Here we present the commended project Athenian Trench developed by Aristide Antonas, Katerina Koutsogianni and Platon Issaias. The Athenian Trench project can be understood as a new step after all these years that Antonas, Koutsogianni and Issaias have been researching the city of Athens, trying to understand its problems in order to propose “a radical change, 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,” in Antonas words. The concepts of protocols and re-territorialization can be found in the basis of the project.

The following text was shared with us by Aristide Antonas:

“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 attempt to 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.

In the landscape treatment of Acropolis and Philopappou Hills, Pikionis treated the paths and his new structures as planes of his idiosyncratic pattern: the archaeological findings and pieces constituted for him built matter par excellence, raw construction materials and not museological objects. The “Athenian Trenches” of the Panepistimiou Axis should be therefore understood as an attempt to transform the archaeological devices to a polemic, conceptual landscape narrative for Attica.”

“In this proposal, there is an attempt to construct different qualities and occupations of public space, primarily with the removal of urban matter. We define as urban matter the material that organizes the surfaces of streets and squares, and also the building volume that occupies the surrounding area of the Panepistimiou Axis. Abandoned structures, degraded passages, empty commercial spaces and unexploited urban roofs are incorporated in the project, in an effort to regenerate and to economically boost these problematic clusters of the Historic Centre. In the street level, this “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. Within this perspective, the carvings of passages and the reactivation of the existing arcades, stoas and roofs constitute an urban initiative that similarly supervenes on the subtraction of building matter in a conceptual way. The porous quality of such operations do not only organize the pedestrian flows and the public activities but also signify a particular reading of the existing urban text.

Similarly with the archaeological excavation, which distorts the existing matter in order to render to the reality of the city a narrative of a different kind, “Athenian Trenches” demand to project a syntax of some sort, one being composed by the various uncategorized fragments, no matter where these are coming from. At the core of this Athenian practice lies a specific interpretive rigorousness, which converts the assemlage of impromptu findings to an effective, useful and coherent architectural field.”

The City Protocols name some systematic micro-legislative interventions operated in the existing tissue of the city; the project proposes the administration of selected rooftops, arcades and specific urban areas such as Korai street with alternative legislations operating autonomously by a control via the Internet; the legal structure that would allow the protocols operation is the most crucial, invisible part of the project. Protocols would have to control the performativity of the proposed spaces in order to clarify political agendas in a practical manner; architecture is used towards an institutional intervention in the core of a collapsed city proposing structures that are supposed to spread socially and organizing new possible urban conditions that could last. The project orients towards an institutional cut viewing alternative city functions. The design departs from some observations on the very ingredients of the city’s materiality and history; the athenian ruins of any kind seek alternative protocols of habitation and programmatic activation.

For a better understanding of the project, please see the following video [HD on recommended]:

Sequence 01 from Antonas Office on Vimeo.

Close, Closer, the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, is initiating a discussion on the future role of contemporary architecture as a wide-ranging spatial practice. We are addressing architecture in its broadest sense: as an agency for the transformation and design of space. Architecture as a living, social, cultural and artistic force that manifests itself in a plurality of outputs that go far beyond traditional construction.

At the London preview on 13th June, curators Beatrice Galilee, Mariana Pestana, Liam Young and participant Daniel Fernandez Pascual, will be sharing their ideas and plans for the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, wich will take place from 12 September to 15 December 2013.

Close Closer curators. © Lynton Pepper

At the curatorial statement, we can read:

“The third Lisbon Architecture Triennale is being forged at a critical juncture. Far from distancing ourselves from this fact, we have chosen it as one of the main anchors of our curatorial approach, as well as to the challenge we have put forward to our participants and audience. We will even take it one step further. In the current scenario of contracting market economies and scarce resources, we propose to approach architecture as a platform for generating solutions and strategies, fostering debate and participation in designing a shared space and future.

What Close, Closer proposes is a vision of spatial practice as reaction, namely to the current economic and political climate, the social concerns and civic deficit we are facing. Driven by integration, this reaction is grounded in interdisciplinary dialogue and gathers momentum and strength through participation. “

At Close, Closer 2013 LONDON PREVIEW, they will be discussing all the ideas, exhibitions, installations and actions that will make up Close, Closer, the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale when it opens in September this year. The talk is organised by Building Design magazine, and places are free but do reserve your seat: bdrsvp@ubm.com

/// Thursday 13th June, 7pm
KPF London
7a Langley Street, WC2H 9JA

And a reminder that our Début Award for young architects (under 35) is closing on 21 June! A €5,000 prize and a place on our list of 10 honourable mentions is up for grabs. Download the guidelines here.

Emilio Ambasz, curator of the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” [MoMA 1972] described the work of Gruppo Strum:

“The Gruppo Strum, rather than presenting a physical design of a domestic environment, chooses rather to go out into the street. Its “stand” represents any corner, where they freely distribute three different pamphlets —red, white, green— drawn in the form of photo-cartoons.

The first pamphlet (white) depicts the present conditions of urban decay. The red pamphlet describes the methods which may be adopted to change the present situation. The green pamphlet catalogues all forms of urban Utopias presently envisioned by designers the world over.”

We are publishing “The Struggle for Housing” because on this fotoromanzo, Gruppo Strum published their statements related with the housing crisis in Italy in 1972. Now, we have a similar crisis in Spain, where it has been estimated that there are more than 20,000 skeletons of unfinished buildings, mostly all of them, housing buildings. If we read Gruppo Strum texts and change the word “Italy” for the word “Spain”, it is possible to see how cyclical is our history and how the same situation in Italy provoked social and political reactions from the citizenship, such as here in Spain with the work of the group Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca [PAH]. They are actively working to stop and transform the foreclosure processes, and have being capable of stopping housing evictions and even forcing legal framework changes. In times when even the European court found that Spanish legislation about mortgages goes against EU law, it’s good to stop for a while and read Gruppo Strum statement:

“Many people in Italy do not have a decent home to live in, and some have no home at all. If they are not given one —and for the time being no one is likely to give it to them, they must get homes for themselves by organizing themselves into a political movement capable of overturning the trend of the current system in which their fringe existence and exploitation are functional [...] What they must procure, therefore, is not merely a home to live in but a city, so as to ensure for themselves a freer social life and one more in keeping with their needs. There have been many struggles for these goals in Italy. The white papers recount and illustrate these . facts, showing also how these struggles for homes continually reshape cities, by attacking and defeating the capitalist organization of territory together with the symbolic values of its formalization.”

Here you can read and download the complete fotoromanzo “The Struggle for Housing”

The Struggle for Housing by Quaderns

WE WANT TO BE LIBERATED FROM:
the house with eternal value
the house with expensive rent
the house with thick walls
the house as a monument
the house with high costs to enslave us
the house that exploits women as cheap labour.

INSTEAD WE NEED:
the cheap house
the open house
the house that makes our life easier.”

/// Images taken from Swiss Photobook