The Popular Market building in Serres is built in the Market Square of town. The building lies on an intersection point of four main roads. Both its concrete arches and arcade justify its domination into the urban iconography.

Built by Moutsopoulos in 1960, it used to accommodate commercial activities. Nowadays, those stores have been converted to storage areas, with a detrimental effect regarding human dealing and commercial life inside the arcade. Either the aging of the building, or the lack of sanitation on behalf of the local Municipality are the reasons why the majority of civilians have lost their appreciation and patience towards the building.

In spite of this, the Market seems to regard itself as a representative of a time when local market and retail commerce had been vital as far as town’s financial welfare is concerned. On the other hand, its mild modern morphology with a repetition of architectural features and functional units, highlight an almost “industrial” sense of building. Last but not least is the concept of Byzantine and muslim typology met in several parts of the building, and is depicted in an interesting sense on the facade.

All those conclusions have led us to put forward an idea of preserving and re- utilizing, in order to ensure that the building remains a perpetual and integral part of regional and square history. A region where traditional stores and wandering dealers do exist, making it swinging between the options of being up- to date or remaining stuck on its recent past.

The Market Square seems unable to fulfill the standards which characterize a public place of walking, resting, accumulating or pausing the urban web.

Its potential activities are totally flattened out by the presence of roads, and they are mainly detected on restricted spaces of pavements and safety islands. The project targets at an intervention into the building, by creating brand new utilities and supporting the concept of enlarging the suppressed free space.

Those new utilities concern both University students and the rest of population, in a duration of a whole day.

Characteristic features of urban formation as crooked lines which compose the facade of the Market and nearby buildings have been the beginning of a synthetic manipulation. The building with its new shape organically participates in the perceptive Square environment, by its oblong and irregular form. Creating a “building into the building”, would succeed to function of a “square into the building”. A project which ensures the sense of current, causing no disturb to the special architectural features of the building.

In the ground floor it is allowed an unforced passage to the stage of the first floor by removing a block of spaces. The entrance of Library (first floor) is in the ground floor as well as supplements of University offices. An internet coffee bar is suggested in the block of stores of a sawal form (north-west part), in an effort to conceptually associate the utility with the industrial character represented by this characteristic form.

In the first floor there is the library which is extended with its reading rooms to the -until now- through empty arches of the upper stage. On the roof of a single- staged part of the Market, there is a scalable surface, functioning both as a ladder and as a shuttle. A high wall with slots brings light into the ground floor and becomes relative with the dominant part of the synthesis, the bar. A space, which lies above the first- floor stage on a light metallic stands and manages to visually restore the building’s relationship with the nearby urban space.