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Athens Terrace Works

Athens Terrace Works

A proposal for the upper layer of Athens

Athens Terrace Works

The project sets the rules for the creation of some grid constructions, done through a stitching of old recycled metal grills of the athens sewerage system or of similar ones that are ordered for this purpose. The project undertakes the unification of some athens blocks through the position of these particular grids. The proposed structure is constituted from recycled grids of the athens metro, the sewerage system, the rain drains. The technology of green houses is used in order to obtain the maximum of green using the minimum of earth and water.

A new legal reform is necessary in order that different roof properties are redistributed in a different logic; different roofs in the same block can be unified. "Athens Terrace Works" is the first project of the series of "urban protocol projects". The idea of the unification of different building roofs and the proposed cohabitation under the typical but always unique canopies formed the first example of a limited and isolated city performance installed and functioning after a system of new rules decided through a wiki process. Greek law does not permit such constructions on the roofs: the proposition serves more as a call to institutionalize different forms of "public spaces" in Athens with micro-legislative functions that could be tested and implemented. The canopies can also be shaped by photovoltaic panels in order to provide electric power for the specific block.

At the other side a question about the underground space of modern Athens is introduced: underground Athens is as for any modern city the space dedicated for the hidden urban infrastructure but in the same time it is the idealized space of the covered ancient ruins. The transposition of the sewerage metallic grids to the upper level of the city is also of a conceptual order.

 

Athens, 2008
In collaboration with Katerina Koutsogianni

Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis: Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary

There is something immediate when we perform in the frame of a protocol. But our actions could prepare for a different order of living. They could transform an experience of radical privation, a passivity, into a conscious affirmation. Alienation in fordist labor was based on this hypnotic, repetitive experience of working, where one repeats without knowing why. Labor in a gamified world becomes a post-hypnotic experience; it shows a form of life in which alienation is familiar, cognized, and desired. Protocols capture this change in the imaginary of the social sphere. Through gamified management, uninterested, fordist repetition becomes fixation and an “increased motivation” to engage something. Today we do not deal with traditional automatism but a perverse evolution of it.

(excerpt from the discussion between Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis)

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