The pattern of the modern Athenian city in its most homogeneous form is based on the building block and the residential building on a privately owned plot, the apartment building. The apartment building typology was the answer to the need for housing for the Greek family. The urban unit of the family was formed together with the concept of the “people” and constituted the ideological basis of the modern Greek state and the basic productive and social unit. In the last twenty years, the social unit of the Greek family has been shaken in the new multicultural environment and the ongoing demographic rearrangements. This describes the crisis in the urban typology of the apartment building, which was formed to house the family as an institution defined by its national identity. The multicultural “crowd” of the modern city magnifies the need for housing by setting new and unexpected conditions for the understanding and use of the metropolitan stock. In terms of importance, two factors seem to need to be addressed on the scale of the city. The first is aimed at the fact that the territory of the Athenian city is covered by buildings at such a high density that the ratio of open space is 2.55 sq.m. per inhabitant and constitutes the lowest percentage in Europe. The second is the crisis of the dominant typology, the apartment building. Twenty-five percent of the apartments remain closed or rented out at the same time as countless foreign citizens, immigrants and refugees, are deprived of a home and a job. At the same time, apartment buildings are aging and on average have 60 years of operation, when the quality of their construction estimates a lifespan of 90-100 years. The proposal entitled “The Pile of Athens” gives an example of a radical method of reconsidering the issue of housing in Athens, while avoiding the overall disruption of the urban fabric. Between the small hill of Hippolytus Colonus and the historic Plato’s Academy, the form of the building mass covering twelve building blocks is completely transformed, while maintaining the same building capacity in proportion to the land that applies today. Three parameters are changing: LAND RELEASE The proportion of open space (free land) in relation to the built area. By doubling the height of the buildings and bridging the existing roads, free space remains for urban cultivation and archaeological excavations. This specific proposal, as a model, increases the proportion of free land per inhabitant from 2.55 sq.m. to 7 sq.m. PRESERVATION OF URBAN DENSITY The new interior spaces cease to be apartments as they are envisaged as single open private spaces, intended more for multi-cultural singularities than for the stable Greek family. The density of residents per building block does not change with respect to the current situation and corresponds to 7 sq.m. of built-up area per resident. PORODES The new urban structures proposed in place of the apartment buildings are called “Plithodomes” (structures for the crowd). They are constructions that provide common fields of space both on the ground and on the raised ground created in the porous structure of the building, with the alternation of open and closed spaces. The levels of the “common” throughout the structure are −also− used for solar energy collection and cultivation. PILE In the proposal for the “Pile Structures” of Athens, the mass of the mega-structure appears to be constituted more by an accumulation than by a constructional articulation of building material. The project is a universal metaphor. The singularities are the concrete bricks. The singularities accumulated together, in the “Pile of Athens”, contribute to the spatial constitution of the crowd. The bricks united, constructed like dilapidated structures, house the public. Unstructured, heavy, mobile, fragile, unstable but also collective, the pile structures expand the fields of the public and provide a form of building invention for the new metropolitan life of Athens.
Collaborators: Vasia Lyri, Michalis Softas