From History to Becoming

THIS IS NOT A DIPLOMA THESIS about Athens; at least, not about the athenian image that is cultivated by the mainstream media and current political debates. THIS IS A DIPLOMA THESIS about what Athens might or might not be.

The produced reseach material, that constituted our archaeological layers, was the think tank from which new minor-narrations were extracted. This procedure was translated into five distinct scenarios of an alternative urban reality. In this new reality, the aforementioned “otherness” affects social life, in new, unexpected ways. This process aims in the incorporation of parallel, minor - narratives, into the major, already established and imposed from the official political forces of power, reality.\nThese procedures of becoming overcome the dialectic duel that the athenian landscape is riddled with historically. This design problem is answered by challenging the limits of architecture in the outreach of form and structure, surface and depth. The emphasis during the design process is given in the transcendence from the plane of the actual (space) to the virtual (narrative); the process is in constant move between those two. This, in architectural terms, gives its place to the duel between rigid and flexible spatial limits, Cartesian and topological surface.\nIn this approach, there are no fixed terms imposed on the individual; each time the becoming of space is a result of the subjects’ interrelations that act in it. Consequently, the program emerges from those acts without being a priori implemented, rendering the space proposed open to dynamic and unexpected events.\nThe athenian landscape is treated as a raw material, flexible to transformations and mutations. This landscape includes the built structures, the natural and artificial ground, the underground. Through “material” addition, removal and boolean operations, new spaces are born to host the emerging program. In the final step, the same procedures are used to visualize the proposed design. By using three-dimensional cutting planes, the design outcome and its spatial information and relationships are revealed.\nAs a conclusion, the present thesis does not consider any “problem” as a question in need for an answer; any given problem “is something that disrupts life and thinking, producing movements and responses”.