City Ground Plan
The cut line provides a pause in the city's dense fabric.
Athens: Prolonging the Duration of Form
In a city made up by the infinite proliferation of a single building type, it is the possibilities for exceptions within this genericness that can give it its specificity and thus assign values in the seemingly amorphous field of the city’s fabric.
This project considers the city of Athens as a territory – a boundless entity - lacking of architecture. It assumes its predominant form, the multifunctional dwelling polykatoikia, as not simply a building or an architecture, but critically examines it as an apparatus and the urban implications of such take on the reconstruction of a city. The polykatoikia, since its rapid growth over the Athenian skyline, is considered here as the node in a network of institutions, political and regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures and social needs; a network where the desire for architecture is absent.
Within such context, the project is a ‘reading’ of the city of Athens through its details and instances. This is achieved by implementing the cut line as a tool to measure the city through architecture and thus aiming to reappraise the architectural value and duration of the common form into a more continuous entity that organises the fabric of the city and exposes the structural and syntactical possibilities of its common form.
Masterplan & Axonometric
The aim of the project is to run a line through the city. The proposal is one segment of this line.
Longitudinal Section
The project focuses on the city as a ground condition where architecture and the city provide the formal material and 'break' with it.
Rhythmical Sequences
The line is unfolded as a notational system reduced to the level of common tectonics.
Formal Durations
The city is represented as a very generic matrix of specifically selected moments. Defamiliarization with the common object occurs through traces from fabrication processes that shift the attention from the object to the effect.
An Authorial Reading of the City's Form
Reading architecture in the city by reducing the layers of form to its structure.
Braille Drawings
Making sense of the line through its absence, through the pause and the arising structured densities of its context.
Moments of Athens 1.0
The project designs instances of Athens that prolong the duration of the city's common form. Discussing the possibilities of an architectural language out of the banal.
Moments of Athens 2.0
The whole, and the form as object, is only the consequence of a series of relationships that construct the process of reading the city.
Moments of Athens 3.0
The texture of the street.
