Design Workshop II
Title: “Immeumble-Cite” (paraphrasing Le Corbusier)
Instructor: Elias Zeggelis
Assistance in the workshop by: Phyllio Katsavounidou, Nikos Platsas, doctoral candidates of the Department of Architects U.Th.
Research hypothesis:
As the living standards of the inhabitants of cities ameliorate, they tend to escape en masse from the urban web, and to urgently privatize their way of life, by distancing themselves from the public arena and social interaction. When private residences are constructed in the countryside surrounding a city, free country space is consumed, the environment is harmed and urban public space is abandoned. As a result of this massive phenomenon, with the desertion of public space, we come to a point where we have neither cities nor countryside, just an extended diffusion and dispersion of private residences creating a geographic building slab on a universal scale, which will be obstructed only by hard to overcome and unknown geographical elements but ultimately, thanks to the necessity to build new floating continents, the oceans will be inhabited.
Thus, we recognize the danger of doing away with the city as a cultural entity, which is an irreversible fact, if we consider drastically defining the borders of cities by rethinking the possibilities of increasing the density of public space and of producing new one within the cities’ given borders.
3 issues for the city of Volos:
In the workshop, the above mentioned research hypothesis will be examined, using the city of Volos as a case study. Volos is a medium-sized European city with very powerful topographical and environmental characteristics. The workshop proposes three different theme-areas where we will examine the feasibility of designing using as criteria the definition of the borders of the city, the increase of densities, the production of public space together with the residence, and the improvement of the countryside surrounding the city.
Area I: The docks of the commercial harbour of the city of Volos. Change the way the docks are used and create urban development.
Area II: The military camp located in the municipality of Nea Ionia: Create an urban park while at the same time increase density in its perimeter.
Area III: Based on the case scenario of a future linear city of Thessaly located between Larissa and Volos, three areas are specified on this axis for the construction of point cities.
Requirements:
- If you were asked to design one of the above areas, what would you propose?
- What kind of urban structure would your proposal lead to?
- On what scale would the constructions be built?
- What kind of public and social benefit programmes would you introduce?
- What would you propose for the available countryside that you would end up with after the evacuation?
- What kind of park would you design where the military camp in Nea Ionia is, if you chose that area to intervene?
- If you chose the docks, how would you, among other things, deal with the relationship between the mobile, floating means and the immobile structures of your proposal?
- If you chose the establishment of the “linear City of Thessaly”, how would you deal with the cores of the in-between point cities in the countryside of Thessaly?
Timetable:
Monday 30th November, Tuesday 1st December: Introduction to the theme, visit to the research areas.
Monday 7th, Tuesday 8th December: First presentation of ideas
Saturday 12th December: Second presentation of the project to a panel.
Tuesday 22nd December: Final presentation of the project to a panel.