Point Supreme Architects . photos: © Yannis Drakoulidis
Petralona House expanded a single level residence on a narrow street in Athens into a three story house. The original footprint and perimeter of the house were retained, but all the interior walls were demolished to create a generous open plan for the communal areas of the home. The two added stories host the private areas of the parents and children connect to the original structure via a curved roof that envelops a central void above the living area and open kitchen, offering connecting views throughout the residence. This space performs as an interior courtyard, reinforced by the presence of a living tree planted through a hole cut in the floor, niches for plants and flowers, and windows on all sides, offering simultaneous views to the outdoors.
The project prioritizes social life and the relationship between interior and garden, a precious feature in the dense urban center of Athens. It is a contemporary interpretation of the traditional Athenian houses typology, where courtyards were often the epicenter of social life for the neighborhood, linking different families and residents and reinforcing the communal character of urban living.
The house is designed as a collection of rooms and spaces, each freely responding to its own program, orientation and contextual conditions– in effect, treated as individual pieces of architecture with their own façade, details, materiality, and references – collectively creating a variety of inhabitable areas, much like a small village. The integration of all structural elements into the perimeter of the building allowed the interior space to create a continuous, three-dimensional experience and to be inhabited freely.
The design mixes eponymous architectural references with vernacular, even banal quotations, juxtaposing high and low culture, history with the anonymous intelligence of local building traditions. The construction incorporates elements collected from Athens and other environments, found in junk yards or abandoned structures. Materials and items abandoned or forgotten are treated with generosity and without prejudice. Through this strategy, the design of the house became flexible and inclusive, an architecture of transformation rendering conventional forms of hierarchy redundant, rejecting norms of scale and blending architecture with furniture, furniture with objects. The elements used are ordinary, but their relationships are unexpected, challenging social and spatial conventions. Through adaptive reuse at multiple scales, the project suggests a sustainable practice for a radically new way of making architecture, a case for architecture as an ‘art of adaptation’.
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