguous, the ones that are still functioning and are in an acceptable condition are still very much in use. We could conclude that the stoas are a fusion of market place and public space. The exploration of the existing stoas reveals and reflects the very fragmented urban and social reality that is Athens of today. A city with multiple, diverse and complex social and spatial issues ravaged by the economical crisis, austerity, conservatism, close-mindedness, its complicated history and (of course) corruption. The spatial and social ruptures in Athens manifest themselves in very different ways making the urban fabric a very complex organism.

Many questions arose while discussing these issues. What is the role of an architect in such an environment? What is our role as political beings? What is our role as troubled young people? How should the future of Athens (and ultimately Greece) be? Are we here to propose solutions to problems? What kind of problems would those be and would any solution be realistic in this context? Putting all those questions aside for the moment we hoped to better understand the link between society and space by creating a base in order to comprehend Athens.

Sea of Athenian Stoas Stoas in the Frame of Athens Harilaou Trikoupi 4

Harilaou Trikoupi 4 Harilaou Trikoupi 2

Sofokleous 1

Sofokleous 1 Agiou Konstantinou 2

Sofokleous 4

Harilaou Trikoupi 2

Agiou Konstantinou 6

Agiou Konstantinou 18

Agiou Konstantinou 6

Agiou Konstantinou 2

Ippokratous 7

Sofokleous 4

Ippokratous 13

Fokionos 10 Agiou Konstantinou 18

Sofokleous 1 Tsaldari 1

Perikleous 28

Fokionos 10

Thiseos 11

Thiseos 7 Athinaidos 8

Tsaldari 1

Lekka 23

Agiou Konstantinou 2 Lekka 23

Thiseos 7

Tsaldari 4

Athinaidos 8

Ermou 6

Ermou 6 Tsaldari 4

Panepistimiou 59

Stadiou 40

Agiou Konstantinou 18

kolokotroni 15 Thiseos 7

Thiseos 7 Perikleous 21

Agiou Markou 28

Panepistimiou 56

Lekka 23

Ermou 18

Perikleous 28

Thiseos 16

kolokotroni 9 Voulis 14

Voulis 15

Ermou 8 Ermou 36

Voulis 14 Stoa Mpolani

Stoa Emporou

Perikleous 12 Dragatsaniou 6

Panepistimiou 59 Lekka 3

Agiou Markou 28

kolokotroni 9 Panepistimiou 59

Perikleous 7

Perikleous 24 Lekka 22

Euripidou 14

Stoa Vivliou

Ippokratous 1

Perikleous 21

Lekka 22

Stoa Mpolani

Thiseos 16 Ippokratous 1

Kornarou 4

Agiou Markou 11 Ermou 6

Stadiou 40

Thiseos 12

Mantaka 57

Panepistimiou 39 Stoa Mpolani

Praksitelous 33 Euripidou 14

kolokotroni 20

Petropoulou 19

Kairi 6

Panepistimiou 39 Panepistimiou 59

Dragatsaniou 2

kolokotroni 47

Sofokleous 5 Dragatsaniou 4

Plateia Omonoias 10

100

120

130

110

Natural Limits

Natural Limits, Pedestrian Axes

Natural Limits, Pedestrian Axes, Public Spaces

Plan of Stoas

Footprints

of Stoas

Praxitelous 33

Perikleous 7

1.Praxitelous 33

2.Perikleous 7 3.

Romvis 22

Perikleous 16

4.Perikleous 16

3.Romvis 22 5.

Dorou 2 6.

Karagiorgi Servias 10

5.Dorou 2

6.Karagiorgi Servias 10

Panepistimiou 34

Evaggelistrias 22

7.Panepistimiou 34

8.Evaggelistrias 22 9.

Athinas 36

10.

Kolokotroni 11

10.Kolokotroni 11

9.Athinas 36 11.

Ermou 36

12.

Ermou 10

11.Ermou 36

12.Ermou 10

13.

Ermou 6

14.

Dragatsaniou 2

13.Ermou 6

14.Dragatsaniou 2 15.

Ermou 8

16.

Dragatsaniou 4

16.Dragatsaniou 4

15.Ermou 8 17.

Ermou 18

18.

Dragatsaniou 6

17.Ermou 18

18.Dragatsaniou 6

19.

Agiou Markou 11

20.

Perikleous 7

19.Agiou Markou 11

20.Perikleous 7 21.

Perikleous 9

22.

Perikleous 28

21.Perikleous 9

22.Perikleous 28 23.

Aiolou 70

24.

El. Venizelou 64

23.Aiolou 70

24.El. Venizelou 64

25.

Panepistimiou 57

26.

Kolokotroni 17

26.Kolokotroni 17

25.Panepistimiou 57 27.

Panepistimiou 56

28.

Ippokratous 1

28.Ippokratous 1

27.Panepistimiou 56 29.

Voulis 8-10 30.

Ippokratous 9

29.Voulis 8-10

30.Ippokratous 9

31.

Ippokratous 13 32.

Athinaidos 8

31.Ippokratous 13

32.Athinaidos 8 33.

Kornarou 4

34.

Kornarou 6

34.Kornarou 6

33.Kornarou 4 35

Kornarou 2

36.

Dragatsaniou 6

35.Kornarou 2

36.Dragatsaniou 6

37.

Athinaidos 8

38.

Tsaldari 8

38.Tsaldari 8

37.Athinaidos 8 39.

Char. Trikoupi 2

40.

Char. Trikoupi 2

40.Char. Trikoupi 2

39.Char. Trikoupi 2 41.

Char. Trikoupi 4 42.

Athinas 42

41.Char. Trikoupi 4

42.Athinas 42

III. ATHENS AS AN ARCHIPELAGO i.READING THE CONSTELLATION OF ATHENS

The first step was trying to understand the base structure of the city, to find the greater logic that could help create a coherence between the different urban and social realities of Athens. By looking at the map there are some elements that undoubtedly stand out and seem to be holding the big splatter of urban development together, or rather defining it, instead of being defined by it. The random, unorganized physical relationship between the hills which was once explained by the hidden topography lying in between, prevents them from being perceived or appreciated as a whole. It is only from above that we can appreciate their full impact on the organization of the city. The Lycabeatus hill, the National Garden, Omonoia Square, the limit of the pedestrian street of Ermou and the infrastructure that marks the Kerameikos neighbourhood. In the south, the biggest regulator and dictator of all, the Acropolis standing proudly and almost indifferently on the hill. A lighthouse of hyper-identity, a tyrant, blocking the flood of grey, indifferently designed buildings. Ignoring them, pitying them, mocking them, defying them. In an eternal battle of what the city was and what it no longer is, or maybe what it always will be. What is very important in our approach is also the method of understanding and analysing the Athenian urban fabric. In the history of mapmaking, the accurate survey of topography is always a preliminary action for long-term urban reform, and the production of accurate maps always implies that there is powerful political stability.9 The random, unorganized physical relationship between the hills once explained by the hidden topography lying in between prevents them from being easily perceived or appreciated as as whole.It is only from above that we can appreciate their full impact on the organisation of the city.10 Despite the fact that we know the city very well we had never realised the obvious axial connections between the topographical elements, such as Lycabetus hill, Strefi Hill, the National Garden and Pedion Areos, because of the social ruptures creating enclaves within the city fabric. Therefore, we quickly realised that simply reading the structure of the city and accentuating its visible connections was not enough. Another aspect that we took into account was the ideological reading of the city. Looking to Piranesi’s instauratio urbis who turned mapping tools to the production of the knowledge of the city informed by conjectures, assertions and decisions rather than just ‘scientific facts’.

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. 2011. Point Supreme, Archipelago Cities,2011

We began by looking at the map of Athens and trying to understand the elements holding the big splatter of urbanisation together. Only by looking at the map were we able to understand the hidden relationships between the topography, the hills and natural spaces. And in this way, by using the topography as limits to define our area of intervention, we then proceeded to map what seemed to be important for the general urban structure of the city. During this procedure we discovered that most of the big planned open public spaces were acting as limits or rather spaces of transition between different urban realities and quickly realized the need for a new kind of lecture of the city. Benjamin Walter talks about ‘constructing the city topographically- tenfold and a hundredfold- from out of its arcades and its gateways, its cemeteries and bordellos, its railway stations and its…just as formerly it was defined by its churches and its markets. And the more secret, more deeply embedded figures of the city: murders and rebellions, the bloody knots in the network of the streets, lairs of love and conflagrations.’11 Let’s consider the former mentioned elements, geographical and physical limits that would allow as to contain the vital organs of identity of the urban organism that is Athens. However, we quickly came to realize that the layers of Athens and its defining elements are not merely physical, but epitomize collective and individual memories, the temporary and the informal. Analysing the physical form of the city was not enough to understand its essence, its culture and its political institutions which have shaped it throughout the years. Therefore, we attempted to follow a method of psychogeography (a term coined by Guy Debord) which describes the disjunction between the static geography of the institutional planning of the city and the dynamism and vibrancy of everyday life. In a first attempt to understand the polysemantic narration that is Athens.

Benjamin, Walter,The Arcades Project,1982

We came to realize that the existing passages themselves could be used for this psychogeography exercise. Each of them represented a different facet of the Athenian reality, combining different traditions, different social and urban realities. They manage to capture the planned and unplanned, the mundane and the unexpected, the formal and the informal, the life and death of the city. Their character depends on their location, on the borders that define them, the people that inhabit them. They themselves can be used as an analytical tool in order to define the different islands of the archipelago, the limits and borders and transitions of the urban space.

Athens could be characterized as a stage set for an infinite number of human and non-human transactions, planned and non-planned, authorized and illicit, which momentarily form part of the megalopolis and which ultimately will transform the whole. A sequence of fluid experiences that unfold over time. It is exactly this essence that we wanted to capture with the positioning and the programmatic functioning of the elements. To capture and give a backdrop of space to every mundane, everyday activity that could exist in the metropolis. Along the way we understood that we were more interested in a critical analysis of urban life as opposed to a critical analysis of the city and realised that the survey of the existing stoas was the ideal tool to present a juxtaposition of the kaleidoscopic social and cultural experience that is Athens.

ii.SPACE OF COEXISTENCE: ATHENS OF ARCHITECTURAL SPECIES-CITY OF EXACERBATED DIFFERENCES

When describing a city we habitually break it down into conceptual fragments, neighbourhoods, places of special interest or character. Debord talks about atmospheric fragments when describing this fragmentary vision of the city. According to Anthony Vidler, the city is considered as a whole, its past and present revealed in its physical structure. It is itself and of itself a new typology. This typology is not built up out of separate elements, nor assembled out of objects classified according to use, social ideology, or technical characteristics: it stands complete and ready to be decomposed into fragments. These fragments do not reinvent institutional type-forms nor repeat past typological forms: they are selected and reassembled according to criteria derived from the specific fragments and its boundaries, and often crossing between previous types; the third proposed by a recomposition of these fragments in a new context.12

Vidler, Anthony. “The third typology.”, 1978

Maganiotis, Alexandros Postcards from Athens, 1986_1990

Ungers, O. M., & Koolhaas, R. (2013). The City in the City: Berlin: a Green Archipelago: a Manifesto (1977)

The centre of Athens which is contained in an isosceles triangle of approximately 2km contains a multitude of fragmented neighbourhoods that reflect different social realities. There is no spatial or historical continuity because contrasting elements are merged without any coherent or logical sequence. Athens itself appears like a fragmented collage where elements of history are mixed with those daily actions that constantly remake the city.13 In this sense Athens is very much similar to 1970s Berlin. The triangle of the centre is composed by multitudes of islands which represent fragmented urban realities. And it is not so much the physical space that keeps them apart like in the case of Ungers’s Berlin, but rather the stark contrast and social schisms that manifest themselves as urban ruptures tearing the fabric apart. Physically and spatially they are very close together, but the social chasms between them force them apart. In our concept we accept this phenomenon and try to make the fragmentation the project for the city of Athens. In this aforementioned triangle rich, poor, immigrants, tourists, animals, women, men, freaks, geeks co-exist and move within some self imposed limits (hard boundaries) which are usually almost invisible but whose social perception is even stronger than their physical or spatial manifestation. Observing these different realities floating together but so evidently far apart the idea of Unger’s urban archipelago started to grow stronger and stronger in our perception of the city. We proceeded (much like Ungers did for Berlin) to identify and select the areas that already had a strong identity which in our opinion deserved to be preserved and reinforced. This selection was not based on aesthetic quality, but to the extent to which these areas embody ideas and concepts, but also social and political phenomena. 14

The image of the contemporary city as an archipelago of urban islands has gained a certain success in recent years as in interpretative image of the urban condition as well as a normative one. The archipelago has been seen as a metaphor able to condensate what the city intimately is; the place where we live separated; and the direction the city could take: defined parts avoiding the destiny of an indistinct mass of urban material.15 Recalling the idea of the urban archipelago frequently means to focus on a range of features of the contemporary city; the diversity of parts within and urban area and their internal rules the relations between parts, but also their reciprocal exclusion. The interest of the archipelago image resides in the way the ‘island’ is defined as part of the city. 16 Hanna Arendt claims that the existence of a space can only be decided by the parts that form its edges.17 But the question is what will define the edges of our islands? In Piranesi’s Campo Marzio the city appears only as buildings without streets and all other infrastructural means of continuity that are necessary for the city to function. In our case Athens takes the form of the sea and the only defined elements would be our chosen ‘islands of intervention’ and a series of elements that define the city’s identity. In this ‘unplugged’ condition of the city, all attributes of urbanity are gone. Rather than interpreting such a scenario as terminal point of the city , however Piranesi presents it as a latent beginning embedded with what already exists in urban space-the ruins. The difference between architecture and urban space is radicalized in order to show the architectural clues that allow the critical imagination to rethink the city, not through its managerial practices but a field of potential possibilities. In this way Piranesi overcame the insufficiency of architectural form, making it possible to rethink architectural design not as what exhausts the form of the city, but as what opens the potential for imagining it differently.18 For Koolhaas the grid is a sea and the plots are islands. The more different the values celebrated by each island, the more unified and total the grid that surrounds them. Ungers coins the term ‘Coincidentia oppositorum’, the coincidence or composition of not just different parts, but opposing ones, which leads to a CRITICAL UNITY.19 The aforementioned projects from Piranesi to Ungers to Koolhaas are all interpretations of the archipelago and different methods of separating the islands. In Ungers case the tool to define the islands was a group of buildings, in Piranesi’s case the tool was the ruins, in Koolhaas’s case the block and for us the tool to define our islands is the stoa. It is the device used to define and dictate the form of the island. Each stoa represents and reflects a different reality detaching the buildings that it is composing and is composed by from the urban fabric. According to this methodology each passage defines an island within the city and the islands are separated into two categories. Natural ones which are the islands of the already existing passages and artificial ones which are the islands that we are defining with our interventions.

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture, 2011

Marialessandra Secchi, Three images of the contemporary city, 2013

Arendt, Hannah. The origins of totalitarianism, 1973

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture, 2011

Ungers, O. M., & Koolhaas, R. (2013). The City in the City: Berlin: a Green Archipelago: a Manifesto (1977).

At this point is should be pointed out that there is a fundamental difference between island and enclave. The island’s existence depends on the functioning of the network of urbanization and so we would have no other choice than using the tool of rational urban analysis in the first phase of our lecture of the city. On the other hand the enclave is a self-organising, self-centering, self-regulating system created by urban actors with set boundaries.20 Therefore, even though the posture that we are taking might seem isolationist, new forms of connectivity would emerge through the introduction of hard boundaries and defined limits. The first step of the process was choosing the islands and the criteria for this choice was based on three elements, identity, structure and meaning. Identity in the sense of distinction from other objects. Structure would be the relationship to a larger pattern of elements and lastly, meaning being the the political and emotional value assigned to the island by the observer (which in this case is us thus introducing the idea of subjectivity). It requires first the identification of elements from others, second the relationship to others and lastly its meaning. The first and second one are the most legible/visible of the physical elements in cities while the third is very subjective.21

20,21

Lynch, Kevin. City sense and city design: writings and projects of Kevin Lynch. 1995

Ungers, O. M., & Koolhaas, R. (2013). The City in the City: Berlin: a Green Archipelago: a Manifesto (1977). Cedric Price, Citations for the Ducklands project

In the Green Archipelago the need to intervene on the whole without designing everything is evident. The procedure was based on the investigation of the design of the vacant open spaces, foreseeing the chance to work on a wider transformation of the contemporary city over time. Following the same procedure we investigated vacant open spaces, combining them with the flux based on existing pedestrian axes and existing passages and stoas. The choice of the vacant plots was strategic and in a quest of a continuous project that merges with and includes the established parts of the contemporary city without acting directly on them.22 The concept of Koolhaas’s Bigness or of Unger’s Grossform also applies to the greater system that we used. The big scale does not apply to what must be built or to the scale of one single building, but belongs to the total project of the contemporary city. The parts become subservient to the idea of the whole. According to Unger’s system of choosing the islands, the differentiations between the islands should not be only of an architectural or aesthetic nature. Social and political differences should be superimposed on the system of islands so that the units function also socially as identifiable enclaves. Treating the context of Athens as an artificial ecosystem whose life needs to be protected and sustained with care and delicacy and counting on the citizen’s identification with the site. Therefore, not providing some kind of solution by the means of architecture.23 Another important point of the process was to decide what kind of posture we would have when analysing and dissecting the internal ecosystems of each island that would ultimately define our general posture. Is what we are proposing a utopia, a dystopia, a critical manifesto, or social critique? After long process of discussion we finally realised that our process and project is not about judgment, but acceptance, acceptance of the perceived reality and an attempt to interpret it differently. According to Venturi architects are out of the habit of looking

non-judgmentally at the environment, because orthodox modern architecture is progressive, if not revolutionary, utopian and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture is anything but permissive. Architects have preferred to change the existing environment rather than enhance what is there.24 But, instead of criticising the architectural expression of each site and trying to propose improvements or solutions to the problems we merely decided to accept the situation of each of the islands and allow our perception of its reality to compose the programmatic alchemy of each new stoa. In the same way that Ungers did we reject the idea of recomposition and instead highlight the existing condition in order to transform fragmentation into a contrasting composition of forms. These disengaged enclaves would lie like islands on the otherwise liberated plain of the city and form an archipelago of architectures, intensifying the character and identity of each fragment instead of pretending to solve problems. The added structures fashioned out of the residual space would act in a symbolical manner capturing the essence of the neighbourhood they would be located in, but always based around the idea of a passage, of movement and flux. In Unger’s words it would be like the completion of the preserved fragments, that will now receive their architectural intervention, in this case always revolving around the idea of passage and movement. A juxtaposition of symbolical elements on a physical and spiritual journey of re-establishing the city and the society constructing it. Our intention is to respect the internal organisation and ecology of each island. The idea is that each added architecture would have the ability to embody and intensify the site. Each new structure would be activating context, not moralizing or interpreting the reality, but intensifying it.25 It’s a design strategy that plans the influence that objects would have on their context. Redefining the urban context created by the constant and unpredictable relationship between them and the complex reality of today. For this to happen we realised that we need to use a different kind of lecture or analysis, based on place-meaning rather than based on the rational urban elements of each island and always keeping in our sub-conscious the state of subjectivity which is strongly associated to the meaning of a place. Lynch claims the existence of three types of space. The first one would be the perceived space, the second would be the conceived space and the third, the lived space. The relationship of these types of spaces is transformed into place meaning. The meaning is studied through the quality of spaces, people’s activities, particular histories and people’s perception to their environment. Through the third space understanding, the meaning of observation of urban elements is a process to understand, to analyse and evaluate urban spaces, which are through not only the navigational elements, but also people’s social experiences (activities and particular histories). People’s navigational ability does not represent their true environmental experiences in urban areas, which cover physical, cultural and historical layer of space. 26

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. “Learning from Las Vegas,1977

Ungers, O. M., & Koolhaas, R. (2013). The City in the City: Berlin: a Green Archipelago: a Manifesto (1977).

Lynch, Kevin. City sense and city design: writings and projects of Kevin Lynch,1995

In this line of thought, our analysis of each island is not based on rational urban elements but rather takes the form of a narrative where we attempt to portray our experience of taking a stroll in each specific island. This method of analysis is of course very subjective since each individual’s experience of the urban space, the stimuli that one is exposed to and the sensations experienced are purely and entirely personal. In this way we attempt to show how these spaces feel, the sound and smell of them, which is of equal value to how these spaces look. In our analysis, the architecture of the city simply is reduced to one of Enrico Prampolini’s theatre sets. We show architecture only to the extent to which its form of expression facilitates or plays a role in framing an activity.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes

‘What if I took not only my own views of myself into account but also the other’s views of himself and of me? Already my body as stage director of my perception has shattered the illusion of a coinciding of my perception with the things themselves. Between them and me there are henceforth hidden powers, that whole vegetation of possible phantasms which it holds in check only in the fragile act of the look. No doubt, it is not entirely my body that perceives: I know only that it can prevent me from perceiving, that I cannot perceive without its permission; the moment perception comes my body effaces itself before it and never does the perception grasp the body in the act of perceiving.’27 -Merleau Ponty Maurice

iii. CONTAINING EVENTS : IMAGINATION AS A SOCIAL CRITIQUE

Let’s take the example of the neighbourhood Omonoia for instance. A nonhospitable urban environment with violent and complex social problems. Stigmatized by drug-trafficking, prostitution, immigration, poverty and lawlessness. What role could architecture play in this kind of environment? Would a police station solve the problem? Would ‘cleaning out’ the area as has been attempted many times by various governments solve the problem? The idea here is not to solve problems, it’s not to moralize. It’s about identity. As illustrated in our analysis boards the architecture of each island is acting merely as a stage set for the events that are taking place around it and its formal vocabulary is only important insomuch as the physical expression of the architecture aides in hosting or enabling an urban event. A portico is just a portico, the typology of the columns and its beauty or ugliness are not of any importance. However, in our interventions architecture ceases to be the backdrop for actions but becomes the action itself. Architecture becomes the discourse of events as much as the discourse of spaces. The main question here would be how to critically approach the political in order to define a possibility for the formal. The architecture of the parts of the archipelago must be made up of the attributes of urbanization-the common ethos of our civilization. By being forced into a form, these aspects will inevitably define a position, within the endless space of urbanization. Through the emerging position of a part, the political and the formal in architecture can be reconstructed.28 This posture justifies our choice of choosing the typology of stoa since it’s an architectural expression of an urban gesture, that would allow us to reflect on form, urbanity and the socio-political simultaneously.29 But, what sort of architecture incarnates the archipelago? What sort of architecture takes the form of a political expression or position? How could we define the programmatic alchemy and essential character of these critical forms that we are inserting to ‘complete’ or contain the islands of the archipelago? Architectural form has always been a controversial issue throughout the history of architecture. The principal conditions for the invention of objects and environments do not necessarily have to include a unitary statement of fit between form and use. Here it is the adoption of the city as the site for identification of the architectural typology has been crucial. In the accumulated experience of the city, its public spaces and institutional forms, a typology can be understood that defies a one-to-one reading of function, but which at the same time ensures a relation at another level to a continuing tradition of city life. The distinguishing

28,29

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. 2011.

characteristic of the new ontology beyond its specifically formal aspect is that the city polis, as opposed to the single column, the hut house, or the useful machine, is and always has been political in its essence. The fragmentation and recomposition of its spatial and institutional forms thereby can never be separated from their received and newly constituted political implications.30 Ironically even though we are using an architectural typology whose essence is to connect, our goal through using this typology would be to accentuate the existing fragmentation. These architectural archetypes destined to connect are being used as instruments of separation and thus of political action.31 Each new passage(stoa) will define the existence of an island, which in itself will be a condensation of the identity of the bigger island to which it belongs. The confrontation of parts can be achieved only based on common and existing aspects of the city, not ex-nihilo creation of the new.32 The passages throughout time and especially according to Water Benjamin have always been characterized as ‘cities in the city’. In this case the passages would define an island in an island. Even by taking into account the reality of the passages today in modern Athens they cannot be considered as an overall tool of connection when it comes to the city as large. However, they can be considered as a catalogue that very acutely describes and represents the fragmented realities of the Athenian centre. 30

Vidler, Anthony. “The third typology.”, 1978

Ungers, O. M., & Koolhaas, R. (2013). The City in the City: Berlin: a Green Archipelago: a Manifesto (1977).

32,33

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. 2011.

Life in a city, according to Aureli means constantly passing through borders and this statement could not be more true when it comes to Athens. Our goal is not to remove these borders, but simply to confirm them by inserting into the existing islands structures of concentrated (or condensed) identity. To redefine the meaning of the city as a site of confrontation and thus of coexistence.33 The spatial discontinuity of the city as the main (architectural?) form of the project. Rather than trying to ‘solve’ the crises of the city, the project’s methodology seeks to exploit them. Mapping seemingly ordinary, everyday features and events of the city and idealizing them not as default situations, but as explicit projects. According to Tschumi context is not a fact, it is always a matter of interpretation. Context is often ideological and hence, may be qualified and disqualified by concepts. In this case, the context is becoming concept, so the context is being transformed in the project’s concept. Concept and context become interchangeable.

In Koolhaas’s City of the Captive Globe urbanization is imagined as a collection of different and competing, built ‘ideologies’. He calls these structures ideological laboratories, where different kind of metropolitan consciousness are formed. According to him, each is equipped to ‘suspend unwelcome laws, undeniable truths and to create extreme artificial conditions’. In this sense, each of the islands will be hosting an ideology.34 Just like the passages already do, in their current state. Each structure would be a parallel between narrative and spatial sequence (like Edgar Alan Poe’s Red Death) an exploration of intricacies of space, feelings, perceptions and events. Exploring the relationship between architecture and event, between pure conceptual space and real space as the site of mundane and interesting, planned and unplanned activity.

Koolhaas, Rem, and Zoe Zenghelis. “The City of the Captive Globe.” (1972)

iv. METHOD OF LECTURE AND ANALYSIS FOR EACH ISLAND

Even though the choice of the positioning of the islands is based on a combination of social factors, urban analysis and mapping of empty plots, when it comes to the analysis of the chosen islands themselves the methodology of analysing them would be quite different. Instead of mapping the important axes, the connection to big public spaces and anything else that could be characterized as a rational approach our method would be mapping events and everyday life in each of the selected islands. Trying to understand these events, and to come up with ways to contain them, frame them, stage them, not moralize them or idealize them. According to Lefebvre, space is fundamentally bound up with social reality, it doesn’t exist in itself, it is produced.35 Therefore, we spent no time trying to analyze urban forms and supposed important axes. Instead we attempted to draw from our own personal experience of the site and of the city. Again the element of subjectivity was very much present, for the experience and lecture of a place is a very personal experience. The stimuli that one receives were very different and to combine three different experiences in one, seemed fascinating to us.

Lefebvre, Henri, and Donald NicholsonSmith. The production of space.1991

Eric Lapierre, Cut-up architecture, Toward a Unity of Time and Space, San Rocco,4, Fuck Concepts! Context!,2012

The method of analysis would be very much similar with Benjamin Walter’s way of approaching his Arcades Project. Looking at Athens as the city of the flâneur, where the human is merged together with the history of the Nation and with each anonymous individual experience, with each informal space, with each random flux and action by re-elaborating its very same constitutive materials. This is what each of these new critical structures strives to contain. If the generic city is the city defined by flux, Athens of the wanderer would be the anti-generic city, every intervention increasing its identity, its essence, its rhythm, its dream factor. The goal would be to create cynic, ironic, provocative and controversial structures of symbolism without any chronological, spatial or conceptual borders. Our initial idea was to imitate the context. Many architectural works correspond to the definition of mimetic contextualism but cannot be claimed to be contextual, for they don’t achieve the requisite unity with their context. To achieve this unity, the project must be the result of the significant depth of field mentioned earlier, which is not what happens with either mimetic, non-critical buildings or spectacularly “innovative” ones. In relation to their context, the projects belonging to the latter category seem like part of a cadavre exquis: they are similar to a word or preposition added blindly to an already-begun sentence, which ends up being either nonsensical, anecdotal or, more rarely, an enduring poem.36 We tried to refine this term by not exactly mimicking the context, but trying to understand its essence and then attempting to contain it. This way our architectural interventions would become simple containers for events and the form would be the residual space of the city.

THIS IS NOT A MASTERPLAN Map of artificial islands

This is not a Masterplan Map of artificial islands

3. 8.

2. 1.

100 m

200 m

1. Island of Time

2. Island of Healing

8.Vertical Island

9.Island of Revolution

3.Island of Desires

4.Island of Solitude

5.Non- Anthropocentric Island

6.Un-Interrupted Island

7.Apparatus Island

IV. ABOUT ARCHITECTURE..(OR THE LACK OF IT) i. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF ARCHITECTURE

The architectural approach was more about the built expression of the ideas and events we were attempting to frame. It is by no means a nostalgic reinterpretation of existing urban forms, but more a laboratory where we attempt to awaken the senses and communicate our interpretations of programmatic vocabulary. Throughout the process we struggled very much with the perceived image of Athens, its purported importance and monumentality. In the travellerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind Athens is the ultimate city of monuments, but that is an illusion. Athens is so profoundly modern and contemporary constantly engaging in an agonistic battle between its past, present and its future. The wanderer finds himself in a frustrating quest trying to discover significance and memory, where there is nothing except empty, grey, dead boxes. Just like any capitalist city of today it has two faces extreme individual anonymity and a seemingly limitless potential for encounter. 37

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. 2011

Due to their formalistic expressions, our interventions could be confused with trying to be monuments. The passage or galleria has the historical heritage of being monumental, from the arcades of Paris, to the Galleria Umberto in Naples, to the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan, (REFERENCE TO ROSSI’S DESCRIPTION OF VITTORIO) but their substance and their conception are quite the opposite of everything that is monumental. A monument is above all an urban form that defines and organises the urban fabric around it. The monument is what composes and defines the city, it is what generates the urban pattern. According to Dürer it is a machine for producing meaning, but also as an apparatus, a machine capable of producing organisation. It represents the contradictions of that time without actually solving them. 38 If a monument is by definition composing the city, standing for everything we believe as a civilization, defining the city and its urban fabric then our structures could be considered anti-monuments. When a monument is placed, the residual space around it becomes the city. The anti-monument is defined by the city instead of defining it. And in this sense our structures are always composed and defined from the residual space of the city rather than producing it. According to Dürer a modern monument would be a machine that produces meaning, rather than already having it. Constructing history for future generation, producing structures based on ideas, not functions. This way history of architecture coincides with the history of ideas. Furthermore, a monument represents an important moment in history, something clearly political, an expression of power and importance. We are not searching to do this we are merely attempting to frame, include and contain the mundane and the banal. To represent the ideas reflected in the urban and social symphony that is Athens without attempting to solve them. Our structures are merely physical means used to achieve either pleasurable recognition, eventual repulsion or complete indifference and the thousand shades that exist in between.

Dürer, The modern monument ,San Rocco, 4, Fuck Concepts! Context! (2012)

Rossi when talking about Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, claims that its quality lies in the fact that its monumentality allows the outer atmosphere to be part of it. However, Rossi only elaborates on the bigness of the structure that allows the landscape to be contained by it. In our case the bigness of the structure is unimportant, its scale doesn’t matter. Our structures would include the outer atmosphere by capturing and containing its essence, by embodying its concept not by their sheer size.

ii. WHICH TRUTH DO YOU WANT TO TELL?

There is a naïveté in believing that beautiful architecture (or even ugly architecture for that matter) can solve problems. Throughout our student path we are formatted to believe that architecture can make a difference and maybe it can. But then how would one explain the homeless people stacked next to the National Library (Ziller’s ….) . If architecture is so important how can one explain the syringes and feces on the ground? The putrid smell of urine and the hooded eyes of the drug addicts that frequent the passage adjacent to the Academy of Athens? The barefoot children sitting on the steps and the pregnant prostitute martyrically (torturously) standing at the corner? What is the role of architecture today and which is its importance? Architecture is insufficient. It is a frame for events, a container of realities, and reality is subjective, just like perception. It only conveys meaning through opposition or association.39 The world is ever changing and architecture should be changing with it. And when we say change we do not mean flexibility. When talking about architecture we should not be talking about walls and columns, monuments or iconic buildings, but about forms of expression. Even talking about the existing buildings or stoas each person views the world through their own personal kaleidoscope. The tourists taking selfies in front of the Academy are oblivious to the dark events happening just a few dozen meters further. ‘Whoo it’s hot !’ exclaims a German tourist buying water from a Pakistani immigrant with holes in his shoes, not even bothering to notice. Meanwhile a teenage girl passes fast with her head bent looking at the ground so as not to step on a syringe or piece of glass, a sad reminder of last night’s street clashes between traffickers. So you see, our architectural forms are destined or even condemned to be appropriated, to be used and worn out, ridiculed and reduced to nothing. Therefore, we are not daring to imagine any kind of solution. We are simply accepting this banal task of framing events and communicating two perceptions. White and black, life and death while keeping in our minds that there are a thousand shades of grey in between.

Jencks, Charles. “Semiology and architecture.” Signs, symbols and architecture. (1969).

In his 1991 article talking about the death of modernism and rationality Eric Owen Moss compares working on buildings to re-writing a text. As an attempt to contest the conventions and un-conventions in architecture and the way people experience their lives… ‘Does the bank define what’s real or are you prepared to contest that?’ These buildings don’t uncover a single truth, so which truth do you want to tell?’40 Moss when talking about about architecture contests that regardless of the function of a building there are experiences that affect or infect the work. There is a visible shift in the projects, over a period of years, from an attitude that is more extroverted (responding to the world as external stimuli), to one that is more introverted (trying to understand the world based on one’s internal perceptions. And yet you can’t get rid of the external quality entirely. Architecture can punch a hole in your sky. You have one frame of reference, someone else has another; we all have a certain way of understanding the world. You start to think that it’s enclosed that it has limits, but it really doesn’t. You think it has those limits even when you claim you don’t.41 And then someone kicks out the lid. It’s theological; it’s a revelation. The hole in the sky theory according to Moss, has to do with the impact of a building on people who experience it, and see that it reveals possibilities that stretch their understanding. That revelation could be social or political or something else. If they refer back to themselves, it might open up something that was not previously available. It’s not so much that there is a right or wrong understanding; it’s more that there seems to be a number of rights and wrongs overlapping. There are a number of possibilities, but not an infinite number. Because… How does the world really work? That changes too. I am prepared to say I can alter that perception, even if it’s an exception. It can be done. Not only in your head but out there. And people will recognise it. I think that’s objective. It’s funny -when you do this, you’re always denying connections. You can boil it down to one building, and quit lying.42 40,41,42

Moss, Eric Owen,Which truth do you want to tell, 1991

What is more important than architecture in this sense, are the acts of looking and understanding and these structures would behave more like viewpoints of rather distortions of reality that make social and political processes more transparent in the everyday environment of Athens.

V. THE ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS: DREAM MACHINES (DONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T BE AFRAID OF BAD DREAMS)

i. THE APPARATUS STOA

This specific island is characterised by the presence of the Parliament building, and multiple embassies and governmental buildings. The ‘completion’ of this island will take place on the street of Zalokosta, a pedestrian street that will be transformed into the stoa apparatus. Zalokosta could be rated as one of the most beautiful, looked after streets of Athens, but its character and spatial quality is of little to next to no importance. What is important about this street is its positioning in relation to the parliament, since its position and direction is perpendicular to the building. Greek society has always been entwined in an agonistic struggle when it comes to the relationship between the government (or any figure of authority for that matter) and the people. Perhaps this is also the reason for which Zalokosta is so sparsely animated and so dead compared to other streets of Athens. The Greek people have developed a repulsion for authority and the late governments of Greece have done little to soften the gaping crevice between them and the people. The urban expression of the parliament is the embodiment of this situation. The parliament is floating itself inside the urban archipelago, more like an enclave rather than an island, completely isolated, with extremely defined hard boundaries, its facade seemingly a cheap pastiche straight out of a theatre set. In front of this facade, tourists patiently await to see the change of the guards, young people are shaking protest banners screaming, beggars are tailing unaware Chinese tourists and the only real users of the public space formed in front of it are the pigeons. The stoa apparatus basically tries to embody and contain everything that the governmental building controls and contains, which is basically every law, institution, discourse, strategy and measure. Foucault uses the terminology of apparatus when he starts to concern himself with what he calls ‘governmentality’ or the ‘government of men’43 and this was our main base for creating the apparatus passage on this specific island. For us this is an opportunity to explore the architectural expression of elements that the apparatus is connecting. And since the apparatus is linked to the project of humanisation it is directly exploring what constructs humanity. But how does the apparatus attempt to nullify the animalistic behaviours that are now supposedly separated from him. 43

Deleuze, Gilles. “What is a dispositif.” Michel Foucault: Philosopher (1992)

But to briefly summarise what an apparatus is: a. It is a heterogenous set that includes everything, linguistic and non linguistic, under the same setting: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements. b. The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation. c. As such it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge. 44 The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements. This stoa would be the physical embodiment (or spatial expression) of the concept of the apparatus. Therefore, the apparatus is represented by the ribbons of circulation that connect the different cells between themselves. According to Deleuze, a social apparatus consists of lines of force. It could be said that they proceed from one unique point to another in the preceding lines; in a way they ‘rectify’ the preceding curves, draw tangents, fill the space between one line and another acting as go-betweens between seeing and saying and vice versa, acting as arrows that continuously cross between words and things, constantly waging a battle between them. The line of force comes about ‘in any relationship between one point and another’ and passes through every area of the apparatus. In the structure the line of force would be Zalokosta itself which penetrates every part of the project while the stoa takes the shape of a ribbon passing from every cell. The other given element would be the intersection of the two axes which would determine the positioning of the panopticon, the governing machine of the apparatus. A cylindrical element, rising higher than the others, almost like a lighthouse. An anti-parliament in the sense that it is open to everyone who would desire to question power, control and the constitutions that construct it. Taunting the activities of corruption and decadence taking place just a few hundred meters to its South, daring the parliament to imitate its transparency. This element derives from the nature of the apparatus, which is essentially strategic, a manipulation of relations of forces and it is always inscribed into a play of power. The panopticon (which derives from the Greek word for all-seeing, panoptes) is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of the institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell wether they are being watched. In this case we would be talking about an anti-panopticon which instead of being a device of control, becomes the device to control the control. But let’s not forget the fact that the word apparatus also has a technological meaning, therefore our architectural expression of this particular device and its cells takes the shape of a machine, or a mechanism.

Agamben, Giorgio. “ What is an apparatus?” ,2009

Deleuze, Gilles. “What is a dispositif.” Michel Foucault: Philosopher (1992)

The idea of the apparatus is directly connected to Foucaultâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s term of Oikonomia which according to him is a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control and orient-in a way that purports to be useful-the behaviours gestures and thoughts of human beings. Therefore, the apparatus could be characterised as a machine that causes subjectification. The next part of the exploration of the physical expression of the apparatus, is the cells, wherein we try to identify what is apparatus, what can format a human being and cause subjectification. The nature of the cells is different and very dense. A prison cell, next to a classroom, followed by a room made entirely out of computer or tv screens, adjacent to a room made entirely out of plugs, a library, a room lined by hundreds of packs of cigarettes, a clothes shop, a chapel, a bank vault, a residential space. The challenge would be to look deep within ourselves and realize what has contributed to our personal subjectification.46

Agamben, Giorgio. â&#x20AC;&#x153; What is an apparatus?â&#x20AC;? ,2009

To sum up, this train of thought is directly associated to the physical expression of the form of the stoa. The stoa which is itself an architectural typology connected to the idea of a network, is representing the apparatus which as aforementioned is also the abstract network keeping the different elements of subjectification and power together. The cells in the physical expression of the apparatus represent the elements of subjectification. So the physical expression of the stoa, of a connecting element aligned with different rooms, embodies the apparatus, a network also connecting different elements. The stoa is an apparatus and the apparatus is a stoa. The structure represents the eclipse of politics. Through the apparatus, man will attempt to nullify the animalistic behaviours that are now separated from him.

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General Axonometric

Cell plans

Chapel

Prison cell

Advertisement Screenings

Library

Apparatus stoa elevation

ii.THE STOA OF DESIRES

Just a few hundred meters away from Omonoia lies Geraniou Street. Admittedly before, starting the survey about the existing passages we had never walked along Geraniou. Not because it is stigmatized or forbidden, but because dwarfed by the big axes of Tsaldari, Athinas and Sofokleous it has been rendered invisible. Not wanting to give any kind of solution or change the system of organisation of the block we accentuate the importance of the entrance of Anaxagora even more by placing a structure alluding to a gate that would make the transition between the sea of urbanisation and our island. During out stroll, much like the flâneur, an unexpected urban scenery unfolded in front of us. The street, almost empty, with all the human activities being carried out glued to the facades of the buildings. The city in this particular island acting quite literally as a theatre set for the human activities. What is prominent here is the social rupture that exists within the island itself. Geraniou’s perpendicular axis being lined with ethnic restaurants and delis which cater almost exclusively to the immigrant population. While traversing the perpendicular axis of Geraniou we almost did not encounter one single Greek and the gazes of the street’s inhabitants were filled with curiosity if not tinged with suspicion and a hint of hostility. However, Anaxagora’s horizontal axis is lined with enterprises owned almost exclusively by Greeks and the street also boasts the presence of one of the city’s most famous and frequented bars, Romantso. Sofokleous is animated with a variety of different activities. This expression of the social structure of the block in the urban fabric was the reason for which we found the cross shape interesting, as it allowed us to include the perpendicular axis of Geraniou and the horizontal one of Anaxagora, thus allowing us to contain two completely different realities in our intervention. However, the activities in the street we mentioned above are not only those defined by the function of the buildings. The blocks surrounding Omonoia are notorious for the drug dealing, the street fights mainly between different ethnic groups trying to co-exist contained in a very limited urban space, the prostitution and there is a general feeling of wretchedness floating in the air, which is also reflected in the faces of the urban actors themselves. During the site survey, we discussed with some of the people living and working in this specific area. ‘They should clean the area out!’. Exclaims one of the shop owners in a stoa almost adjacent to the square of Omonoia, referring to the immigrants and the drug dealing taking place in the street. In the same shop, his friend contests ‘It’s not their fault! The system and economic crisis is not allowing them to integrate, what would you have them do, starve? In any case even if

they move the drug-addicts, homeless and immigrants, the problem will just be transferred somewhere else. And that is not really a solution’. The conversation between them continued in this way for a while. They both concluded that it was not safe for us to be in that area after nighttime. ‘I would not allow my daughter to walk in Omonoia after hours’ said the shop owner and everyone around us nodded, mumbling their agreement. Our project is the acceptance of the anomie and lawlessness of the island. We don’t endorse prostitution, drug addiction, or anomie. We attempted to find the root of these activities, what causes them and why people resort to (turn to) them. Is the actual root desire, weakness, desperation, or oppression? And what if the completion of this island’s structure was about freedom? About celebrating forbidden desires? About accepting and facing the problems plaguing the Greek society without trying to solve them, but integrating them into a spatial structure. What if these events and weaknesses were framed and contained differently? In today’s society gender, sex, pleasure and substances are taboo subjects. In reality though almost the majority of the society experiments with these issues happen behind closed doors. What if there was a way to no longer stigmatize those issues? What if society accepted their existence and tried to deal with them in different ways? What instead of hiding one’s desires, one started to celebrate them? Using architecture for turning actions and everyday situations into rituals. It would be about formalizing actions and creating a depository of passages for rituals. This part of the city is a collage of various very heterogenous rituals that are socially separated. Some are deemed acceptable like going to buy a sandwich from the turkish kebab and others are not, like smoking marijuana. Our decision was to take this metaphorical categorisation (separation) and translate it into a spatial rupture. The surface of the street becomes the line that separates these two types of rituals. The non-stigmatised ones take place on the surface of the street while the forbidden ones are shoved under the street surface. When imagining this project we were always keeping in mind its section, the density of the activities, that would be taking place in it. To express the hidden desires is without any doubt the hardest part of this work. It demands a clearness about one’s intentions and not to picture naive positions or presumed representations of what a desire could be. To give an architectural form to rituals, and when talking about form we are not referring to the architectural attitude or style, but to the extent to which an architecture plays a fundamental role in molding and defining an action or an event. Roman architecture for example was formalist. “Formalism” here is not to be understood as an attitude within architecture (i.e., the formalism of Carlo Rainaldi or Richard Meier) but as a more general cultural attitude of the Romans that came before (and produced) architecture. Indeed, it was the formalism of Roman religion that produced Roman architecture. Formalism depended on the desire – which was religious in origin – to give form to the environment, to define the scene for ritual actions, to underscore and exalt gestures by building a stage around them. Everything needed to be more defined, more perspicuous, more

apt to receive a precise position in memory. Formalism came from a desire to turn circumstance into ritual: to frame gestures, to stage events, to give form to actions. Architecture formalized the given.47 In the same way we attempt to formalize events, that have already been formalized or not in a different way and try to bring out the density of activities that existed in a limited space, such as a 3 metre large street. To sum up, the spatial expression of the concept takes the following form. The level of the street itself becomes a stoa, with the ground floor spaces hosting everyday acceptable activities and the underground becoming the second level of the stoa where a series of rooms connected to the illicit and secret desires unfold. But why desires and why rituals? It is what the different social groups have in common. The experiment would be to see what new types of sociability will be produced, by channeling public passions. Included in the programmatic alchemy are an erotic library, an erotic cinema, sex rooms, rooms with psychedelic projections where people can take drugs but also rooms that explore different materialities and aspects of desire, such as desires oriented to taste, hearing, touch, nature and the senses in general. The project also poses questions of transparency and sincerity. It is supposed to raise questions such as ‘Do I feel comfortable with the idea of an uncomplexed, graphic expression of sex in the urban environment?, ‘Am I for more sincerity and transparency in my illicit practises ? And in the others?’.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Fragments from an Essay I will never be able to write, San Rocco,4 Rituals, Obstacles and Architecture, 2012

The form of the project is also reflecting this problematic, there are elements jutting out of the surface of the street creating visual or physical interactions, with what is lying underneath. So while you are calmly eating your taboulé you might accidentally catch a glimpse of the secret world that lies beneath. The two stripes of the cross explore different spatial scenarios one is about alternating spaces that are defined by their textures and materials, such as the floor of each room being different ; exploring sensuality and desire associated to materials, touch or smell for example. The other direction of the cross is the spatial scenario defined by the architectural element of the wall. Twisting and turning the wall creates different shapes, nooks and crannies where the secret desires can be expressed, but remain hidden.

In his project the City as a Festival Ettore Sottsass rejects the man workerproducer and invites men to explore their psyche, sex and bodies:’ So we are at the point in which there are no more powers, but wandering fluxes of will and public passions, which are generated within in the same way, like molecular movement and settlement of gases and liquids, like the sky settling, with clouds coming and going, storms, rains, winds, clear skies and then lulls in the winds. […] They may design temples for public or private meditation, or lawns for reposing on, or even buildings conserving memories provoking smiles, boredom, eroticism or mysticism etc. Maybe they will design temporary or permanent buildings to scatter like pop corn over the planet along the ancient migratory routes, the ancient areas of pleasant clim, the beaches with spring winds, under the crumbling mountains, in the shade of the luxuriant forests, under the rainbows of African waterfalls’48 -Ettore Sottsass

Sottsass Jr, Ettore. “The Planet as a Festival.” Casabella, 1973

AFTER VISITING THE ACROPOLIS I WILL GO TO THE GUCCI STORE.

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Plan Stoa of Desires

General axonometric

iii.THE UN-INTERRUPTED STOA

The axis perpendicular to the trilogy of Ziller is made up of two plateaus. The strip of Korai square and the rectangular surface of Klauthmonos square. This urban form was conceived in order to give prominence to the synthesis of the trilogy, placing it on a pedestal. The height difference of 9 metres between the beginning of Klauthmonos square and the square in front of the Academy of Athens, is adding to the importance of these buildings. Klauthmonos was initially conceived as a viewpoint to admire and frame the trilogy, but it has lost its initial function as a public space. The importance of this space inundated by trees haphazardly placed over its surface, in no way following or taking into account the framing of the space. Even the positioning of the enormous statue representing the National Reconciliation after the civil war, that completely ravaged the Greek society, is completely wrong. Its positioning right in the axis of the trilogy blocks the view and doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t allow the eye to discern the architectural quality of the trilogy amidst this very confusing urban symphony of stimuli. Moving past the obstacle of the statue we are faced with almost a barrier of bus and trolley stops, the ugly hangars of their structures obstructing the view, creating a spatial rupture between the square and rendering it an almost inaccessible enclave. Moving to the strip of public space opposite Klauthmonos, Korai square, the series of challenges and obstacles encountered make it impossible to traverse the square in a straight line. Kiosks, shrubs, rubbish bins, motorbikes, the gaping hole of the metro entrance, the glass pyramid jutting out of the surface of the square illuminating the archeological space lying underground and the

two sad-looking metallic structures, desperately attempting to create the illusion of a functioning public space (but actually only providing a shelter for parked motorbikes), are only some of the elements that make the straight passage through this square almost impossible. As a consequence human activity is shrinking back from the open spaces and is almost exclusively glued to the facades of the buildings framing Korai square, which is lined mainly with cafes and small boutiques. Our intervention here is about bringing to the surface the already existing spatial destiny of this urban strip, to frame and direct the itinerary from the lower part of Klauthmonos square to the tip of the Academy of Athens. The stoaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ultimate role, is to connect and direct, which is directly the role of this strip and justifies our decision of turning it into a stoa. Klauthmonos and Korai are in this way transformed into a view corridor. Klauthmonos is already working as an enclave just like the majority of large public spaces of the centre of Athens. Our decision was to accentuate this rupture by the introduction of hard boundaries, enclosing Klauthmonos like a garden between walls. The presence of the water is fundamental, because it is the common element that guides the pedestrian throughout the transitions that are happening in parallel to this journey from Klauthmonos to the Academy. The first scene is the enclosed garden of Klauthmonos, a space of peace and reconnection with nature. It should be pointed out here that nothing changes in Klauthmonos square, it remains a void, an open-air room. The trees remain as they were and it conserves its calm, unbothered interior state. The uninterrupted stoa passes underneath the street defying the cars, trolleys, bus stops and various other obstacles aligned to the line of Stadiou and continues in Korai square where it is elevated to almost its very end, with the structure finally physically framing the Trilogy. The final element that plays a fundamental role for this strip is the fact that it is enclosed within walls. Gibberd defines the street as the void of an open-air room. The street walls of the space (the buildings) are defining the void of the space body, creating in this way what we would call view corridors.49

Gibberd, Frederick. Town design. architectural Press, 1970.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Fragments from an Essay I will never be able to write, San Rocco,4 Rituals, Obstacles and Architecture, 2012

Roman architecture was made of plans exactly because the Roman religious space was extracted from a continuous surface. Roman architecture was made of enclosures, gaps and obstacles in an extension of space that was meaningful from the beginning. Roman architecture transformed a landscape understood primarily as a depository of platforms for rituals, machines for visualising the divine in a given geographical context, devices that needed to be corrected in order to assure the precise execution of those very same rituals. The landscape was consequently adapted in order to comply with the requirements for a highly codified communication with the gods.50 For us the island is the continuous surface chosen for its spatial destiny and the equivalent of the divine temple would be the academy. Our stoa would merely be a viewing machine guiding the pedestrian amidst the rituals being carried out throughout the urban space.

TRILOGY ISLAND

Plan of un-interrupted stoa

iv. THE NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC STOA

In the cliché photos of Santorini, or shots from Athens’s picturesque Plaka neighbourhood, apart from the architecture, the protagonists are the cats perched on walls and windows, claiming the city as their own. In the grey concrete jungle that is Athens it is difficult to imagine the place of the animals. The sad images of dogs panting underneath the 40 degree heat or searching in rubbish bins for food, are very common and the Athenians almost take these scenes for granted. Branzi in his project for le Grand Paris insists that by integrating a piece of nature in a project one assigns to it some kind of spirituality, a greater power and meaning. ‘Yes, of course. The animal is the centre of the project. I really like the image of animals. They are magic presences possessed by indecipherable goodness. When you introduce a fragment of nature into a project, it emits an infinite power superior to the whole geometric system of modernity, while its uniqueness makes it almost sacred.’51 -Andrea Branzi In the most anthropocentric neighbourhood of Athens, filled with pedestrian streets, bars and taverns, we chose to integrate the Non-anthropocentric stoa. The main concept was to let nature take its course and dominate the site of the project. We deliberately chose a plot with the presence of a church, because religion is entirely a product of humanity, questioning in this way its relationship with nature. What is more sacred? Mother nature or religion? Even the church has been run over by nature, the part underneath the dome excavated leaving a gaping hole.

Branzi,Andrea, Bringing Animals at the Centre of the Urban Project Domus,2018

A thin metallic structure echoing the form of the site defines the intervention. On this plug-in structure we are integrating watering and feeding devices for the animals, nests for the birds, open cage structures for the pigeons, games and swings for the rodents, crumble kingdoms for the insects and cavities for bee nests while the ground is composed from many types of natural textures, such as sand, green, rock. The textures of the floor are spilling upwards to the elevations of the buildings, for some of them they even reach the rooftops. The human is welcome to penetrate this realm, but not to disrupt it. He has no rights between the borders of the intervention, he is simply an observer.

This gesture is not only a reflector of the existing situation but it is also a reminder that a much-needed posture needs to be defined regarding the animals and their future in urban centres. Regardless of the stray animals situation in Greece many cities are being forced to face the fact that due to the destruction of their habitats more and more animals seem to be aimlessly wandering towards urban centres in search of food. Cities are growing so fast and big that the space for free animals is consistently reduced.

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v. STOA OF SOLITUDE

Every urbanist or architect that has ever attempted to decipher the complex mechanism that is Athensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban fabric has found himself confronted with the plateau of Omonoia. Throughout the years many changes and many propositions (urbanistic and architectural) have been made in the hopes of making this plateau an approachable human space and all have failed. Currently it takes the shape of an island surrounded by cars, a no-manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place with no human activity. The anecdotal presence of two or three shrubs and a metallic sculpture adorning its sad grey surface. Omonoia is probably one of the most strategic points of the city, the perpendicular axis of Athinas leading directly to the foot of the sacred hill, and physically connected to Stadiou, Panepistimiou and Tsaldari, the most important urban axes of the city, the veins of the city we could say. Once again the human activity is taking place glued to the facades of the buildings that form the square. This is also due to the fact that the existence of the four metro entrances scattered around the square generates movement and activities. The variety of activities and social groups co-existing and co-acting on the surface of these residual spaces is mind-boggling. Immigrants, tourists, beggars, pedestrians, sellers, some of them stagnant and some of them quite literally only a blur of movement. The ever-present obstacle of a car or of fumes polluting every activity taking place in the limited spatial enclaves attached to the buildings. Omonoia is an expression of the contemporary, urban condition of chaos and solitude. It expresses both sides of the same coin. Standing in the middle of the square, looking at the city one does not feel part of it, one feels a stranger, exposed, isolated and alone. However, also standing in one of the public spaces in front of the Hondos Centre building for example, surrounded by hundreds of people, one feels the same, if not a more acute loneliness. We started thinking how we could contain and frame all these complex and complicated events, how to contain isolation and loneliness, how to express the multiple spatial and physical ruptures that are expressed in this approximately 90m by 90m empty urban block. And finally decided to literally treat it like an urban block. The choice of the labyrinth was made because of its complexity and capacity to contain hundreds of events, simultaneously isolated from one another. It is also a structure that is in itself a hard boundary and at the same time contains defined boundaries.

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Therefore, we positioned a built slab, a layer of thickness, equally superposing it all over the block and respected the boundaries expressed by the roads tearing the shape of the urban block apart. As aforementioned architecture should stop being the backdrop for actions and rather become the action itself. We positioned walls on the edges of the streets completely isolating the roads from the paved areas. The choice of walls aligning the edges of the street are the physical expression of the spatial rupture between the car kingdom and the pedestrian space. These walls allow us to make the cars part of our structure, this way being included in the labyrinth. The strips of the labyrinth develop on multiple levels allowing the pedestrians to cross the streets in corridor-bridges that keep them isolated from the cars and outside environment and allow them to continue their journey inside the labyrinth uninterrupted.The structure of the labyrinth is also associated to the feeling of freedom. When you exit the labyrinth one feels a feeling of liberation just like Theseus after killing the Minotaur. The only given elements for the form of the labyrinth are the metro entrances which we consider to be the gates of the structure and of course the centre, which is the element that gives the labyrinth its reason for existing. After traversing all these spatial realms, these stages of isolation and solitude the traveller finds himself in the centre of the labyrinth by following a strip that is gradually going up from the sides and reaches a level of about three storeys high in the centre. The flĂ˘neur is elevated above the surface and can reconnect with the city and claim it as his own. Omonoia square as a limit and a narrator, hovering between form and infrastructure. Following the principle of Ungersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Grossform, Omonoia acts a stabiliser and container within which program and infrastructure play out. Size is not what defines Grossform as a criteria. 52 Our goal was to homogenise the square by treating it as an overall system, but without changing its character of functioning as a collage of spatial enclaves. To reduce architectural form to its natural condition, to separate and to be separated and to use it as a tool to confront urbanization. Form in this context indicates limitation, partial character, determination, it works as a cognitive instrument.53 What should be pointed out is that the labyrinth much like the stoa is about movement, the stoa about passing from one urban scene to another and the labyrinth is composed by many urban realms so each fragment of passage from one space of the labyrinth to another could be considered a stoa. In this sense, a labyrinth is composed by a high but not infinite number of stoas. The maze appears to have had different and sometimes contradictory meanings. To mention just one example: the labyrinths of ancient Crete for example signified a gloomy, tortuous Underworld; yet the maze described by Virgil served as a metaphor for Troy, the perfect fortress-city. This multiple character of the labyrinth accounts, in part, for its power and durability as a symbol through the ages. What is perhaps unique about the maze as both object and archetype is the antithetical nature of so many of its meanings. These can be separated into positive and negative values.

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Ungers, O. M, Grossformen im Wohnungsbau, VerĂśffentlichungen zur Architektur 1966

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. 2011

Above all, the maze was a complex work of art, having been designed by Daedalus, an inventor and architect. It was also an arena for trial and ordeal, for confrontation and conquest, for initiatory rites in which the hero undergoes a process of self-discovery. Engaging the maze constituted an exercise of faith and perseverance. Finally the maze served as a precinct within which evil was contained and into which, paradoxically, no evil spirit would dare to penetrate. The perimeter of the maze separated the world of the quick from that of the dead; it differentiated outer from inner space, good from evil.

Suza Templin, Thoughts about Labyrinths and Mazes,New York,2002

Van Eyck, Aldo. “Team 10 primer.” (1962).

In Roman antiquity the labyrinth suggested the archetype of the ideal city. Christianity used floor-labyrinths as a metaphor for one’s finding his spiritual centre by walking the circles. In the medieval world, the maze stood for the war between good and evil that brought salvation for all humanity; a metaphor for the sinful world in which the errant soul must wander. So, too, medieval architects made the maze a symbol of both divine perfection and hellish confusion. Later, in the Renaissance and Baroque, a different type of labyrinth came into fashion - (the Reformation brought with it new, more personal forms of devotion, and these altered the meaning of the symbol of the labyrinth): The “Labyrinth of Love”- the maze becomes a symbol for the snares of love; the ambiguities, difficulties and reversals associated with love and erotic relationships generally. (Love is a labyrinth that closes fatally around the unsuspecting....) The maze becomes a garden of joy and amorous pleasures, an “amazing” place.54 In Omonoia the labyrinth can represent all of these things. It can be a torturous hole, a network of crime and evil, a hiding place of lovers, a paradisiac dream, or a city in the city, an infinite number of possibilities. Let’s just call it Labyrinthian Clarity.55

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Plan stoa of solitude

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General axonometric

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vi. THE STOA OF HEALING

‘I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the facade of the cathedral(…). I experience myself in the city and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.’ -Juhani Pallasmaa In the multi-sensory environment that is Athens what is the place of the human, of the constituents of its essence, the human’s body and soul? In the turmoil of contemporary times the social problems that Athens is faced with are multiple and while being ravaged by the economic crisis the city is desperately trying to hang onto its humanity. The neighbourhood of Metaxourgeion is the perfect expression of the madness and chaos that is Athens. Cars dominating the streets, immigrants appropriating the urban space. In this brutal and inhuman environment which is the urban condition, dominated by cars, poverty and despair what is the place of the body and soul? The structure of the intervention is developing around a neoclassical building that is hosting a non profit organisation. The public space in front of the main facade of the building is being dominated by the presence of cars. Even the pilotis surrounding the space in front of the building have become parking spaces for scooters and motorbikes. Human activity is almost non-existent, again desperately clinging onto the building elevations. In his book Body, Memory and Architecture, Bloomer claims that ’What is missing from our dwellings today are the potential transactions between body, imagination and environment… To at least some extent every place can be remembered partly because it is unique, but partly because it has affected our bodies and generated enough associations to hold it in our personal worlds.’56 This statement can also be applied to the urban condition. The urban environment impacts the body and soul, just like it itself is changed and defined by human activity.

Bloomer, Kent C., et al. Body, memory, and architecture. 1977

However, Athens is currently engaged in a losing battle with the social conditions that are plaguing the Greek society. The small gestures such as non-profit organisations or the open medical centre located some metres further at the end of Sapfous street catering to the needs of the immigrants or to the part of the population that does not have access to healthcare, are not really enough to make a real impact on the situation.

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Our quest was to take all these things the human, the inhuman, the brutal, the gentle, life and death and compose a structure which explores all these factors which define the human and inhuman conditions of Athens today. The structure is composed by three parts (but acting as a continuous organism that includes the existing urban fabric), each representing a constituent of the urban condition of Athens. The first one is the kingdom of cars in front of the building, where our decision was to extend the columns of the buildings and create a stoa only for the cars, while simultaneously exploring the architectural and non-architectural elements that compose the urban space. In the cultural and historical fusion that is Athens we are always condemned to find ourselves confronted with its history and here we decide to take history as a slave, using the corinthian column located just a few metres further (the sole reminder of Athens’s glorious past) as an excuse to express the different layering of Athens’s architectural aesthetic through an exploration of typologies of columns. These columns are made up of various architectural elements from which the spatial (physical) body of Athens is composed by. Corinthian, Ionic and Doric capitals, car parts, shop signs, rubbish, water, natural elements and so on. The second part is street of Sapfous which is perpendicular to the main building we are using to structure our intervention. Nowadays the element of water, very much like the stoa represents passage. In the Greek context for the immigrants, water represents passage from death to life, from danger to safety, from despair to hope. We chose to flood Sapfous street to represent this idea of passage. Sapfous was not a random choice, the street is lined with immigrant dwellings, the pavement crumbling away, the buildings reeking decadence and poverty. The urban scenery is in itself a reflection of the conditions that the uprooted people need to battle with in order to survive. The body of water ends up in the main structure of the Asklipeion, taking the form of a circular pool. It is the end of the journey where the traveller (urban or otherwise), will again find the missing link between his body and soul. The structure of the Asklipeion is elevated; the courtyard and the piloti surrounding it contains open rooms related to the ancient Greek gymnasium (where athletes trained in Ancient Greece), where one can re-connect with one’s physical form, by taking care of one’s body. The series of the rooms leading to the western part of the intervention are an exploration of the senses and psyche of the human hypostasis. Screaming rooms, music rooms, tranquility rooms (where one can reconnect with nature since the floor is either made out of sand, soil, or water), the bubble wrap room where the walls are made entirely out of bubble wrap, destined to relax even the most stressed user, destruction rooms or painting rooms where one can release one’s anger or creativity…

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The most essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquility. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space, light. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence.This structure is ultimately an exploration of the senses and how these senses contribute to calm or control the soul. Every experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle. Architecture strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense of being in the world, and this is essentially a strengthened experience of self. Instead of mere vision, or the five classical senses, architecture involves several realms of sensory experience which interact and fuse into each other. 57 By exploring the sense of touch, as for example we did with the bubble wrap or the sand we wanted to give a shape to the sense of touch. Pallasmaa claims that there is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. Gravity is measured by the bottom of the foot; we trace the density and texture of the grounds through our soles. Standing barefoot on a smooth glacial rock by the sea at sunset and sensing the warmth of the sun-heated stone through one’s soles, is an extraordinary healing experience. 58

57,58

Pallasmaa, Juhani. The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses 2012

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The visible and the invisible.1968

The final part of the structure is the thermae where one ends up after having cleansed one’s soul. Here, the final stage of the cleansing takes place where one pampers one’s body. Dominated by the presence of a large circle of water making the transition between the two different structures the thermae is the last stage of tranquility. The body knows and remembers and this architectural experience, is about remembering and forgetting. Marleau-Ponty’s philosophy makes the human body the centre of the experiential world. In his own ‘Our body is in the world as the heart is in the organism; it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system; sensory experience is unstable and alien to natural perception, which we achieve with our whole body all at once, and which opens on a world of interacting senses. 59

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WHAT A STRANGE WORLD OF ARCHITECTURAL HYBRIDS..

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THEY TOLD US WEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;D BE SAFE HERE.. BUT THE BUILDING IS FALLING APART..

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General plan

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Gymnasium Healing of the body

Thermea Healing of the soul

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General axonometric Stoa of (for) car

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vii. THE STOA OF TIME

Time is the 4th dimension. Banally, one doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t give an appointment specifying just a precise time; a coordinate in time must be agreed. What follows is that time is embedded in the human condition as its fundamental premise. In architecture time, is as important as space, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s often connected to the notion of memory.60 Movement and passage can be associated to time, because time is movement, this is why we use the term passage of time. So time can be expressed in the form of a stoa. The void is in itself architecture, because it represents the infinite number of possibilities that have not yet taken form, instead of being defined by a spatial or physical expression. As already mentioned the big urban voids in the city of Athens, that are masking under the definition of public space, when in fact they are nothing of the sort, such as the aforementioned Plateia Klauthmonos, Plateia Kotzia or even the square of Syntagma, are not only not acting as mediator elements bringing the city together, but are in fact elements that accentuate fragmentation. The square of Koumoundourou located on the Western side of the triangle that encloses the historical centre of Athens, belongs to the category of these aforementioned voids. On this horizontal plateau almost no human activity can be detected, except for the occasional passer-by crossing the square, furtively glancing around, or homeless people sleeping on the grass. The upper part of the square is being doted by the presence of the National Gallery, a building whose existence we found out very recently. The square in itself is acting as an enclave, isolated from the human activity that once again finds itself confined to the facades that surround it. The reflection made about the urban voids, is that as the city continues to grow, expand and densify, ultimately they will end up being filled in. As aforementioned in Athens it is very difficult to escape from the burden of history, since the city is made up by different layers, that can be detected in the structure of the city. For example the church of Afios Theodoros, south of Klauthmonos square is on a small plateau lower than the rest of the surrounding urban fabric, a reminder of the medieval layer of Athens. Wherever one might dig in Athens they would probably discover several layers of ruins, representing different eras. We could even say that as time goes by, parts of the city die. 60

Carnets, Architecture is Just a Pretext,2019

Our idea here would be to explore the different definitions and expressions associated to movement and passage in the city(metaphorical and literate). We once again accept the fact that the square is currently an island in itself and surround it with a railway, to further accentuate its limits.

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The structure moving on the railway lines would be the literate expression of the moving stoa, mirroring the movement that this plateau of public space is generating, that of repulsion, since pedestrians would prefer to move around it rather than crossing it. The interior of the square would be the metaphorical expression of movement associated to time and the city. Our idea is to superimpose a grid on the square, and then superimpose over that a grid of circulation. The blocks of the grid express the life and death of the city standing for present, past and future. Some are excavated until the very first layer of the city where there is nothing, others reveal antique or medieval ruins and others, others are flat representing the present and others are built slabs that represent the future layer of the city which will be elevated above the others. The flâneur can in this way witness the life and death the city moving between the blocks of the grid. In Pallasmaa’s words: ‘Buildings and towns enable us to structure, understand and remember the shapeless flow of reality and, ultimately to recognise, and remember who we are. Architecture enables us to perceive and understand the dialectics of performance and change, to settle ourselves in the world, and to place ourselves in the curriculum of culture and time’. 61 So our stoa in Koumoundourou has rooms which used to exist, which currently are and which will eventually come to be.In this case architecture becomes a machine of identity and memory and it is engaged with fundamental existential questions. It is about accepting that the ideal for the city is not a system…in which the physical structure if the city is at the mercy of unpredictable change. The ideal is a kind of master form which can move into even newer states of equilibrium and yet maintain visual consistency and a sense of continuing order in the long run. 62

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Pallasmaa, Juhani. The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses 2012

Fumihiko Maki,The Megastructure Investigation in Collective Form, 1964.

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PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK STUDENT VERSION

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PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK STUDENT VERSION

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;LL BE SAFE HERE, ALMOST NO ONE EVER PASSES FROM THIS SQUARE..

WHY DOES NO ONE EVER COME HERE?

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PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK STUDENT VERSION

Plan stoa of time

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General Axonometric

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CONCLUSION: SEDUCING THE STRUCTURES OUT OF THEIR CONTEXT

The final stage of the project would be subtraction of the context. Since our interventions are architectural containers of the context they don’t need the context anymore. They are containers of the essence of the context. Therefore, the final step of this hyper-contextual approach is to ignore the context. In OMA’s welfare island, the illusion of an architectural project that ‘improves’ the city is replaced by an architecture that reifies in the most radical way the splintering forces of the metropolis that might otherwise remain ungraspable. From this perspective welfare island can be interpreted as an extreme consequence of a scenario of decline in which New York, once a paradigm of congestion and density-survives a radical process of depopulation. Beyond being simply examples of New York’s culture of congestion, the artifacts floating within the empty grid are also the last bastions of ‘cityness’ left in this scenario of urban decadence. Architecture is thus projected as an island, the last opportunity for the city to become something and survive its decline.63 The final image of the project is an image representing the structures floating in the Athenian sea. Like an abstract collage of architectural elements put together for no apparent reason. Societies and persons assemble themselves according to their own interpretations of absolute reference and traditional value; and up to a point, collage accommodates both hybrid display and the requirements of self-determination. Because collage is a method deriving its virtue from its irony, because it seems to be a technique for using things and simultaneously disbelieving in them, it is also a strategy which can allow utopia to be dealt with as image, to be dealt with in fragments without our having to accept it in toto, which is further to suggest that collage could even be a strategy which, by supporting the utopian illusion of changelessness and finality might even fuel a reality of change, motion, action and history. 64 City form is not one particular image of the city, but possibility of forming moments within the city on the basis of architectural examples.65 So to conclude (for the moment),our goal was not to improve the city and find solution for its problems. Our work is about representation and expression, about questioning society, but also questioning ourselves. So this is the reason for the existence of two images for each project the ideal one, which is a very personal matter as aforementioned, because the ideal is represented through the subjective prediction of an image and the dystopian one, which at the same time could be someone else’s ideal scenario. What must be underlined is that buildings are unstable systems in dynamic environments.

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Gargiani, Roberto, and Rem Koolhaas. OMA.Welfare Island,2008

Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage city. 1983

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. 2011

These cities within the city are not the literal staging of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lost form within the limits of architectural artifacts; it is also and especially, the possibility of considering architectural form as a point of entry toward the project of the city. In this sense, architecture is not only a physical object; architecture is also what survives the idea of the city.66

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