Projects for Athens 2008-2012 at Venice Architecture Biennale 2012

Point Supreme Architects presents 8 visions for the future of Athens in the Greek Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012.

Germanina

The task asked for the expansion and conversion of a rural farm campus into a cultural and accommodation centre.

Sigrou Avenue

Proposal to capitalize on the programmatic identity of the existing main route from the center to the sea, and to reorganize it through the confrontation of public transport and new ceremonial rituals of daily life.

Athens Ferry

Proposal to add public space on the roof tops of a central city block in the form of a ferry boat.

Rivera and Kahlo House

The studio-house of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were designed by Juan O’Gorman and built in San Angel Inn in Mexico City.

Giorgia Apartment

Europe 27 - 2nd Prize

Pinocchio

The visually dominant local landmark of a High Silo is complemented by a sculptural volumetric extension

Epicenters - Shortlisted

In order to make Islev area attractive for people to live, work, and socialize it is proposed that the district’s current center is extended

The Architects Brain

‘In pre-modern epochs, renewal of practice was always initiated by looking backwards, as a return to the fundamentals.

Petralona House Extension

The addition to an existing one-storey residence in the center of Athens is pushed towards the street elevation

100 Views of Acropolis

City of Tables

Gösta Museum Extension

The new building is a bridge that connects the existing museum with the island of Taavetinsaari. Upon arrival it presents itself merely by its roof.

Mina House

From a distance Mina House appears like an ordinary building, resting under a pitched roof with the typical red tiles of the area.

Kozani Square

The new main square in Kozani serves both the everyday and the monumental; the central part takes the form of a gently sunken ellipse.

Dafnes house

The house is in front of the beach close to a Greek city. The first volume frames the plot, while the second crosses it continuing the built volume of the neighboring construction.

Europan 10 Trondheim phase II

Phase II of the concept design has just been completed and preparations for the next phases have already started for the second Europan project to be realised in Trondheim.

Athens As Island

AthensX4 - Honourable Mention 

The contemporary Greek city is made up of some of the smallest urban blocks in Europe, with an accompanying dense network of small streets and incredibly narrow pavements.

Archipelago Cities 

The geography of the Greek archipelago seems to reappear in the urban setting of Athens; the city is a translation of the archipelago landscape of the Cyclades.

Athens by Hills

The project aims to highlight the full range of unexploited mountains, hills and natural remains that float in the city fabric and around the Acropolis. 

Science Center

Kostas R. House

The vacation house outside Athens is placed on a linear plot, framed on two sides by shifted neighboring houses that are to be built. The masterplan dictates the principle of the design

Hotel Vitina

The hotel in Vitina combines communal facilities and rooms-for-rent in one volumetric configuration; the linear building assumes both the small and the big scale.

Marble Mural

The piece is a hymn to marble; a 10 x 2m wall consisting of 7 marble pieces of different origin, natural history, color, texture and image.  

Hortus Conclusus - Honourable Mention

The new Theater Square is dedicated to the magic of nature: an urban room realized as a ‘secret garden’. The tall palm trees create a landmark on at the scale of the city, while at street level the garden becomes a place for the imagination with local plants and flowers creating open and closed spaces of light and shadow.

Six d.o.g.s garden

The intervention in the garden of the six d.o.g.s. cultural centre in central Athens, returns the site to its natural state.

Piraeus Tower

Rather than an autonomous, self referential edifice, what today is called ‘Iconic Building’, the new Pireaus Tower capitalises on its strategic positioning.

Koukaki Apartment

For the renovation of this central Athens apartment, internal walls were demolished to create a continuous living area.  To bring natural light further into the apartment and to increase the sense of space, an internal window was introduced at the heart of the house.

Half Real

Point Supreme collaborated with two visual artists, a musician and a performance artist/choreographer to create an art installation and one week performance called 'I DO'.

Square Pool

Athens has lost its relation to green, water and nature in general. In Ancient times springs and rivers were sacred and Athenians considered water to be a supreme good, an inextricable part of daily routine.

New Maribor Museum

Trondheim

The Masterplan suggests a series of carefully placed interventions that act as appendages to the former submarine bunker ‘Dora 1’:

Vienna

The project accumulates the collective intelligence on housing, fusing it together into an implausibly rich whole.

Kalavrita House

The structure of the house was recently built in a small village in the mountains. The heavy wooden roof construction displeased the clients who asked for its camouflaging.

Architecture Foundation Cordoba

Kiafas house

The house is sited at the entrance to a village, surrounded by fields. Starting with the generic rectangular box of a suburban home the corners are carved away bringing light, ventilation and views into the centre of the house. 

Polikatikia 1

On a triangular corner plot in a leafy area of Athens the client requested a study for a building of 4 apartments, one apartment per floor.  Like four little villas on top of each other, two apartments were to be occupied the other two for sale.

Metaxourgio

The strategy is to focus on the two most critical levels of the city; the ground floor plane and the roof top level, to effect the injection of new architectural form to the area.

Kalavrita café

Kalavrita is a picturesque mountain town surrounded by natural beauty. The project uses a deliberately limited palette of materials that collectively reflect the natural setting.

Travel Agency

A chaos of paper, brochures and accumulated mess, the existing travel agency in the seaside city of Patras lacked any sense of excitement or joy.  Inspired by the maritime history of the city and the sense of travel and adventure that boats evoke, the project inserts a ‘mariner’ into the space. 

Heaven

There is only 2.7 m2 of green space attributed to each resident of Athens making it the most deprived of all European Capitals. In the most densely built central areas the percentage drops to a mere 0.4 m2 per person.

Benetton

Exarcheian Walls

In December 2008, the shooting of a 15-year-old student in Exarcheia caused extensive rioting in the area. While the riots were still taking place for days, life in the surrounding city continued intact as if on either side of an invisible wall.

Golden Cube

The Golden Cube avoids all comparisons; its absolute form effortlessly conquers any dimension and guarantees its unique timelessness. The structure looks like it has always been there.

Kaminia Garden

The existing garden is rich in spatial qualities. The proposal enhances the existing conditions so that they acquire a clear, distinguishable identity.

café  ‘-ismo’

The cubic volume of the café is divided by two walls that frame the public areas.  Point Supreme’s intervention was to design installations on these perpendicular walls: a giant eye and mouth that combined appear as a cubist face in the space.

Aktipis Flower Shop

Unbuilt-Legitimization 1

The contemporary Greek city, lacking any overall planning or vision, expands in all directions.  It is materialised through the endless repetition of polikatikias (apartment building); in essence the realization of the domino house.

Pizza Perez

The graphics complement the simplicity of the space. They express and celebrate the variety and richness of taste in the food served. All the ingredients used are mapped and allocated colours and codes – these are translated into a scientific looking matrix that covers the wall of the seating area. It offers an abstract overview of all the possibilities of choice.

Watersquare

The project proposes a great number of typical and extraordinary water related activities along a dense network of public spaces around the water square, turning this into an active archipelago of potential identities.

Frames

The project exploits the unique condition of the site where nature is strongly present in two antithetic scales; vast forest and lake along three sides versus small pockets of remaining forest inside the territory.

Mintilogli house

This old house in a Greek village is listed; no windows or alterations can take place on its exterior. The proposal striped the interior of all constructions turning the house from two separate floors into a deep 4-floors-high void space where rooms and mezzanines are floating.

Athens As Island

06/11

Athens Tourist Campaign Poster

07/08