Urban Design Project
The decayed bank of the river Ilissos, could be considered as a sleeping giant as it hides a huge possibility of dynamic in the Athenian landscape. The power of evoking memory and its actual form as an empty – vacant space, make it a fragmentary end point for one’s historical consciousness. Since it is situated between two different municipalities, actually as the end barrier of both, and having been blocked from the sea, it is found in a problematic relation to the urban space, man and the environment.
The streamline of contemporary Ilissos, could become a very strong axis of events, combining differences together, enhancing communication of inhabitants, rehabilitating memory of the past and fortifying the urban qualities of the future.
The design administers two basic ideas.
The adoption of local event for the neighborhood thus forming centre points for communal use and reestablishment of relations to nature thus enforcement of memory retreat of the past.
Ilissos can become an urban experience of intense changes, interesting image perspectives and event divergences.
A pattern of relating paths is planned, related to existing pedestrian precincts and empty spaces whereas communal uses are proposed. This pattern is either visible or notional interrupted or reappearing in space.
The design aims to reinforce the stream line of the old river giving it a dynamic of possibilities of uses and intense actions.
Three themed areas are designated as main points of design intervention whereas continuity in between them is realized in several ways.
The notion of nature is provided through an antithesis. The stream remains empty to a certain point of subversion where water appears dramatically. This intense antithesis as realized in space is purposed to evoke notions of rethinking different times in the rivers history – present and past. Across the stream whereas water is absent, river channels purpose to remind its existence.
These channels become the fragmental pieces of the river’s past –in a way of distortion - the water stream decays and breaks into pieces as entering the urban density, suggesting a resistance to the “solid” non natural environment of the city.
The idea of interpenetration of different elements in space, produces transformations of great intense thus evoking notions of versatile realities. Through antithesis one can experience the stream line as an adventure of consciousness in the city’s present and past time.