Community House in Athens

 

2011 - Keramikos, Athens

Architecture of Integration - EPFL

Martina Vesik/Lea Serikoff

 

Situated along the important axis of Plato’s way, in the middle of the neighbourhood of Keramikos, the project responds to the Urban Constitution by proposing an attraction point in a “village”, a public space for the neighborhood, and inserting a pocket public space, a plaza, that is located on the street. The morphological characteristics of Keramikos are the different heights of the buildings, forming a fragmented, terraced streetscape. We play with this by integrating the building into the context and responding to the various heights thus creating outdoor terraces and a fragmented volume dialoging with the existing scale.

 

The project constitutes a series of structural cores in an open space. These cores or “houses”, determine indoor streets and squares in a large and varied circulation space, thus creating links from the outside street to the courtyard. Each house contains a specific program, closed off for sound or privacy purposes, whereas the squares are used as gathering spaces. This mixture of defined and undefined spaces enables adaptation and flexibilty. The stairs participate in the fluidity of the main open space connecting the different levels of the building, creating a promenade ending in terraces. Lifts, fire stairs and specific services are found in the houses.

 

The façade, which is composed of vertical ceramic rods, is seen like a skin that reacts and stretches around the building and also provides some protection from the sun. When passing the building, the porous façade allows visual links through the building to the inner basketball court.