URBAN ENTANGLEMENT
…I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars [..]. I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the different moment of other men, but never and enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind. The garden of forking paths is an incomplete but not false, image of the universe In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time.He believed in an infinite series, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent,convergent and parallel times.This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I exist and not you; in others, both of us. [Jorge Luis Borges, The garden of Forking Paths ]
The Greek city is characterized by small squares with dense network streets, narrow sidewalks and fragmented green spaces. This project, a utopian provocative work, is aiming to propose alternative ways to potentially improve the quality of the surrounding scenery and create more public space with enrichment of the green element among four blocks of flats at the city of Athens. The proposal aspires to set up new social relations for the inhabitants of the selected area and create a new unity, as well as expand it in the entire urban “fabric” in a critical way. The general target are the inhabitants of the city who usually neglect the public space while at the same time they are concentrated primarily on their private residence. The primal thought was to select an area that is degraded. The fact that Athens in general lacks of public and open spaces provoked us to picture the whole city as an opened terrain ready to be redesigned. The architectural intervention consists of a green network which aims to embrace not only the public space among the four randomly selected nearby blocks in the centre of Athens, but also promotes the possibility to create a wide network spread over the whole city. The intervention follows the logic of fractals meaning that from each person (units) unfolds a repeated state which in a greater scale embraces the whole urban space of Athens while it results to the person itself. This sequence (order or disorder) is repeated similarly in multiple levels of analysis. Jorge Luis Borges on his story 'The Garden of Forking Paths' describes the structure of time and compares it with the structure of a tree which gets repeated. The self-similarity of the urban cluster in space-time, multiple dimensions and interactive spatial relationships starts from the apartment and the inside life, it continues with the relationships among neighbors and spreads over roads and the eternal of the city in order to get back in persons. As public space is used nowadays only as a transition area from one place to another, its usage is getting more and more devaluated within society. In a similar way the Greek idiosyncrasy discredits any sensitive action in public space while in a paradoxical way the society is getting enchanted by individual arbitrary appropriation. In Greek public space the imaginative individual initiatives encourage arbitrary interventions (either personal or collective) and as a result movements are becoming complex and the general indifference creates a perplex situation lost in legislation and bureaucracy.
The structure consists of a dynamic wire network developed in between the buildings and mainly tangled among the balconies. The network behaves like a “social machine” where the climbing plants grow among the apartments of the blocks, according to the relationships of the inhabitants. The soil is supplied by cubes placed either on the facades of the buildings or on the balconies. The network is denser near the “entrances” of the crossroad in order to raise a sense of curiosity for discovering this space. Moreover, it isolates the urban noise pollution and creates introversion (sense of neighborhood). At the same time the intervention evolves in a lower density in the inside open spaces of each block. The greek term used for this space is akalyptos. It is referred to the open space among the buildings of each block and this void is usually abandoned and useless. In the proposal akalyptos flourishes and remains communal in order to liberate an open semi-private garden. On the rooftop level the inhabitants may cultivate vegetables, vineyards and other plants. On the ground level, there is a grid that develops spatially into cubes creating an urban furnishing – a public space and sometimes even a space of obstacles, depending on human behavior. Some pieces of the grid may move either towards inside or towards outside by mechanical pistons depending on people's handling. When people take care of the plants the grid is getting formatted into public furnishing (like seats when it gets up or pools as it gets down). On the contrary, when there is no human care the grid is anarchically formatted into a rough area. The car parking problem that may arise from the unification of the four residential blocks is resolved by an underground parking area. It that way, the existing public space is transforming into a space of better living with improved conditions of humidity, shading and noise.
The plants have a connecting role themselves. Getting out of the properties they create a network that influences the way people lives interlace. The daily life is detached from the individuality of the apartment. It opens up to a network of relationships outside the balcony of the individual (private area) and in a semi public space at the street level with the appropriate comfort conditions as well. The proposal positive outcome is strictly limited to the promise. Initially it might challenge excitement or may trigger fear. However, when experiencing the area it may enable someone realize that everyone he can have the control of the situation. In a sense, the intervention goes back to the earlier public space architectural values. It expects to create a new starting point, not reviving old norms (with regards to the scene of the inner yards where people lives interact) but creating a constructed background in which social groups negotiate with spatial values. The intervention also validates interaction processes with the public space. As the proposal restores the vitality resulting from the advancement of human relationships, the action of the cubes (based on pistons) on the street level is associated with the reaction of the plants which is related to the action of the inhabitants (like fractals). As long as people neglect to take care of the green network, the plants grow out of control. Alike the cubes that rise up from the grid the area gets inaccessible. The image of the netting and the human initiative is a two-way relationship that is constantly changing, just like an organism is fed by the conditions and alters during seasons. For instance, in the winter when most of the leaves are drooping, the web apart from the visual clarity forms a noise situation as the wind blows through the empty branches.
In conclusion, for an ideal proposed network, chaos is no longer considered as disorder but as a locus of maximum information. From now on its up to the Greek attitude whether the place turns into a living hell or a living paradise.
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away. Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form. [Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities]
Annita Koutsonanou | Evy Tsolaki | Maria Spaniola Architects Engineers
URBAN ENTANGLEMENT
…I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars [..]. I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the different moment of other men, but never and enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind. The garden of forking paths is an incomplete but not false, image of the universe In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time.He believed in an infinite series, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent,convergent and parallel times.This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I exist and not you; in others, both of us. [Jorge Luis Borges, The garden of Forking Paths ]
The Greek city is characterized by small squares with dense network streets, narrow sidewalks and fragmented green spaces. This project, a utopian provocative work, is aiming to propose alternative ways to potentially improve the quality of the surrounding scenery and create more public space with enrichment of the green element among four blocks of flats at the city of Athens. The proposal aspires to set up new social relations for the inhabitants of the selected area and create a new unity, as well as expand it in the entire urban “fabric” in a critical way. The general target are the inhabitants of the city who usually neglect the public space while at the same time they are concentrated primarily on their private residence. The primal thought was to select an area that is degraded. The fact that Athens in general lacks of public and open spaces provoked us to picture the whole city as an opened terrain ready to be redesigned. The architectural intervention consists of a green network which aims to embrace not only the public space among the four randomly selected nearby blocks in the centre of Athens, but also promotes the possibility to create a wide network spread over the whole city. The intervention follows the logic of fractals meaning that from each person (units) unfolds a repeated state which in a greater scale embraces the whole urban space of Athens while it results to the person itself. This sequence (order or disorder) is repeated similarly in multiple levels of analysis. Jorge Luis Borges on his story 'The Garden of Forking Paths' describes the structure of time and compares it with the structure of a tree which gets repeated. The self-similarity of the urban cluster in space-time, multiple dimensions and interactive spatial relationships starts from the apartment and the inside life, it continues with the relationships among neighbors and spreads over roads and the eternal of the city in order to get back in persons. As public space is used nowadays only as a transition area from one place to another, its usage is getting more and more devaluated within society. In a similar way the Greek idiosyncrasy discredits any sensitive action in public space while in a paradoxical way the society is getting enchanted by individual arbitrary appropriation. In Greek public space the imaginative individual initiatives encourage arbitrary interventions (either personal or collective) and as a result movements are becoming complex and the general indifference creates a perplex situation lost in legislation and bureaucracy.
The structure consists of a dynamic wire network developed in between the buildings and mainly tangled among the balconies. The network behaves like a “social machine” where the climbing plants grow among the apartments of the blocks, according to the relationships of the inhabitants. The soil is supplied by cubes placed either on the facades of the buildings or on the balconies. The network is denser near the “entrances” of the crossroad in order to raise a sense of curiosity for discovering this space. Moreover, it isolates the urban noise pollution and creates introversion (sense of neighborhood). At the same time the intervention evolves in a lower density in the inside open spaces of each block. The greek term used for this space is akalyptos. It is referred to the open space among the buildings of each block and this void is usually abandoned and useless. In the proposal akalyptos flourishes and remains communal in order to liberate an open semi-private garden. On the rooftop level the inhabitants may cultivate vegetables, vineyards and other plants. On the ground level, there is a grid that develops spatially into cubes creating an urban furnishing – a public space and sometimes even a space of obstacles, depending on human behavior. Some pieces of the grid may move either towards inside or towards outside by mechanical pistons depending on people's handling. When people take care of the plants the grid is getting formatted into public furnishing (like seats when it gets up or pools as it gets down). On the contrary, when there is no human care the grid is anarchically formatted into a rough area. The car parking problem that may arise from the unification of the four residential blocks is resolved by an underground parking area. It that way, the existing public space is transforming into a space of better living with improved conditions of humidity, shading and noise.
The plants have a connecting role themselves. Getting out of the properties they create a network that influences the way people lives interlace. The daily life is detached from the individuality of the apartment. It opens up to a network of relationships outside the balcony of the individual (private area) and in a semi public space at the street level with the appropriate comfort conditions as well. The proposal positive outcome is strictly limited to the promise. Initially it might challenge excitement or may trigger fear. However, when experiencing the area it may enable someone realize that everyone he can have the control of the situation. In a sense, the intervention goes back to the earlier public space architectural values. It expects to create a new starting point, not reviving old norms (with regards to the scene of the inner yards where people lives interact) but creating a constructed background in which social groups negotiate with spatial values. The intervention also validates interaction processes with the public space. As the proposal restores the vitality resulting from the advancement of human relationships, the action of the cubes (based on pistons) on the street level is associated with the reaction of the plants which is related to the action of the inhabitants (like fractals). As long as people neglect to take care of the green network, the plants grow out of control. Alike the cubes that rise up from the grid the area gets inaccessible. The image of the netting and the human initiative is a two-way relationship that is constantly changing, just like an organism is fed by the conditions and alters during seasons. For instance, in the winter when most of the leaves are drooping, the web apart from the visual clarity forms a noise situation as the wind blows through the empty branches.
In conclusion, for an ideal proposed network, chaos is no longer considered as disorder but as a locus of maximum information. From now on its up to the Greek attitude whether the place turns into a living hell or a living paradise.
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away. Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form. [Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities]
Annita Koutsonanou | Evy Tsolaki | Maria Spaniola Architects Engineers