5th PrizeVentura Trindade Architects LDA, Joao Maria Ventura Trindade
Site Specific – Architecture LDA, Patricia Marques Costa
Short description of the project
1.
The landscape is an accumulated fabric of marks of a place, a set of relations that in each inhabited space was shaped by overlapping.
The superficial image of a territory very often hides the depth of time that occurs between its origin and its contemporary configuration.
The successive overlapping, made from deleting and rewriting, never fully erases the previously imprinted signs, necessarily producing in each intervention a dialogue between the past and the future.
In a place like Piraeus, and addressing a theme such as the ground, the complexity of the depth of time of the place cannot stop being the central theme of the work related to the outdoor spaces.
The project develops the idea that the floor and the ground are rich in content, history, overlapped signs throughout time, lost logics, marks in which their meaning became diffuse.
The analysis of the records that register each transformation of a place, the overlapping of those maps and charts, allow deciphering an important part of depth that the ground contains but its first appearance does not reveal.
We propose to recover traces of the history of the construction of the place, incorporating them as a base of the new proposed structure, and make its operative and functional character a significant part of its future cultural program
2.
The subsistence in time of a building often determines the transformation of its program into new uses.
Strangely, the constructions that better respond to the specificity of the function for which it was conceived seem to also be those that better adapt to shelter new uses.
A cereal storage Silo, vertically organized in a rigid formal and functional configuration adapts in an unexpectedly simple manner to its new program as a museum.
Probably because, as before, it is in the analysis and comprehension of the past and character that its transformation is based on.
The peculiar manner of transporting the cereal in the old warehouse, vertically accessing the top and after driven by gravity, it ends up establishing analogies with other contemporary museum spaces, while symbolically translating the idea of submersion that the museum program suggests.
The visitor is invited on a trip that goes from the surface to the very bottom, in a strict sense and in a broad sense, while also offering a parallel understanding about the space in crosses.
1st Honourable Mention
ASVS ARQUITECTOS ASSOCIADOS LDA.
Vitor Cristiano Silva Barros
Short description of the proposal
The building, a lighthouse for Culture
By carefully analysing the intervention site, we realized that by its scale, location and verticality, the building of the old cereal stock-house arises as the main geographical reference in this area of the Piraeus port. Its tower and longitudinal deployment along the peninsula axis, which constitutes the main part of the intervention area, makes it the great gateway into the harbour, the welcome card to passengers arriving to Athens on ship cruises from around the Mediterranean.
The start point for the project development rises exactly from this idea of welcome, the element that defines the arrival, the light that guides and indicates that land is just a few miles away, a metaphor of a lighthouse, like the great lighthouses of antiquity that fed some of the most beautiful Mediterranean mythologies.
The Museum of Underwater Antiquities, henceforth the MoUA, revives the old silo by transforming it into a lighthouse for culture. The cereal grains are replaced by the most precious underwater treasures, and the compact mass of concrete becomes a big bulb that announces the arrival at the cradle of Western civilization.
The peninsula, a memory of an industrial past
Observing a satellite image of the urban fabric that surrounds the intervention area, we’ve noticed that the orthogonal net of Piraeus and Drapetsona seems to dewater at the harbour’s peninsula. The rational geometry of resolute streets and blocks, becomes a draped organic net when it meets the avenue that separates the city from the harbour (Akti Ietionia).
When approaching the image, focusing on the intervention site, we found that this organic design is enhanced by a series of micro lines drawn on the pavement by the movement of trucks, the orientation of cargo containers, and by the roofs of the warehouses that are expected to be redesigned.
It’s from this industrial matrix, engraved on the pavement for more than a century, that lays our masterplan design. The tracks marked by the wheels of the trucks are transformed into footpaths, watercourses and fields of flowers; the avenue that divides the peninsula becomes a big mall that serves the new equipment; cargo containers give way to others which now function as cafes, terraces, bars and shops; former parking acquire contours of squares and plazas, and the large green patch defined by the Drapestona park and the archaeological site dilute in all these new decks, similar to what happens to the Cartesian drawing of the surrounding city.
A new park grows, such as other small gardens, squares and large assembly spaces that invite citizens to culture, trying not to forget the industrial memory of the place, designed by the wheel of time.
