GROUNDING ATHENS, VOL. 1 : INDEXICAL LANDSCAPES AND ATHENOGRAPHIES
The Acropolis, Stoa Attalou, and M1 Metro Line, seen from Adrianou. Maria Mitsoula.
This catalogue is part of a collection published by the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. It documents student design work produced in the Master of Architecture (MArch) programme in 2025-26. Each catalogue describes one of the following design studios in the MArch programme. The full collection is available to view online at issuu.com/esala.eca.
Catalogues, 2025-26:
Crossing Tangier: Architectures of Enjoyment
Doing Enough with Less: Rigorous Simplification
Grounding Athens, Vol. 1
Moving Water II. North Sea Edge
Radical Harvest: Earth/Care/Reuse, Vol. 3
The Shared Island Unit
Published in 2026 by The University of Edinburgh, under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
French, Chris, and Maria Mitsoula. GroundingAthens,Vol.1: IndexicalLandscapesandAthenographies. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2026.
Plaka and Lofos Likavitou, seen from Acropolis. Maria Mitsoula.
APPROACHING ATHENS, FRAMING ATHENOGRAPHIES
The Greek word keimeno (κείμενο), Aristide Antonas writes, refers to both something ‘fallen down’ and to something put down in words, a text. The ruins beneath Athens, he suggests, have this double meaning; as things ‘fallen down’ they form “diverging extant texts” made present in the city above, “reading material” outlining “a rough history of ideas” on the city.1 Grounding Athens sets out to explore these ideas, to read the divergences and histories which are evident in, and made evident by, Athens today.
The city that Antonas is describing emerged with the inauguration of Athens as the capital of Modern Greece, in 1834. To underline the end of Ottoman rule, and Greece’s turn toward Europe, the new capital was laid out as an exemplar of the Western European image of a city. Architects Stamatis Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert, students of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, began a survey of Athens in 1831, three years before the confirmation of Athens as the capital. This survey included a proposal for an extension to the city based on neoclassical principles. In this proposal, large institutional buildings marked three broad avenues set out on a triangular street pattern, which structured adjacent grids of housing and commercial development. The streets were laid down, and then development was suspended, leaving behind an urban structure which would be gradually infilled. Infrastructure preceded occupation: roads, tramlines, street lighting and sewers became expressions of Athenian modernity. These infrastructures far exceeded the needs of a city with a population of only 6,000 at the time of Greek independence, but as Evangelia Chatzikonstantinou observes, constructing
1 Aristide Antonas, “The Construction of Southern Ruins, or Instructions for Dealing with Debt,” South as a State of Mind, no.6/Documenta 14, no.1 (2015).
infrastructure is not only a project of building material things, it is also a project of constructing social relations and practices. 2 The expansion of Athens and its infrastructures demanded skilled labourers, new forms of work, and developed technologies. Infrastructuring Athens involved the modernisation of Athens’ citizenry. Like the emergent city, this social modernisation was – paradoxically – based on the reassertion of an ancient image of Athens. Aided by archaeological surveys and excavations which provided increasingly compelling (if not complete or accurate) evidence of a “correspondence” between the ancient Athens of Western European imagination and the developing city, Modern Athens became a physical manifestation of a new model for European democracy. 3
Both the infrastructural and the archaeological projects which underpinned Modern Athens are endless: both “form infinite endeavours not to be satisfied by completion.”4 Athens today exists within and between these ever-expanding projects, and between the two associated perceptions of what a city represents. Both projects involve specific articulations of ground: of ground as the site of historical value, and of the ground as a passive space accommodating movement, logistics, possible futures. These two contradictory articulations of ground are explored in the projects documented in this catalogue, which question how architecture comes to exist and operate between the historical-material concerns of archaeology and the systematic operations of infrastructures. But these are just two of the urban ‘texts’ which we might read in Athens, and which inform this work. Since the financial crisis in 2008, Athens has been subject to a series of reductive, synoptic characterisations. The imposition of severe austerity measures by the EU bloc presented Athens as a “city of crisis,” of youth unemployment and financial unreliability. Strict financial controls created a situation where vacant spaces combined with cheap rent and underemployment to foster a vibrant creative community, successful despite the restraints imposed. This led to displacements, spiralling rents exacerbated by the spread of (licensed and unlicensed) short-term lets, and an accelerated process of gentrification. Through events like Documenta , Athens gained a reputation as a creative, energetic city, as ‘the new Berlin’ (Athens is four
2 Evangelia Chatzikonstantinou, “Fetishizing the Road. Syngrou Avenue in Athens at the Turn of the 20th Century,” (Conference Paper, 9th International Conference on the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, 2011).
3 The production of such a correspondence involved the destruction of sites of nonconformity. Ottoman settlements around the Acropolis which had existed for 400 years were cleared, and their occupants were displaced so that the ancient ruins might appear more clearly.
4 Antonas, “The Construction of Southern Ruins.”
thousand years older than Berlin). At the same time, it was being re-cast as the city at the centre of the European “Refugee Crisis” of 2015, a transit point for the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing civil war in Syria. Today, the dominant narrative is ecological: Athens is Europe’s hottest metropolis, a city at the forefront of the climate emergency, assaulted by increasingly frequent and unpredictable droughts, floods, and wildfires. None of these characterisations are baseless, and yet they simplify often complex, intertwining urban and social phenomena into singular issues. If, as Antonas suggests, contemporary Athens is a materialisation of a thinking inscribed in the ground, the projects in this catalogue explore architecture as an index of conditions in, of, and on the ground. They develop ways of describing and drawing out the intertwining ‘texts’ latent within the ground of Athens.
To prepare these descriptions and drawings the students were asked to work as ‘Athenographers’, gathering, recording, finding, and measuring Athens. The term is used by contemporary anthropologist Tyler Boersen to describe those individuals who scour archives, sites and collections to compile social histories of the city of Athens. “They study the records of archaeological findings for signs of the interaction of antiquity with the modern city” and create “long lists of objects, both ancient and modern, that connect in a palimpsest of stories.”5 The term has a longer history. It is associated with a form of short story in Greek writing, known as chronographema ( χρονογράφημα). Usually translated as ‘vignette’, the term folds together time (chrono-) and writing ( grapho, meaning ‘to write’). Chronographemata (the plural) are stories that aim to describe a moment in time in Athenian life in detail. Collectively, the writers who specialised in chronographemata were known as Athinaiographoi , Athens-writers, Athenographers.6 Whether anthropologists or authors – or in this case architects – Athenographers are driven by the sense that Athens is “on the edge of being lost,” 7 or that a moment must be captured and recorded in a particular way, with sufficient intensity, lest it disappear. That moment reveals something. It becomes a way of understanding (and critiquing) Athens. Athenographers thus combine urgency, a careful accounting of material, and a critical attention
5 Tyler Boersen, “Athenography: How does a city that belongs to the past look toward the future?” Athens Insider, 25th October, 2022.
6 Joshua Barley, Athens Tales (Oxford University Press, 2025), 9.
7 Boersen, “Athenography.”
Centre for Sculptural Surgery, Carrubers Close.
Site Section and Plan Composite. Wiktor Krzystolik.
to the present. In their re-tellings, Athens emerges “as a culmination of historical pressures… materialized as a city of concrete.” 8
Through their projects, the students – operating as Athenographers –describe moments which evidence pressures and their materialisations in Athens today. They offer a critique of Athens, as well as providing new images of what the city might be. Returning to Antonas’ initial proposition, as well as something fallen or something written the keimeno that is Athens becomes the basis of thesis (θέση, thésis, “something put forth”). For Grounding Athens and its Athenographers, these theses are not articulated in ‘long lists’ or further texts, but in the architectural and urban proposals documented in this catalogue. These proposals offer critical readings and positions from which to move into a developed present.
Grounding Athens began with a one-semester exploration of the closes, courts, and ‘entries’ on the edges of the Old Town of Edinburgh.9 These spaces structured the medieval city as much as the markets and institutions at its core. They were the source of the raw material which supported the construction of the city and the expansion of brewing and tanning industries during the Industrial Revolution, as well as the spaces of labour and dwelling that would become the focus of modernisers and philanthropists. In Scottish urbanism, these spaces were formed by and around plots known as ‘Lands’: long, thin burgage plots which ran perpendicular to the main street of a town or city. The ‘Lands’ were typically fronted by a tenement providing housing and commercial premises, with a long ‘yard’ behind containing amenities to support the commercial activities (tool sheds, byres, orchards, gardens). Students were asked to explore these spaces and to propose new ‘Lands’ for the city of Edinburgh, which would combine an awareness of environmental patterns, re-framed productive possibilities, and new situations and arrangements for dwelling. These projects explored the idea that architecture might act as an indexical, as something pointing toward a broader social or ecological territory.
An index, in the sense used in publishing, is an interface providing directions to a particular term or idea within a larger, associated document
8 Boersen, “Athenography.”
9 The brief for these ‘new lands’ developed from the ESALA Architectural and Urban Design Summer School “New Lands: Sowing Florentine Irises in Geddes Gardens,” written and delivered by Chris French and Maria Mitsoula in 2017 and 2018. Programme Director: Dorian Wiszniewski; Course Organisers: Chris French and Maria Mitsoula.
Above. Indexing Lost and Found Things. Time-based staging of the Royal Mile. Abdulrahman Alsuraya and Emily Grills.
Right. The Lost Foundry of the Canongate, Hammermen’s Close. Surfaces Plan, Isometric and Site Study. Emily Grills.
Redundant Infrastructurings: Wellheads, Water Vessels and Light Measures of the Old Town. Natasha Bell, Keely Cetin, Sam Crichton, and Yuting Cai.
Urban-Geological Thresholds: Ceramic Screens to Hutton’s Section.
Site Isometric. Oscar Thomas.
or text. Read inversely, an index is something which gathers, which condenses a larger field. All the complexities of a situation are held in an index. An ‘indexical’ is an object or term within that index which allows us to locate something within the broader, more nebulous field. Architecture, understood as indexical, directs attention to the field to which it belongs and of which it is composed. In some of these first explorations the city was seen as a collection of ‘lost’ objects, or objects that belonged to a particular – and now improbable or impractical – intersection of material availability and the craft skills required to work with those materials. Some projects sought to bring these craft skills back into focus, others to imagine new futures for the material objects ‘lost’ to history but still present in the city. In some of the projects the city was understood as a place of overlapping, redundant infrastructures, systems, and industries, each of which provided amenity but also generated unexpected waste products, excesses, contaminations, or environmental challenges. Other projects understood the city as a site of latent ecological potential and explored architectural projects which looked to foster the climatic conditions (of light, shade, wetness, humidity) required to support the ecologies of selected species. As indexicals of the Lands of Edinburgh, each of these projects were concerned with the relationship between architecture, as a figure, an articulated ‘term’, and the broader landscape.
As the focus of the studio shifted toward Athens this relationship became critical. Shannon Mattern offers a developed interpretation of the index, and the indexical, as they pertain to landscape. For Mattern, landscapes can be considered ‘indexical’ where they render perceptible “the logics behind their own organization, management, and use.”10 Such landscapes “equate land with property… reduce natural materials and living things to ‘resources’… [and] regard geography as abstract space to be traversed as efficiently as possible.”11 An indexical landscape is a site through which we read extractive, anthropocentric processes at large, expressed locally in spatial terms. In Athens, this redefinition of the indexical as a critical tool informed a series of drawings of Athenian Grounds. At varying scales, these drawings sought to describe the processes which structure the operations of the city, be these archaeological, infrastructural, logistical, or social. If, as we have proposed, architecture in Athens operates in the loosely-regulated
10 Shannon Mattern, “Scents of Spatial Order: Sensing Technical Landscapes.” In Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, ed. Jeffry S. Nesbit and Charles Waldheim (JOVIS, 2023), 39. 11 Mattern, “Scents of Spatial Order,” 39.
space between archaeology and infrastructure, these drawings sought to understand both the archaeological and the infrastructural as forms of index (as gathering larger geographies, histories, ‘abstract spaces’), and to develop the idea that architecture is an indexical, something which refers to and generates correspondences between these conditions. As Athenographers the students sought to document these correspondences, as architects they sought to generate them. The propositions which are emerging – and which are documented in the pages that follow – engage with the often intangible atmospheric and environmental effects of technological processes and historical structures, and the concrete context of Athens, its material concerns and conditions. Presented here, at the end of the first year of a two-year programme, they frame the students’ emerging attitudes toward architecture and the city of Athens, and offer some initial terms through which we might encounter and read the history of the city – its archaeologies – and see pathways – infrastructures – toward its possible futures.
Chris French and Maria Mitsoula
St. Dimitrios Loumbardiaris Church, Lofos Philopappou. Dimitris Pikionis, 1951. Photograph: Maria Mitsoula.
ATHENS GROUNDING
Site: Plateia Nerou (Water Square), Kallithea. Programme: Water Decontamination and Desalination Systems, Hydrological Landscape and Salt Marsh Garden, Open-Air Theatre and Associated Facilities.
SHIFTING HYDROLOGICAL GROUNDS
INFRASTRUCTURAL ETCHINGS ON THE ATHENIAN COAST
ABDULRAHMAN
ALSURAYA
The Athenian coastline presents as a clearly defined edge, an overt expression of what Shannon Mattern describes as a ‘technical land’. But beneath the hardened plane of the harbours, ports, and ferry terminals is a dense field of logistical, historical, and material inscriptions. The coast is composed of land reclamations, hardenings, and shiftings, and is increasingly vulnerable to sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. Despite appearances, the Athenian coastline is a place of uncertainty, of tremors and tremblings.
Through a process of de-laminating the hard crust which has formed on the coast, Shifting Hydrological Grounds re-frames Athens’ intertidal zone as an active, operational-ecological landscape. It traces the logistical and semantic inscriptions of the harbours – the dry docks, bonded territories, and suspended maritime states – and etches a new urban landscape onto the Water Square at Kallithea. Historically a part of the fluctuating space of the Halipedon (literally, ‘salt field’), the site of the Water Square is now covered in a hard skin, creating a place for episodic events. The proposals rework this ground to form a hydraulic system, which intercepts petroleum drift from the adjacent marina, cleaning and desalinating the water to support these events. This system acts as a flood basin, creating absorptive capacity. Within this field, the Water Square becomes the backstage area to a coastal theatre, allowing the site to oscillate between civic uses and operational latencies. The ground is not fixed, but rehearsed, adjusted, and re-performed as a trembling interface between leisure, infrastructure, land, and sea.
Intertidal Logistics: Resurfacing Athens’ Water Square. Edge Infrastructures and Performance Spaces. Aerial Perspective.
Above. Etching the Piraeus Drydocks onto Plateia Nerou and the Halipedon. Collage Studies. Left. Reconfiguring a Shifting Coast. 1:500 Study Model.
Above. Festival Stage, Back-of-House Facilities and Edge Infrastructures. Exploded Axonometric.
Right. Memories of the Lost Salt Marsh. Mapping Salt Infiltrations and Flood Futures in Neo Faliro.
Above. Athens’ Water Square and the SNFCC. Aerial Perspective. Inset. Thickened Infrastructural Ground: Oil-Water Separator. Isometric.
Site: Lipasmata Multifunctional Park (former Fertiliser Factory), Drapetsona. Programme: Salvage Yard, Craft and Construction Workshops, Workers’ Gallery and Park.
QUARRYING ATHENS, SEEDING LIPASMATA
DEVELOPING (RECIPROCAL) RUINS AND WORKINGS
WIKTOR KRZYSTOLIK
Dimitris Pikionis’ pathways on the Acropolis, designed in 1954, were composed of fragments from Neoclassical buildings cleared to enable urban development. These pathways embed loss within an ancient, and carefully constructed, landscape. The clearance was facilitated by antiparochi, a law allowing landowners and contractors to co-develop plots. This law enabled rapid urban expansion, leading to the loss of around 80% of Athen’s 19thcentury buildings. Today, a second phase of ruination is underway, driven by another law, Nomimi Moira, which distributes inherited property equally among all heirs. This has resulted in the fractured ownership of buildings (adelfomiria), making maintenance, development, and sales unfeasible, and resulting in widespread abandonment. In 2025, the Greek government changed this law, enabling the sale of abandoned plots for redevelopment.
With 1,800 vacant buildings in central Athens, some of which may become development sites, Quarrying Athens, Seeding Lipasmata sees abandoned buildings as a material resource. Extending the logistical operations of the constructed coastline of Pireaus into Lipasmata, a former fertiliser factory in Drapetsona – now known as The Workers’ Park – it establishes spaces for collecting, processing, and redistributing material. Understood – after Pikionis – as a landscape of material fragments, it frames the city as a reciprocal system: abandoned buildings become sites of extraction, feeding the restoration of Athens’ urban fabric; new voids are opened within the city; a space of work and production is re-established in Lipasmata.
Selected Buildings, drawn at 1:100, shown on previous Exarcheia drawing.
Above. Choreographing Construction Elements. Spatial and Material (Dis)Assembly. Inset. Measures of NomimiMoira. Survey drawings of the abandoned houses of Exarcheia.
Operational Fields: Quarrying Abandoned Constructions. Workers’ Gallery, Viewing Space and Workshops. Site Section and Planimetric.
Right. Workers’ Gallery, Workshops, and interventions in the Glass Factory. 1:200 Study Model.
INFRASTRUCTURAL ARCHAEOLOGIES
BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE LONG WALLS ZONE
HEI LOI HILARY WONG YUTING CAI
JINGHUI HUANG
(Working) Between the Lines: Archaeologies and Abandoned Infrastructures of the Long Walls. Composite city plan, exploring the spaces between the M1 Metro Line, Leof. Pireos, and the Kifissos River.
03
INFRASTRUCTURAL ARCHAEOLOGIES
BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE LONG WALLS ZONE
HEI LOI HILARY WONG | YUTING CAI | JINGHUI HUANG
In 2015, architect Aristide Antonas described Athenian infrastructure as an “unreadable field, a new imaginary technical god, and a new analphabetism.” Infrastructural Archaeologies traces this unreadable field. It explores the infrastructural landscape of Athens as a layered site of historical industrial systems to reveal and imagine its illegibilities as productive agents in rethinking the city. It begins with two former industrial sites: Technopolis, within the former gas factory complex in Gazi, and the disused PPC Steam Power Plant in Neo Faliro. These sites mark the historical axis of the Long Walls Zone, a 6km long, 180m wide defensive corridor once flanked by 14m high walls which connected Athens to Piraeus. While the walls are lost, the corridor is still visible in the morphological pattern of the area and in the paths of contemporary infrastructures. The former power plants are connected by a Metro line which traces the South Long Wall, and Leoforos Pireos covers the ancient road which ran alongside the North Long Wall. Moving along these lines, archaeological remains appear intermittently amongst the factories and warehouses of Moschato. As industrial activity has declined, many buildings here have been repurposed as cultural venues or temporary festival sites, others remain abandoned. Infrastructural Archaeologies proposes to inset a continuous landscape into the gaps in the Long Walls Zone to form an ecological corridor, combining water filtration and staged planting to remediate polluted land and transform neglected infrastructural edges into accessible environmental and social spaces.
Archaeological-Infrastructural Intersections. Selected sites in the Long Walls (Inter)Zone.
Site: Site of the former CHROPEI Dye Works, Sofianopoulou, Pireaus. Programme: Urban Winery, Phytoremediation Nursery, Community Market, Housing.
PHASED (PHYTO-)REMEDIATIONS
AN AGRICULTURAL INDEX OF THE LONG WALLS ZONE
HEI LOI HILARY WONG
Eugenia Bournova and Vincent Gouzi describe Pireos Street as an index of urban transition. While it might resemble “a field of archaeological ruins, whose chimneys are preserved like antique columns,” they note that the reality is more complex. Despite appearances, this is not a static place, and change here “signals an adaptation of the industrial network rather than its disappearance.” Phased (Phyto-)Remediations understands post-industrial landscapes as places of and in transition. It focuses on an area once occupied by the chemical company CHROPEI (Χρωματουργία Πειραιώς, Piraeus Dye Works), left unusable as a result of soil contamination. The proposal introduces functions to this site which recall the agricultural landscape of the Long Walls Zone. An urban winery is the intended outcome of a phased strategy for environmental remediation and community engagement. In its initial phase, the project cultivates plants known to absorb soil contaminants, including sunflowers, lavender, and poplar trees. These plants extract heavy metals and stabilise the contaminated ground, initiating ecological recovery. As soil conditions improve vineyards are introduced, transforming the former brownfield site into productive agricultural land. A community garden serves adjacent (existing and proposed) housing, and a laiki agora (λαϊκή αγορά, literally ‘peoples market’) spills into the car parks of the Georgios Karaiskakis (Olympiakos FC) Stadium, providing space for the sale and sharing of produce and wine. Over time, the site shifts from a landscape of phytoremediation to orchards, and ultimately an urban winery, creating a long-term ecological and social resource for the city.
Remediating CHROPEI: Establishing Social and Ecological
Above. Shading/Screening Cloisters and Cellars. Studies through a growing garden at CHROPEI; looking to and onto the market-screen.
Right. Urban Winery, Pireos. Isometric, with market-screen to the Georgios Karaiskakis (Olympiakos FC) Stadium car park (right) and stepped theatre with sunflowers.
Site: Former PPC Steam-Electric Factory, Dim. Falireos 57, Pireaus. Programme: Public Swimming Pools, Gymnasia, Water Filtration Beds, Energy Generation, Exhibition Spaces.
REDUNDANT INFRASTRUCTURINGS
WATERWAYS AND CIVIC FIELDS OF THE KIFISSOS RIVER
Following the line of the ancient Long Walls of Athens, from Filopappou Hill to Pireaus, an overpass forms a gate and blockage. This overpass carries Leoforos Kifisou. Climbing a flight of steps to a bridge beneath the road a culverted river is revealed, following the overpass. The river is the Kifissos, which extends 27km from the mountains to the bay. Adjacent to the river is a disused steam power plant, which closed in 1972. This was the first steam-powered electricity plant in Greece. The river was culverted in 1961, but our guide recounts stories of people swimming in the open river, which was warmed by the power plant. Now the river is bounded and severely polluted, and the decaying power plant is used to host occasional exhibitions. Redundant Infrastructurings aims to re-introduce a productive exchange between water, infrastructure, power generation, and public amenity. It establishes a landscape of water purification, reed beds, and sedimentation pools to accommodate overflows from the culvert and reduce pollution in and from the river. This landscape enables a gradual improvement in water quality, and supports a series of swimming pools, which replace the lost ‘amenity’ provided by the river. The roofscape of the power plant becomes an extended field of solar water heaters and photovoltaic panels. Inside the former factory, flexible gym spaces serve neighbouring schools. A new threshold connects the outdoor pools to the factory space, containing exhibition space, and offices for managing the new infrastructure. The project evolves over time into a long-term ecological and spatial system, in which water is returned to public use.
Composite Site Plan and Site Sections of a new civic water-field.
The Kifissos as a Redundant Infrastructure and Infrastructure of Redundancy.
Above. Landscape Infrastructures and Industrial Relics. Pools and exhibition spaces in the reconfigured PPC Steam-Electric Factory.
Left. Folding shades of the new Exhibition and Museum Spaces and the Sunken Pools. Perspective Vignettes.
Site: Pireos 7, Moschato.
Programme: Long Walls Zone Agency Offices, Archives, Exhibition Spaces, Water and Soil Testing Facilities, Archaeological Site, Gardens.
BETWEEN (THE) LONG WALLS
EXCAVATIONS, GARDENS, AND ECOLOGICAL AGENCY
JINGHUI HUANG
Between the former Manos sunflower oil factory and the site of the abandoned EXMA paper factory is a clearly defined, walled archaeological excavation. Set back from Leof. Pireos, and at an unusual angle to the surrounding morphology, the excavation reveals a shrine, dating to the 4th Century BCE, contemporary with the first phase of construction of the Long Walls. Today, this excavation is a rare walled garden in the predominantly constructed landscape of Moschato, and its depth reveals the extent to which this landscape has acquired thickness over time. Between (the) Long Walls aims to expose the soil, to open up disused areas of the Long Walls Zone both horiztonally, as gardens, orchards, excavations, and sites of phytoremediation, and vertically, as openings for new wall-buildings. The garden-sites operate within the remit of a larger collective agency tasked with developing the Long Walls Zone as an ecological corridor. Adjacent to the excavation on Pireos, an Agency Office coordinates site protections, bioremediation, and water filtration processes. It provides facilities for soil and water testing, and for monitoring the effectiveness of environmental responses. Long, wall-like buildings –referencing the thickness and height of the lost Long Walls – split the site into a shadow garden and a light garden, mirroring the division enacted by the Northern and Southern Long Walls. These wall-buildings act as naturally ventilated interfaces, creating connections between the cultural spaces, exhibition venues, and archives of the Long Walls Zone Agency, and separations between areas of contamination, remediation and testing.
Above. Archaeological Orientations: Siting a Wall(-Building) and Garden. Perspective Study.
Below. Agency Office (Wall-Building I) and Excavation Garden. 90-degree Axonometric.
Above. Between Sunflowers, Paper, and Soil. Material Vignettes.
Right. Agency Office and Excavation Garden. Composite Site Plan and Section
Site: Perraivou 15, Neos Kosmos. Programme: Columbarium, Mausoleum, Morgue, and Aquamation Facilities; Memorial Flower Garden and Market; Digital Archiving Centre.
SKEUOMORPHIC (ANTI-)MONUMENTS
MAINTENANCE, PRESERVATION, VALUE, AND SUSPENSE
OLIVER HIGGINS
Workers hang from Santiago Calatrava’s Olympic stadium in Marousi, applying fresh paint to the steelwork, which is rusting only 22 years since the 2004 Olympic Games. Across the city, the Hellinikon airport site which hosted temporary stadia during the Games, awaits redevelopment as luxury housing and an urban park within the new ‘Athenian Riviera’. Between the two, in the centre of Athens, the Games provided renewed impetus to restore ancient and Neoclassical archaeological remains in an effort to boost tourism. Restoration is a continuous endeavour.
In October 2025, the Parthenon could be seen without scaffolding for the first time since the 2004 Olympics; it was covered again one month later. In the New Acropolis Museum nearby, a video captures the careful cleaning of dirt from one of the Erechtheion caryatids. Removed from the everyday pressures of weather, these figures are, after Agamben, rendered sacred within the museum. Exploring Athens as an active, everyday city requiring continuous care, Skeuomorphic (Anti-)Monuments engages with sites of time, suspension, and decay. Held above the site of a Hadrianic Gymnasium, a proposed Columbarium explores a possible future for Athens’ cemeteries, which are increasingly crowded, and burdensome. Between a night club and a development left suspended by the discovery of archaeology, an open, structural stone frame creates niches for human remains, while a hanging canopy – a skeuomorphic re-casting of the robes of the caryatids – shelters a Flower Garden for mourners. A sealed stone vessel contains an evolving archive of contemporary Athenian life.
Acropolis
Acropolis Museum
Kallimarmaro
Perspective look into the archaeological flower garden
Above. Columbarium and Memorial Flower Garden. Perspective Views.
Right. Installing an Athenian Topoi/Graphes. Installation, Studio 3, Minto House.
Perspective look into the terraced Columbarium.
CLIMATIC GROUNDS AND LIFE VESSELS
MYTH, MEASURE, AND TYPOLOGIES OF WIND AND WATER
EMILY GRILLS
JOHANNA LUPP
SAM CRICHTON
Charting Common (Hydrological) Ground: Archaeologies and Infrastructures of Weather.
Athenian Ground drawing, combining site surveys, archaeological records, and on-site sketches.
CLIMATIC GROUNDS AND LIFE VESSELS
MYTH, MEASURE, AND TYPOLOGIES OF WIND AND WATER
EMILY GRILLS | JOHANNA LUPP | SAM CRICHTON
Climatic Grounds and Life Vessels investigates how architecture mediates between water, air, and ground. Athens is facing intensified heatwaves, increasing water scarcity, and rising energy demands, alongside episodic winter flooding caused by sealed surfaces and culverted rivers. Rather than treating these as isolated problems, the project reconsiders them as interconnected climatic conditions embedded within a historical, archaeological and mythical ground.
Drawing on the typological studies of Aris Konstantinidis and his notion of buildings as “vessels of life” (δοχεία ζωής, docheía zoís), Climatic Grounds and Life Vessels explores historic infrastructures as operative models for future climatological architectures. Beginning with explorations of existing hydrological and aerological structures, including the ancient Tower of the Winds, the uncovered section of the Eridanos river passing through Monastiraki Square metro station, and the Roman reservoir at Dexameni Square, Athens is positioned as a layered hydraulic and atmospheric landscape, where water and air have long been mediated through architectural ground. Through these typological studies, a series of new Athenian vessels develop, which collectively articulate a re-imagining of the ground of Athens. These vessels offer new devices to connect air and water, and engage with the climatic challenges facing Athens. They are active in fostering relations between these climatic agents and their various associated effects.
Vessels of Life: Typological Studies of Athenian Water/Wind Measures. Installation, Studio 3, Minto House.
Site: Aiolou 94, Omonoia.
Programme: Living Reserve (Walled Garden, Orchid House, Botanical Vessels), Emergency Reserve Centre, Temporary Housing.
AEOLIAN TECTONICS
TYPOLOGIES OF SCREENS, VESSELS, AND RESERVES
EMILY GRILLS
A key figure in Athens’ meteorological landscape is the Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora (10-11BCE). The Tower is thought to house the world’s first water clock, fed by springs from the Acropolis; its eight faces are adorned with the figures of the eight winds. It marks the convergence of measure, environment, and myth. Following the path of Boreas (God of the north wind) from the Tower, along Aiolou Street (named for Aeolus, the God of Winds), and through the ancient Acharnian Gate into Modern Athens an array of ‘Life Vessels’ layer climatological infrastructures and strategies. They mediate air, water, and shade, responding to changing technologies and climatic pressures by combining passive strategies from ancient Athens with contemporary mechanical systems.
Drawing on Aris Konstantinidis’ survey of Athenian courtyard houses and the Υπαίθριος (literally, open-to-sky spaces) mandated by contemporary building regulations, dwellings are re-framed as climatic instruments. On Aiolou, at the intersection of the paths of Boreas and Kaikias (God of the northeast wind), a walled botanical garden creates an emergency reserve. Layered service skins and thickened grounds shape controlled internal environments within. Shifts from the rigid morphology of the Modern city capture prevailing winds and direct movement through the urban block, creating permeability. Evoking the Athenian phrase Φύσηξε βοριάς (“Boreas has blown”), a thickened façade creates spaces with varied, controlled microclimates, offering respite from the urban heat.
Above. Walking the Path of Boreas: From the Tower of Winds to Aiolou. City survey. Inset. Developing Aeolian Typologies. Cast fabric study models.
Above. Walled Botanical Garden and Emergency Reserve. Ground Floor Plan. Inset. Ventillating Facades. Study Model.
Below. Sheltering Aiolou: An Urban Courtyard House. Isometric.
Site: Aridittou 3, Syntagma/Lofos Ardittou.
Programme: Hydrological Measuring Field (Civic Climatic Basin, Swimming Pools and Changing Facilities, Storm Water Mitigation Landscape).
MEASURING FIELDS AND (LIFE) VESSELS
DEVELOPING DEXAMENI’S (HYDROLOGICAL) SECTION
JOHANNA LUPP
Measuring Fields and (Life) Vessels traces a hydrological line between the ancient reservoir (134-140CE) at the end of Hadrian’s aqueduct, in Dexameni Square, and the subterranean logics of storage, calibration, and climatic moderation necessary for engaging with the water pressures affecting Athens. From the reservoir, which still contributes to the irrigation of the National Garden, this line extends to the former Olympic swimming pool adjacent to Zappeion, which was constructed in the 1930s and used for the 1960 European Aquatics Championships before falling into disuse. The pool is adjacent to ‘The Great Athens Walk’, a public-realm project which aims to promote pedestrianised, climateconscious urban infrastructures. It is also adjacent to the culverted Ilissos River, which was covered following catastrophic floods in 1961. Though hidden, this river remains a latent hydrological system beneath the city. The project reimagines the site of the abandoned pool as a Civic Climatic Basin, translating the logics of the Dexameni reservoir from subterranean world to inhabitable landscape. This basin establishes a field of measures, a calibrated ground of tanks, wetlands, and water infrastructures that collect, filter, store, and reuse rainwater and water from the Illisos River. It operates seasonally, retaining storm water in winter, tempering microclimates in spring, and offering shade in summer. The Olympic pool is reactivated and complemented by new pools and support facilities. Alongside these pools an elevated, linear walkway anchors a series of vessels which reposition architecture as climatic and social infrastructure.
Prev. Climatic Grounds and Water Fields: From Plateia Dexamenis to Zappeion. Athenian Ground drawing.
Programme: Centre for the Investigation of Subterranean Ecologies (Testing Vessels, Seminar Rooms, Water Garden).
ATHINA’S/ATHENA’S DARK ECOLOGIES
RIVERS OF THE UNDERGROUND AND THE UNDERWORLD
SAM CRICHTON
In 1945 the open waterways of Athens measured 1,280km. During the post war ‘antiparochi period’ of the 1950s, 25% of these rivers were culverted. Today only 434km of open riverbed remain, a 66.4% reduction in 80 years. The culverting of the rivers was a response to flooding; the rivers would burst their banks in flash floods that claimed lives and destroyed property. However, these flood phenomena were the result of development. The expansion of the city into areas of flood risk overburdened the natural network of small, shallow riverbeds, and consequently any increase in rainfall resulted in flooding. While Athens experiences an annual rainfall of only 390mm, the city continuously experiences dangerous floods, with deaths and damages recorded regularly since 1961.
Since they were culverted, Athens’ rivers have quietly flowed beneath the concrete of the modern city, and – as the Roman poet Ovid once wrote – “dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” The subterranean landscape of Athens now consists of dark underground lakes trapped beneath the surface, ‘Dark Ecologies’ of evolved species and polluted ecosystems. This environment is part of the future Athenian ecosystem, not something to remedy or mend but a consequence of the realities of Athens’ relationship to her rivers. The project documents the macro- and micro-hydrologics of this ecology and its corresponding crises to propose a centre for testing the specific, subterranean water conditions found within the rivers of Athens’ underworld.
Above. Archaeological/Infrastructural Intersections: Pl. Monastiraki. Site drawings and archaeological surveys. Inset. Underworld Architectures. Solids and voids of of
Monastiraki Station.
Above. Hanging Garden, Entrance Bridges and Water Intake Room. Vignettes. Left. Centre for the Investigation of Subterranean Ecologies. Elevation.
Site: Pedion tou Areos and Leof. Evelpidon, Kypseli. Programme: Equipment Storage (Emergency Relief for Refugees), Pump and Well Houses, Gatehouses (Ticket Booths, Kiosks) and ‘Counterweights’ (Support Facilities).
CONTESTING/EXTENDING FIELDS
THICKENING EDGES AND AXES OF PEDION TOU AREOS
OSCAR THOMAS
Athens is on the Aegean Sea Plate, a fast-moving, precarious tectonic microplate splitting from the Eurasian Plate. It sits on the Attic-Cycladic Crystalline Complex, a subduction complex within the Southern Aegean Sea, an area of intense geological stretching, known as extension. These geological tensions formed the mountains which enclose the Attic basin and create shoulders to the city of Athens. These mountains are the site of a second, and more rapidly evolving, tension. Here, a shift from sacred (mythological, almost mystical) ecological terrain to profane urban territory is readily apparent. Athens is spreading into the mountains, consuming forests and bringing inhabitants into proximity with the sites of wildfires. Contesting/Extending Fields explores these tensions through a third, expressed site of tension within Athens: Pedion tou Areos, the Field of Mars. Here, competing demands for public access clash with private maintenance contracts and the murky agendas of philanthrocapitalists.
While these tensions can be plotted in plan they are experienced in section. New gatehouses to Pedion tou Areos amplify those tensions described above and mediate between the contested geological and urban fields of Athens. As an architectural infrastructure - a delineated and diffused thickened edge - these Gatehouses re-order horizontal divisions into vertical thickenings, extending subterranean geological compressions into tectonic assemblages. These assemblages support the park and form a shared water infrastructure to sustain the city, the fields and organic life.
Projections of Geological Tensions: Sectioning Pedion tou Areos. Installation, Studio 3, Minto House.
Left. Geological Tensions, Ataraxian Islands: Tethering Pedion tou Areos. City Plan. Above. Contested Fields: Urban Tensions and Vertical Edges. Installation drawing.
Waiting Lands: Surveying Athenian Gaps. Layered archaeological and geological survey drawings; site surveys.
WAITING LANDS
UNSTABLE GAPS AND ATHENIAN WISH IMAGES
JIARUI LI | YICHENG ZHANG | XINRUI CHEN
Describing the urban voids of Berlin, Beveridge, Kip, and Oevermann call on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘wish image’. Urban voids, they note, are “absences of urbanisation [which] offer a moment of pause to reveal the diverse wish images involved in the making of cities.”1 They term these absences “waiting lands,” from the German word brachen, meaning ‘fallow’. Despite claims to the contrary, Athens is not the new Berlin, but it is a city of absences and wish images, where unrealized developments, vacant lots, formal urban gestures, and grand plans intersect. Focusing on the intersections between ancient and Modern Athens and the lost edges of the Ottoman city, Waiting Lands surveys Athens’ unstable gaps, drawing their surfaces, edges and surrounding structures. It reads them as sites where meaning, use, and the wish images we associate with the city are renegotiated. The three projects which collectively explore these Waiting Lands approach Athens’ gaps as spaces where new and old intersect, and where remnants of former figures remain visible. They introduce architectural infrastructures which operate to their own temporal registers, and thus act in a manner akin to the archaeological sites which harbour unique ecosystems and suspend development. These architectural infrastructures increase biodiversity (supporting replanting and rewilding), carnivalesque fantasy, and temporary occupation (supporting the increasing number of visitors who pass through Athens each year) to make present lost histories.
1 Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip & Heike Oevermann, ‘From Wastelands to Waiting Lands: Retrieving possibility from the voids of Berlin’, City, Vol.26 No.2-3 (2022), 281.
Layered Constructions: Intersections of Neoclassical and Contemporary Athens. Elevation studies.
Site: Varvakios Central Market and Square, Omonoia. Programme: Commerical Space, Water Collection Basin, Workshops, Market Facilities.
STRATIFIED GAPS
GROUNDING EXCHANGE IN THE POST-COMMERCIAL CITY
JIARUI LI
In Omonoia and Kotzia Squares modern facades and temporary structures intersect with neoclassical buildings. These intersections are the focus of Stratified Gaps; they are sites where material and urban conditions are revealed. At the scale of the city, these interfaces are found in those unintegrated and informal open spaces which have formed in ad hoc patches between blocks. But they are also evident in the tension between legislation and development. Many of Athens’ commercial buildings are no longer fit for purpose (spatially or environmentally); many are abandoned. These cannot be redeveloped, as legislation would prohibit reinstatement at the same density, leading to a loss of space (and capital). Stratified Gaps proposes a sequenced exchange of these spaces, a mode of planning which anticipates relocation through the making and closing of gaps.
The underground parking structure at Varvakios Municipal Market becomes the first site of exchange. Part of the underground structure is retained to support the Market, and part is opened up to provide public space; a gap is created. Artificial terrains are formed in this gap, a new “landform” composed of the rubble of the parking structure. A canopy provides shade and generates humidity. Interlaced passageways connect streets, with raised sections accommodating the displaced commercial spaces. The uncovered basin is transformed into a stratified landscape of hanging gardens, galleries, and water basins, housing archaeological artefacts and everyday material recovered from the shifting city above.
Above. Shading/Ventilating Subterranean Strata: A New Market Canopy. Aerial Perspective, and Supporting Market Logistics: Varvakios Market Arrivals. Perspective view.
Above. Archaeological Excavations, Ground-level Bridges, and Occupied Canopy. Perspective views. Below. Trading Spaces: Occupying Varvakios Subterranean Strata. Long section.
Site: Pl. Koumoundourou (Eleftherias), Psirri/Omonoia/Metaxourgeio.
Programme: Forestry Library, Nursery and Plant Shop, Woodworking Facilities, Flexible Community Space and Outdoor Theatre.
URBAN VOIDS TO INTERSTITIAL FORESTS
CULTIVATING ECOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
YICHENG ZHANG
Micromeria acropolitana, a small, pink flower discovered in 1906 and considered extinct until 2006, only grows on the Acropolis, but is an example of a phenomenon noted across Greece; the protections afforded by archaeological sites have created living ecosystems with unusual ecological value. Despite covering only 0.1% of Greece, these sites contain 11% of the country’s biodiversity. Urban Voids to Interstitial Forests takes these archaeological-ecological gaps as the starting point for a project of urban biodiversification. It aims to respond to ecological crises affecting contemporary Athens, including urban overheating, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity. It looks for gaps: places where the boundaries of roads and squares have become uncertain, where abandoned plots merge, or where archaeological remains prevent encroachment. It turns these gaps into an extended urban forest, separated from but within the city, composed of native trees and plant systems. Within these forests a series of buildings support re-forestation. Beginning in Koumoundourou (Eleftherias) Square, designed by Leo von Klenze as a boundary between ancient and Modern Athens, the urban trees of central Athens give scale to public spaces and facilities supporting public events; they enclose a site for organising the distribution of forestry and woodwork crafts. Lightweight buildings between the trees offer shade, ventilation, cooling, and ecological cultivation. Passive stack ventilation systems and circular irrigation strategies provide cooling via natural ventilation and humidification. Gaps become sites of cultivation.
Above. Theatre Seating and Elevated Planted Gantry. Perspective Views.
Above. Planted Facades and Passive Ventilations. Sectional Isometric studies, and Framing an Urban Forest-Theatre, Isometric.
Right. Foresting Plateia Eleftherias: Nursery, Library and Public Theatre. Planimetric.
Site: Lisikratous 1, Plaka.
Programme: Material Reclamation Workshops and Salvage Yards, Workshops, Temporary Festival Infrastructures (Shading, Seating, Stages), Storage.
HOLDING GAPS AND FRAGMENTS
RITUAL AND MATERIAL AS CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE
XINRUI CHEN
Among the marble figures in the Archaic Acropolis Gallery of the New Acropolis Museum is a figure of Nike of Kallimachos. The figure is assembled from fragments, bound together by a new steel column and associated armatures. Rather than restoring the statue, the presentation of the figure of Nike acknowledges ruptures in time, enabling the fragments to persist as fragments and find new associations. The same juxtaposition is evident in Athens itself. Contemporary materials stitch together and space ancient remains, be it at the scale of actual connection or of urban interventions. Holding Gaps and Fragments explores the architecture of these stitches, these structures which facilitate the making of associations rather than the completion of historical images. It explores architecture as an act of holding, of creating spaces, intervals, gaps.
Focusing on Plaka as a locus of historical artefacts and urban gaps, the proposal reimagines the city through its (lost) carnivals and contemporary festivals. Squares are temporarily reoccupied for performances; these overlooked spaces become stages, theatres, and places of encounter. Reclaiming stone from abandoned buildings, and salvaging steel and fabric from festival structures, materials are reassembled into seasonal shelters and shading devices. These expand the workshops supporting the carnivals into a civic infrastructure. At the corner of Lisikratous and Sellei, a workshop and seasonal theatre allow temporary forms of collective life to assemble within the city’s everyday rhythms.
Temporary Cultural Infrastructures: Prop and Stage Workshops. Perspective view.
Above. Prop and Stage Workshop: Performance Space, and Workshop. Perspective Views. Right. Seasonal Infrastructures: Canopies, Stages, Screens. Exploded Isometric.
Site: Athens School of Fine Arts (AFSA), Pireos 256-260, Agios Ioannis Rentis. Programme: Pigment and Dye Factory (Planting Beds, Dye-Processing Facilities, Drying Spaces), Archaeological Excavations, Artists Studios.
EXCAVATING PRODUCTION
CULTIVATING MATERIAL IN POST-INDUSTRIAL PIREOS
ZHUOSHI LI
In 2017, Athens School of Fine Arts (AFSA, ΑΣΚΤ) was one of the main venues for the art fair Documenta. It hosted “Material Matters,” an exhibition of artefacts assembled as a ‘library’ of material for discussion. This gathered litter from Sydney, playing cards from Madrid, fabric from Rajasthan and toy boats from the flea market in nearby Monastiraki. Established in 1837, AFSA has always been a gathering point for key Athenian artists. Excavating Production seeks to position these figures within a history of labour and making, to explore intersections of industrial heritage and creative and craft practices.
In 1992, AFSA moved to the former Hellenic Textile Mill, which closed in 1981. It is now one of several cultural organisations occupying postindustrial sites along Pireos; approximately 26,570 Greek manufactories closed in the 1980s and 1990s. Excavating Production explores how new craft spaces might join these cultural organisations. A pigment production facility is introduced to one of the sites of the Athens Festival. A vacant lot becomes a system of archaeological trenches and planting beds; a former warehouse accommodates dye-processing spaces; a new elevated volume provides studios, connecting the Festival and AFSA. Arranged vertically, wet processes below are separated from dry spaces above, forming a material cycle from cultivation to production. By integrating planting, archaeological excavation, and artistic practice, the project establishes a new productive cultural infrastructure that reconnects past and present.
Above. Trenches, Beds, and Trays: Pigment Planting and Dye Factory. Section Study.
Right. Rhythms of a Dye Factory. Elevation studies of insertions between the existing structural bays.
Above. Pigment Planting and Dye Factory. Sectional Isometric Study.
Right. AFSA Studios. Isometric sections through the elevated studio spaces.
ARCHITECTURES OF DISPLACEMENT
ECOLOGICAL,
NATASHA BELL ADELAIDE PHILLIPS KEELY CETIN
INSTITUTIONAL
AND INDUSTRIAL AGENTS
Displaced Athenian Territories: Refugees, Ministries, Protests, and Power. Athenian Ground drawing, charting interconnected movements, displacements, and migrations.
ARCHITECTURES OF DISPLACEMENT
ECOLOGICAL, INSTITUTIONAL AND INDUSTRIAL AGENTS
Architectures of Displacement examines Athens as a territory of ecological, institutional, and industrial displacement. Across the coastal, urban, and agricultural peripheries, it traces how systems of production, governance, and inhabitation are continually relocated, leaving behind fragmented landscapes and vulnerable communities. It understands displacement to be both an act of violence and – after Lyotard – of wilful destabilization or disruption, one aimed at challenging established structures. Borrowing from Andrew Herscher’s description of refugee housing in Athens, it frames a series of contemporary displacements affecting the city, made evident through three sites. In the Prosfygika (literally, ‘Refugee Homes’) of Alexandras Avenue, institutional shifts and redevelopment pressures expose an erosion of civic space, prompting adaptive re-use strategies that embed social resilience. In Eleonas, the decline of agricultural ground and the pressures of climate change position architecture as a mediator between cultivation, displacement, and resource distribution. In Drapetsona, the post-industrial coastline is reimagined as a site of ecological repair, transforming former logistical infrastructures into networks for phytoremediation. Collectively, these projects reposition architecture as an active agent operating across scales, linking ground, community, and infrastructure. Through re-planting, re-use, and the re-distribution of resources, they propose a networked approach to regeneration that transforms sites of displacement into productive, civic, and ecological systems.
NATASHA BELL | ADELAIDE PHILLIPS | KEELY CETIN
Above. Tracing and Archiving Displacement Events. Installed drawing.
Left. Developing the Tectonics of Displacement. Isometric Studies.
Site: Leoforos Alexandras 160, Ambelokipi.
Programme: NGO offices, Community Healthcare Facilities, Civic Assembly, Community Market, Tree Nursery.
AFTER DISPLACEMENT
REASSEMBLING CIVIC GROUNDS OF PROSFYGIKA
NATASHA BELL
In 2027, nine major government ministries will relocate to a new campus in Ymittos, eastern Athens, on the site of a former ammunitions and explosives factory. As part of a wider urban regeneration strategy, this move will release over 200 buildings for public housing, but it will shift governance to the urban periphery, disrupting established sites of civic expression. After Displacement investigates this intersection of institutional displacement, politics, and housing. It focuses on the self-managed refugee housing (Prosfygika) on Leoforos Alexandras. This housing faces regular threats of demolition, often under state-led redevelopment plans. It is adjacent to the Apostolos Nikolaidis Stadium, which is to be demolished on completion of a new stadium for Panathinaikos F.C in Votanikos. This land exchange has already resulted in the displacement of one refugee camp, from the new stadium site. The proposal focuses on what will be the site of the former stadium. It introduces a series of adaptive interventions shaped by the needs of the community within the Prosfygika across Leoforos Alexandras, supporting education, healthcare, and social exchange. Structural elements of the stadium will be repurposed to reduce and localise resource use. The ground excavated to clear the stadium site will be re-shaped, on site, into a series of sunken gardens for growing trees, generating humid microclimates to minimise irrigation needs and aid in heat mitigation. These strategies form the basis of a network of interventions across Athens, a new civic route which re-establishes collective presence, resistance, and a more sustainable urban future.
Above. Islands of Displaced Ground: Tracing Displaced People and Places. Morphological Studies. Layered Displacements: Situating Migrations on and off Leof. Alexandras. Isometric Collage.
Above. Sacred Routes, Urban Voids: Planting Framework. Isometric. Left. Mapping Moving Ministries: A New Protest Route. City Plan.
Above. Responding to Displaced Land: Extending Prosfygika. Site Isometric.
Site: Agricultural University of Athens, Par. Iera Odos, Votanikos. Programme: Community Kitchen and Market, Wildfire Resource Offices, Mixed-Use Communal Spaces for Migrant Workers and Refugees.
CULTIVATING DISPLACEMENT
AGRICULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURES OF IERA ODOS
ADELAIDE PHILLIPS
In Eleonas and Votanikos on the western edge of Athens, onceproductive olive-growing landscapes have transformed into fragmented post-industrial territories. Abandoned industry, migratory settlements, and environmental degradation coexist, registering displacement across ecological, social, and industrial systems. Cultivating Displacements positions architecture as an active agent within these displaced conditions. A Center for Agricultural Development and Displacement operates as a site of remediation, supporting ecological restoration and displaced communities. Through re-planting initiatives and the redistribution of resources, the project connects Eleonas to its agricultural history, while addressing the pressures of urban expansion, migration, and climate instability. As wildfires encroach upon the urban periphery, accelerating cycles of displacement, the project establishes a regenerative agricultural framework that integrates cultivation, education, and resource distribution.
Located along Iera Odos (the Sacred Way) – the oldest road in Greece and a historic axis of production and movement – the project engages with the notion of the transit corridor as both context and generator. The primary architectural gesture reinterprets this axis as an operable mesh façade that mediates sunlight, provides storage facilities, and supports formal programmes. This linear system extends into the agricultural grounds, where it organizes a network of canopies that structure cultivation, labour, and the transfer of resources between field and building.
Study 04 1:200
ARCHITECTURES OF DISPLACEMENT | STUDY 03 1:200
Site
Below. Centre for Agriculatural Development and Displacement. Site Plan. Study 05
Plan 1:500 @ A1
ATHENOGRAPHY ATHENIAN GROUND DRAWINGS TOPOI / GRAPHES MODEL BUILDING PROPOSAL
Above. Cross Cultivating Olives and Industries. Study models (left) and
Survey: Layers of Eleonas (right)
Above. Centre for Agricultural Development and Displacement. Perspective collage and axonometric study.
Left. Sections through a (lost) Olive Grove. Study sections with canvas etching and transfer print.
Piraeus is Europe’s largest passenger port, ferrying twenty million people each year to the Greek islands. As well as passengers, the ferries transport goods, materials, and equipment from Athens, and return agricultural products, ceramics, and leather to the mainland. The port is defined by the logistical demands of these exchanges. It is a site of holdings, transferences, displacements. Separating Pireaus from the industrial harbours of Perama is the Workers Park, on the site of the former Lipasmata fertilizer plant which supplied agricultural landscapes across Greece. The factory was sustained not only through the movement of materials, but through the migrations of labourers, who became embedded within Drapetsona. While the agricultural territories and industrial infrastructures have been displaced, the community remains, and the coastline and soil continue to register the long-term environmental consequences of industrialisation. Drapetsona is now a “sacrifice zone,” where ecological degradation has become an accepted cost for wider regional productivity. At the junction of these two ‘landscapes’ is the Krakaris Conveyor Belt. Once a transmitter of raw materials, Logistical Displacements re-imagines the conveyor belt as a measure through which to re-interpret coastal territory and reveal displacements. Rethinking the constructed coast as an ecological infrastructure, an Office of Planting Logistics and nursery shift the logics of logistics from movement to repair. Phytoremediating plants are cultivated, transforming Lipasmata from a post-industrial landscape into an active agent of environmental regeneration.
Above. Measuring the Krakaris Conveyor Belt. Scan and Site Survey. Infrastructures of Remediation: Gantry View. Perspective Vignette.
Above. Infrastructures of Remediation: View of the Soil Hardening Zone and Planting Zone. Perspective Vignettes. Re-casting Concrete Infrastructures: Material Displacement Studies. Elevation and Cross Section.
ATHENS UNFINISHED
FORMATIONS AND FORMALITIES OF AN IMPROBABLE CITY
ZIYI ZHONG YUNHE LI
Revisiting ‘The Cultural Centre of Athens’: Projections and Projects for Aristotle’s Lykeion.
Setting Ioannis Despotopoulos’ scheme for a Cultural Centre in contemporary Athens.
Site: Athens Conservatoire and Aristotle’s Lyceum, Kolonaki/Pagrati. Programme: Public Theatre; Soil Construction Workshops and Classrooms.
ATHENS UNFINISHED
FORMATIONS AND FORMALITIES OF AN IMPROBABLE CITY
Athens is built on an improbable premise. It was named capital of modern Greece because of its ancient ruins, and their association with democracy. The ruins instigated an ever-expanding archaeological project to reinforce that association. The new capital was thus built on ground that becomes increasingly untouchable the more that it is known. How do we develop architecture that is respectful of the ecological and historic significance of ground when ground is increasingly sacred? In Athens, this tension is usually expressed through separation, either of the archaeological sites from the city or of new material from old. Athens Unfinished sees this tension not as a technical matter, but as a structural contradiction between present-day demands and historical continuity. The “unfinished” is understood to relate to open-ended processes and evolving relationships between archaeology, construction, and public life. Two projects, located between the Athens Conservatoire (part of an unfinished urban project) and the Lyceum of Aristotle, explore material and spatial strategies for developing ‘unfinished’ architectures. A thickened, suspended promenade reimagines Aristotle’s walking lectures (Περιπατητικός, “to walk about”) as spatial figures, creating a path between discussion spaces, reading rooms, and a sunken amphitheatre. Circulation accommodates pauses, dialogues, spaces of rest. A workshop produces prefabricated rammed earth panels for use in constructions across Athens. Excavated soil reframed as constructed matter allows ground to participate in building. The spaces of the Conservatoire become a dynamic urban material field, an unfinished, and unfinishable, project.
ZIYI ZHONG | YUNHE LI
Above. Unfinished Athens: Untouchable Sites and Incomplete Projects. City Plan. Inset. The Cultural Centre of Athens. Model, Ioannis Despotopoulous. 1959.
Above. A Shifting Theatre: Removable Seating and Shading, and Crossing Ground(s): Urban Bridges. Perspective Vignettes.
Right. Bridging Leof. Vasilissis Sofias and Leof. Vasilissis Olgas. Section through Aristotle’s Lykeoin.
Left. Sections through an Improbable Ground and Unpacking Urban and Material Layers: Archaeology, Material, Performance. City Sections and Exploded Axonometric.
Above. A Workshop for Excavated Earth. Isometric, and Material Displacements: Metro Cuttings and Archaeological Displacements. Section.
Right. A Workshop for Excavated Earth: Expanding the Athens Conservatoire. Isometric.
Exhibition. Studio 3, Minto House, 20 Chambers Street. May, 2026. Photograph: Maria Mitsoula.
Exhibition. Studio 3, Minto House, 20 Chambers Street. May, 2026. Photograph: Maria Mitsoula.
Abrahamsson, Christian. Topoi/graphein:mappingthemiddleinspatialthought University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
Antonas, Aristide. “The Construction of Southern Ruins, or Instructions for Dealing with Debt.” South as a State of Mind , no.6/Documenta, Vol. 14, No.1 (2015).
Barley, Joshua. Athens Tales, edited by Helen Constantine. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Bastéa, Eleni. TheCreationofModernAthens:PlanningtheMyth . Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Boersen, Tyler. “Athenography: How does a city that belongs to the past look toward the future?” Athens Insider, 25th October, 2022. https://www.athensinsider.com/ athenography-how-does-a-city-that-belongs-to-the-past-look-toward-the-future/.
Bournova, Eugenia and Vincent Gouzi. “Going down Piraeus Street: the metamorphoses of a street, witness of industrial Greece” Athens Social Atlas , June 2023, https://www. athenssocialatlas.gr/en/article/piraeus-street-witness-of-industrial-greece/
Chatzikonstantinou, Evangelia. “Fetishizing the Road. Syngrou Avenue in Athens at the Turn of the 20th Century,” (Conference Paper, 9th International Conference on the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, 2011.
Kousoulas, Stavros. Athens: Notes on Urban Immanence. Routledge, 2025.
Lending, Mari. “Negotiating Absence: Bernard Tschumi’s new Acropolis Museum in Athens.” The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 14 No. 5 (2009): 567-589.
Mattern, Shannon. “Scents of Spatial Order: Sensing Technical Landscapes.” In Technical Lands: A Critical Primer , edited by Jeffry S Nesbit and Charles Waldheim. JOVIS, 2023.
Scherr, Richard. “Architecture as Index: Toward a Theory of Contingency.” Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 44 No. 3 (May, 1991): 172-181.
Theocharaki, Anna Maria. The Ancient Circuit Walls of Athens . De Gruyter, 2020.
Students at the Panathenaic Stadium (Kallimarmaro). January, 2026. Photograph: Maria Mitsoula.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Studio Leaders
Chris French and Maria Mitsoula
Students
Abdulrahman Alsuraya, Natasha Bell, Yuting Cai, Keely Cetin, Xinrui Chen, Sam Crichton, Emily Grills, Oliver Higgins, Jinghui Huang, Wiktor Krzystolik, Yunhe Li, Zhuoshi Li, Jiarui Li, Johanna Lupp, Adelaide Phillips, Oscar Thomas, Hei Loi Hilary Wong, Yicheng Zhang, Ziyi Zhong.
Visitors
Kevin Adams, William Bell, Lucy Benjamin, Suzanne Ewing, Nikolia Kartalou, Eirini Makarouni, Chiara Mesquita, Pepe Navarrete Jimenez, Briony Potter.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Aikaterini Antonopoulou, Stelios Giamerelos, Platon Issaias, Aspassia Kouzoupi, Eirini Makarouni, and Haris Makedonopoulou for their contributions to the ‘Athens Primer’ series of talks, delivered in the first semester of this studio programme. We would like to extend particular thanks to Aspassia Kouzoupi for the ‘walking lecture’ delivered while traversing the Long Walls Zone in Athens; to Stelios Giamerelos for arranging a visit to the wonderful apartment and office designed by Atelier 66 at Benaki 118; and to Dimitris Antonakakis for his gracious hosting and generous description of that project. We are grateful for the support of the technicians in the workshops, print, and photography facilities at the Edinburgh College of Art, including Malcolm Cruickshank, Paul Charlton, Rachel Collie, Richard Collins, Paul Diamond, Joanna Hobbs, Louis Knight, and Sam Price.
Grounding Athens, Vol.1 edited by Chris French and Maria Mitsoula
Cover Image
Urban Tensions and Vertical Edges: Installation Drawing. Oscar Thomas
The format of this catalogue has developed annually, evolving from the inaugural catalogue series produced for the ESALA MArch studios 2017-18, designed by Emma Bennett and Rachel Braude. Printed by J Thomson Colour Printers Ltd., Glasgow
Passenger Ferry at Pireaus Harbour, seen from Eetionian Gate of the Ancient Walls of Piraeus. Maria Mitsoula.
