Ready Mades, Archpoints
The raft, the envelope, and the garden
The raft, the envelope, and the garden, or emergency, temporariness and permanence respectively, is an ongoing project. It investigates the minimum spatial requirements of current refugee routes, from escaping war to creating a new homeland. Moreover, it maps potential stimuli for transforming the dated urban building stock and the scattered rural settlements.
The current refugee crisis, the biggest in our recent history, creates emergencies. But it also creates new fields of architectural discourse, research and education, new design tools, new architectural approaches, in a move from ‘me’ to ‘we’. Despite the current state of crisis in Greece and the scarcity of resources, new methods can be applied based on the triptych need-live-act. The main idea of the research is to integrate the refugees into the current urban and non-urban environments, and at the same time to reuse, re-adapt and update the existing
infrastructure.
infrastructure.
The case studies address the challenge of improbving the quality of urban and rural living through rejuvenating the existing building stock while embedding a holistic approach at a variety of scales. The goal is to show how minimum transformation can be used as a tool in consolidating connectivity, functionality and visual perception. The research combines different scales of design (object, building, urban/rural) and as such it expands the boundaries of architectures into new fields of experimentation. By re-examining the concepts of need, live and act, it contributes to the ongoing dialogue of sustainability and collectivity.
Architects Chrysostomos Theodoropoulos / Anastasia VerteouriCurator SADAS, Greek Architects AssociationSituation 15th International Venice Architecture ExhibitionYear 2016