Piraeus Turm Dimitra - Chatziargyriou & Antigoni Karaiskou
Work in Progress: Piraeus Tower
Dimitra Chatziargyriou & Antigoni Karaiskou
2017
The project “Work in Progress: Piraeus Tower” investigates the link of city and society and suggests a new model of habitation. The city, just like society, transforms throughout the years and never reaches a final state. The present crisis in Greece has empowered local elites, weakened the voice of local communities, deteriorated the living conditions and left a growing number of unfinished buildings. These effects are investigated, to see whose presence dominates the urban space. A new model of habitation should be implemented in order to evolve the city, maintain its urban identity and shape a new urban consciousness.
The Piraeus Tower functions as a case study. Started to be built in 1972, it stayed an unfinished building since then. It is a symbol of today’s crisis, a testimony of essential events for Greece, reflecting the "mosaic" of the Athenian urban landscape. A building keeps the marks of its history and frames the creation of collective memory. A traumatic memory needs an exceptional healing, but destruction is not a valuable option. Not many buildings have provoked so many opinions, discussions and histories driven by their emptiness.
This contribution to the debate involves a more sustainable approach, where local inhabitants would act in a bottom–up process of renovating the existing. It suggests the self–construction of small elements which hack the mega structure and thereby create a dynamic of self–responsibility. The skeleton of the existing building would be considered an infrastructure were the new low–cost shells would grow in terms of open source design, and the idea of the commons in relation to the processes of production. Users would design and build private, communal and public space in the pre–existing built environment by exchanging knowledge and resources, creating networks and interacting with the city. From Do–It–Yourself to Do–It–With–Others, this experiment intends to bring together citizens, residents, designers and refugees to promote the intersection of the political, social, technological and economic field.
http://antikara.wixsite.com/purgospeiraia
Dimitra Chatziargyriou is an architect who graduated in 2015 from the School of Architecture (University of Patras). Her research interests focus on the definition of the informal on a conceptual and spatial level. She has participated in international architectural competitions, independently and in collaboration with architectural offices. Currently she is collaborating with DAFNI, a network of Sustainable Greek Islands, as a member of the architectural team.
Antigoni Karaiskou is a graduate of the University of Patras, Greece, where she experimented with new approaches of intervening in the built environment, acknowledging the power planners have in forming a city and searched for the link between technology, the city and its citizens. She is currently attending the Master Program of Building Technology at Technical University of Delft, Netherlands.