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Athens Trench Project

Athens Trench Project

Athens Trench Project

We propose here a change of the city, related to a re-territorialization performed with new protocols; to see the city of Athens as a function of its perverse ground in the same time idealized for its ruins and undermined as the field of its infrastructure. The concepts of protocols and re-territorialization can be found in the basis of the project. “Athenian Trenches” tackle the city as a condition that operates with an apparent duality. On the one hand, what is stressed is the city’s current condition, which classifies Athens as the paradigmatic city in the era of this particular financial moment of the globe. On the other hand, the proposal measures the importance of the city as an urban formation inhabited by traces of both an ancient and a recent past. Every part of the Athenian history forms a potential narrative. The various successive layers in the city of Athens correspond to this system of narrative strata. Departing from Dimitris Pikionis’ tradition, but also commenting Bernard Tschumi’s interpretation of the urban underground in his New Acropolis Museum, we introduce a different type of “archaeology”, one that constitutes a spatial strategy documentation of the findings as project that leads towards some practices of urban subtraction that constitute the core of the project. The proposal uncovers, organizes, piles and composes in this particular moment the fragments of the city’s uninterrupted social activity. The “New Panepistimiou Axis” becomes the plane that continues the experience of Pikionis’ pedestrian networks of Acropolis and Philopappou Hills for the inhabitant and the visitor of Athens. The proposal introduces an area of transition from the ancient, historic spaces to the core of contemporary Athens.

Read more about this project at Quaderns.

 

Athens, 2013
In collaboration with Katerina Koutsogianni and Platon Issaias

Athens trench

An “excavation strategy” materializes trenches and pits that uncover layers of the city’s historic phases. These peculiar archaeological digs display the more or less random ancient or medieval findings and ruins and together with these, there is a a field of infrastructural networks, recent building materials, tubes, pipes and rough structural planes that can constitute equally important materials of this paradoxical excavation. The arrangement of their fragments in the city’s public space, together with traditional archaeological findings, organizes sitting areas and spaces, underlying this peculiar composition of the Athenian ground.

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