STUDENT HOUSING (COURTYARD)
LOCATION Athens, Greece
CLIENT OLIAROS Property Development
PROGRAM Student Housing Development Model
STATUS Design 2009 (Competition)
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The proposal for 34 Marathonos Street puts forth a novel way of organizing student housing by providing 18 individual living units in two building volumes organized around an interior patio/courtyard and circulatory space. The project aims to provide two projected atmospheres: One for the residents and one for the neighboring public. This is created through the street façade billowing into an elevational cloud that offers true feeling for the street inhabitants, while keeping the interior nature of the patio housing secluded and private.
An entry corridor takes residents and guests through to the central patio, which allows for an internal city to exist. Within this courtyard the citizens can interact, eat, commune, study, fight, exist and ignore each other, all while removed from the concerns of the street. The ground level patio connects via ramp/elevator to the twin roof decks, which offer a unique form of internal public space for the students.
The project offers through its own development methods for replication and expansion into other sites. The facade system allows for each successive project to become subsumed into the street-wall and provide a form of urban atmosphere never before seen, but immediately recognizable. Each new project can become part of an urban community of visual effect, and give identity and feeling to a new neighborhood.
While the elevation offers a formal and visual way to connect and expand the personality of the neighborhood, the project organization offers a way to afford consistent and simple expansion and a newly networked interior of public space, exclusive to residents of this community. The introduction of patio space to each project allows for an open and lateral community to span from project to project building and developing a new “street” and new” city which exists internal to the collection of student houses, affording new feelings of community to both residents experiencing their new urban environment and visitors enveloped between the breezy facades!
The proposal for 34 Marathanos Street allows for two new audiences to be created and cultivated through its ability to unite facades seamlessly into a new atmospheric community on the street, and an effortless city of residents within its interior.
