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THESSALONIKI METROPOLITAN WALKWAY
Location: Thessaloniki, Greece Plot size: 1120 m2 Project year: 2012 Architectural Competition Entry Honorable mention Team Architects: Fanis Anastasiadis, Thomas Dalampouras, Naya Stergiou Transportation planning: Konstantinos Peikos Electrical & mechanical Engineer: Spyros Vlachos Greenery Design: Dimosthenis Milonas |
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The design aim is to create a metropolitan walkway (Agias Sofias Str.), to integrate some of the city's most important monuments and propose an iconic and eco-friendly landscape as an entrance to the city center via the new subway station. A new shifting topography is proposed, a porous surface which can address today’s challenges and is flexible enough in order to adapt to future challenges. This new landscape does not rely on strict social rules and boundaries, negating the plurality and variety of the cityscape, but attempts to embody freedom of movement and expression as it stresses its transformability, aiming towards spatial flow and interlacing. In this context the linearity of the axis as a concept, through the use of dynamic forms and hard geometries, is discarded. Instead, the proposed topography initially shifts in order to reintegrate the existing monuments in present’s day cityscape, redefining the previously hard boundaries.
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At the same time this flexible topography of multi- sized pores is distributed down the axis in close relationship with the needs and characteristics of each individual area that the axis consists of. Thus, a “soft” environment is created, offering a freedom of movement and various stimuli in the process of understanding and appropriation of the urban space. In this sense the pores are urban islands which act as social attractors, inviting free use of their infrastructure for public and commercial use.
Apart from serving their designated purpose, the pores contribute to the sustainability of the proposal by creating green islands of flora and fauna and by integrating solar panels on top of the iconic sun shelters which cover for most of the energy required for lighting during the night throughout the axis. |
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