LARGE OBJECTS. By Kassy Leontiadou and Jessie Turnbull

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1 WORKSHOP_MAPPING ATHENS IN 21 st CENTURY LARGE OBJECTS By Kassy Leontiadou and Jessie Turnbull JUNE 2009 SUMMARY Athens is a city defined by its monuments, while the towers built during the dictatorship play a large role in shaping the skyline. But in this study we are most interested in the buildings of the 21st century and their effect on the city. Large objects behave as points of focus in a city which can be seen as an undulating carpet of polykatoikia (apartment buildings). Analyzing them allows us to consider forces which punctuate and shape our experience of the city. There are few large objects that we can experience from the street. The only large objects within the city that one has a sense of on a daily basis are the hills, which we include in our study of large objects. As one moves higher in elevation (for example from ground level to the upper floor of a building) the large objects within the city become apparent. From the top of the Hilton Hotel tall objects are immediately noticeable. The sectional quality of the city is apparent. Moving higher the objects with large footprint become more apparent: you experience the effect of large plan objects.

2 The city of the 21st century is shaped, as Yannis Aesopsos suggests, by the convergence of culture and commerce and perhaps the instigator for this was the 2004 Olympic games: many buildings that were designed for it, scattered across the city, and massive new commercial centers evolved alongside these. The city has become a "City of Leisure". But to add another layer of depth to the study we also looked at the "City of Institutions": buildings which may not have salient architectural characteristics, but which attract huge numbers of people each day, such as hospitals, universities, office buildings, and major residential complexes. Data on each of the 87 buildings that we included in our study was collected through primary and secondary sources. We visited and photographed buildings where feasible, and collected online data concerning dates, floor areas, capacity, height etc. Using a spreadsheet we documented the large objects of Athens, listed first by program, by date, by typology and finally the ambiguous category of effect within the city.

3 Borrowing and expanding upon Alejandro Zaero-Polo's vocabulary, we have identified five categories within typology : Tower (such as the Athens tower office building) Bar (such as the Hilton Hotel) Cube (a building which has a z-axis dimension similar to the x- and y- axis, but also suggests a building which has an iconic value and has a sign role within the city) Horizontal (buildings such as the Ikea-type megastores on only one or two stories.) Landscape, a new typology, which consists of more than one building in an enclosed complex, such as the acropolis hill, the Faliron Beach Olympic zone, and Technopolis cultural complex in Gazi. An analysis of several buildings from each of these typologies and time periods show a general trend. The buildings shift from tower and bar types to horizontal and landscape types at the turn of the 21st century. According to government legislation, no building should be taller than the Parthenon, in order to avoid any comparison. Currently building heights are capped at 27m, although this number has varied over the past 100 years. The final category that we have used to understand the Large Objects of Athens is Effect, by which we mean the role that each building plays on its surrounding urban context. This has been broken down into four categories: Landmark: offers a point in the city by which one can orientate oneself. Viewpoint: a public place from which to view the city. There are relatively few of these, but the Acropolis and the hills (which we consider within the culture program) offer views, as do the three large hotels. Concentrator: a building which draws people together through its function without any specific architectural qualities. Hospitals and large residential buildings fall into this category. Neutral: without specific program, in this case many of the abandoned Olympic structures, which simply remain as a large object within the city offering no push or pull factors to the inhabitants.

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5 In order to map these qualities we focused on three areas within Athens where we identify interesting accumulations of large objects: Maroussi, where the Calatrava complex lies alongside The Mall; Pireos Avenue, a former industrial area which is in the process of becoming a strip of popular culture; and Faliron beach area, one of the 2004 Olympic sites. For each location we produced two sets of diagrams: one maps the visual presence of the large objects within their context, and the other which shows the zone of influence in terms of movement towards the objects by consumers or users. The three zones show very different reactions. In all three cases the area examined and the number of large objects in question are similar. Two of the areas show little connectivity with the surrounding area. While they are integrated with the public transport system they do not engage with the surrounding area, and increases in flows of traffic to the Large Objects have little effect on the surrounding neighborhoods beyond road congestion. Maroussi is the most developed example, where the malls and stadium have been in place long enough to have a reciprocal influence on the neighboring commercial area of Kifisias Avenue, but the two have little chance to interact, and have little impact on the residential neighborhood beyond the Kifisias Avenue façade. Cars dominate the consumer and spectator experience. The sporadically occupied but huge capacity of the stadium is of lesser significance when compared to continuously high flow of consumers into The Mall. Faliron is sadly undeveloped and empty after the initial impetus of the 2004 Olympics. The large objects are connected only alongside large roads, despite planning actions, which designate a 42km pedestrian and cycle path along the coast. These objects create voids in the landscape of the sea front, and are surrounded by seas of empty car parks. Pireos avenue is located along a narrower road and is therefore more conducive to pedestrian connectivity. The popular culture of the strip extends and merges into the art gallery of the New Benaki and Technopolis, and the strip could be considered a new cultural

6 zone, albeit one that appeals primarily to Athenians rather than tourists, with Bouzoukia, theatres and bars. Conclusion The use of the spreadsheet to identify certain characteristics then allowed us to reexamine the role of the buildings once they were categorized. We consciously avoided taking a subjective standpoint on the quality of the architecture of the buildings we analyzed, considering Bernard Tschumi s museum alongside the haphazard hospital buildings or ugly tower blocks. However, addressing this point could allow for a more intuitive understanding of the buildings roles. Taking the breakdown of the Effect category we can see that those buildings which fulfil more than one of the roles of Landmark, Viewpoint and Concentrator plays a very

7 important role within the city. The only two Large Objects in our analysis which fulfil these are The New Acropolis Museum and the Acropolis itself. If we are to consider the role of new large objects in Athens then approaching it from this ambiguous but enlightening point of view allows us to gain insight into their future effect on the city. Sources