The redesign of the Athens School of Fine Arts (A.S.F.A.) building complex at Pireos Street, aims to create a school which will promote the interweaving of different media and disciplines, the formation of a free, public space, which will encourage a mutual conciliation of the civic with the academic life and to attribute a new identity to the school through managing the industrial past of the buildings and combining the different morphological styles.
To achieve those goals, a series of actions is decided:
• Removing building mass and designing connecting routes.
• Penetrating Piraeus façade and reactivating the outdoor space
• Distinction between free, open public space and the protected space of the school.
• Defining limits – filtering functions and movement. The twisting of the building grid sets guides to the gradual transition from “public”- urban to “private”-academic. Repeated inside the
building complex, the grid twist forms flexible, workspaces and exhibition studios, which are articulated independently from the strict, rigid grid of the bearing structure.
The educational functions were distributed into two poles, to the south and north side of the plot. An independent construction system was selected, to wind freely among the existing bearing structure, shaping the study & exhibition studios. Those studios form the basic educational unit of the faculty, inside of which the personal workspace of each student is articulated in different sizes and shapes, depending on the requirements of each project. Outdoor educational functions are placed to the west creating a free to the public place. The classic façade of the old industry creates e filter that controls the “ingression” of the urban functions in the academic space.
status: thesis, academic – NTUA
area: 24.523 m²
location: Athens
team: Meni Gentimi, Eleni Kavallari, Amalia Tsountani
year: 2008
