www.art-omma.org, the project room n.3 , The 'Undulator system for an Urban(e) community by D.Verigakis, G. Maranzana, T. Pagonis, L. Lycouriotis

The lawless expansion of the Athenian metropolitan juggernaut has reached its natural limits -the coasts and mountains defining the Attican basin- and is now continuing beyond them, towards unnatural ones. One of the few remaining spots where the mountain chain might be penetrated is between the northwestern hills, skipping the main mass of mount Parnes from the south. This is where Ano Liosia is situated.

The site lies: spatially between the void and the urban tissue, temporally between the past and the future and politically between the developers and their goal

.In addition, the area presently houses the Rom community, which seems to have formed its own environment, in-between urban and nomadic. This is treated as a non-fact by the proposed municipal plan, which simply overlays on the fields a perfect reproduction of the current urban trend of institutionalized randomness, with 'beautifying' touches (such as the compulsory use of ceramic-tiled slanted roofs). These programmatic contradictions have led us to try extracting the real from the nominal: the municipal plan might be law-abiding but it is not conceptually, let alone ethically/aesthetically acceptable. We had to reinterpret it in its entirety for the general principles of a viable residential neighborhood in this area to be set out. In so doing, we inverted the working process; rather than taking a basic plan to a higher analytical level, we started from the end product and disintegrated it, giving it a less deterministic logic, while keeping within the general rules.

In our effort to address the issues raised in the EUROPAN 6 perspective, we were immediately faced with the problem of defining the "in-betweenness" of the site. And here, multiple paradoxes emerged. This case is clearly one of city expansion and the site is really in-between nothing. The westward area is empty but is officially targeted for development, so this poor, socially "delicate" area of Ano Liosia is an obstacle in the developers' path, to be surmounted (just like the hills).

Athens 2000

A Brief Look at Athenian Urbanistic Malaise

Immediately following the birth of the modern Greek State (1830) and the choice of Athens as its capital (1834), the city was subjected to such intense population and finance pressures that her authorities, succumbing to various interests, hastily abandoned even the pretence of an urban planning policy. The fabric of the village that evolved at the foot of the Acropolis has been inorganically stretched into the contemporary metropolitan tissue of almost 5 million. The main transportation arteries are former rivers and streams that were covered over; former countryside resort areas have been absorbed and expanded to form the modern suburbs and archaeological sites have been excavated and segregated from public life. The foundation of the building system remains the single or multi family house developed on one plot of land with the local practice of "anti-parohi" . This summarises what Athens consists of: rather than an articulated organism it is the result of single interests packed next to and over each other - it is the spatial imprint of a public domain, which is merely the sum of the private spheres put together. The policy framework that is the cause and the effect of this urban reality, is one of turning the random into plan, the ephemeral into permanent and the already formed reality into theory.

The state, rather than policing private interest in the name of common welfare, is acting more as a private player itself. In that perspective the terms 'theory' and 'plan' are not reliable in the context of Athenian city planning in the sense that they either do not hold any theoretical reflection other than institutionalizing and reproducing the existing reality, or that they do not hold any legacy at all, meaning that neither those who formulate the rules, nor those who have to abide by them, really mean to keep them. The continuous need to expand, to find more land to accommodate the increasing demand, has invariably led local authorities to seize one more chunk of Attica and extend the city limits a bit further.

This functions as a multiple level organizational structure to combine the layout of housing, the directions of pedestrian circulation and the focusing of/on communal spaces into one integrated system.

Despite the inherent contradictions (or because of them), this site presents us with a clear case in favour of intervention, and the intervention takes on a particular localistic importance: the 'undulator' seeks to undermine the local repulsion of the 'public' as well as the aesthetics of a happily oblivious suburbia, which would make the exporting of the Rom people a little further west easier.

Upon the grid of vehicle traffic streets, a system of undulating lines has been overlaid as an alternative tool of land parceling. Contrary to the system of blocks, which creates a clear separation of private from public, the lines divide the site into stripes, running along the east-west axis and interrupted just by the roads, thus creating a more open, flexible and continuous townscape.Spatially, the lines are realized as walls, defining a network of intermingling paths (for pedestrian or service-vehicle use) amid fragmented row housing.