A Civic Infrastructure for the Cycladic City.
The project addresses the lack of a conscious, contemporary Cycladic architecture. It re-imagines the Cycladic wall, to offer a civic infrastructure that blurs the lines between an event space of daily life and the the ceremonial infrastructure of a cemetery. The cemetery is regarded as a prototype for a new typology of spatial structuring that goes beyond the economic drives of tourist dependence and critically engages with the tensions of the two opposing dominant typologies, namely the spatial ambiguity of the continuous facades and the autonomous composition of the plan
The two orders of the plan, the enclosure of positive space (dwellings) and the punctuation of negative space (graves) is always buffered and mediated by the facade walls that offer a hierarchical logic of transitional zones with a large distributional variation
Axial distribution of zones on site. The cemetery, in relation and extension to the city, as connective infrastructure. The wall acts as a border as much as an element of extension and continuity.
The Facade wall fragments space into a more legible scale, it allows for mixed occupancy. It separates zones, it infiltrates and contrast the order of the plan while creating levels of spatial ambiguity between interior-exterior and public-private
The change of use of the monumentalized stone wall, is manifested by changes in texture and tiling. The Urn wall has a split-face surface, with seamless horizontal joints and punctuated vertically aligned joints, constructed by a key and lock drywall system that relies on CNC milling.
The tiling differentiations act as an ambivalent border between different zones and functional performances of the walls. The Urn wall is distinguished by a change of floor tiling and a minor change of tone in their colour
Two orders of the plan, the dwellings and the graves always mediated via the facade wall. The grave appears as a building's footprint and punctuates a negative space, a void, while in its extent it creates an artificial landscape complementing the one of the vernacular dwellings.
The exterior of the graves has a rough stone texture that employs a Gabion wall infilled with recycled stone rubble. The interior has a smooth honed schist veneer surface
The monumental wall, zones and scales the site along its internal axis, while it punctuates and envelops primary circulation along the connective axis. The facade walls blur exterior and interior, while fragmenting space further into an exterior-interior for mixed occupancy
The facade walls offer different types of enclosures. They can be read as a continuous interior of a house in the exterior, made public.
The plan-order of the graves is infiltrated by the facades to blur the boundaries of the cemetery premises and thus creating higher levels of ambivalence between cemetery and public space. The graves are recessed into the ground thus not being directly visible from eye level (unless one looks down), exhibiting a transformation of wall materials and heights.
