-
Architects: Kalliope Kontozoglou
-
Photographs:Henriette Attali
Text description provided by the architects. On a long and thin site, along the Athens ring motorway and next to a toll station stands a container like building. It is the store and showroom of a company that imports and sells textiles.
The view for the passing driver as well as the one who is entering the motorway is that of a monolithic volume offair faced concrete held high up in the air.
This concrete surface (2nd and 3rd floors) is offered more as a gigantic billboard than a building to the passerby, both car and pedestrian alike. In contrast to that, the lower part of the building (ground and first floor) is punctured by large openings that repeat themselves at regular intervals offering to the interior, frame after frame, a cinematic view of the speeding vehicles.
The two identical prisms “slide” on top of each other to allow for a wedge-shaped catwalk to be created, forming the entrance to the building.
Inside, a long wall, painted blood-red, separates the showroom from the store areas and organizes the space. The same concrete finish follows in the interior, while the shelving is based on rough pine soft wood standard sections assembled and screwed together on site.
The building is stated in simplicity and rationality that transcends the ephemeral of the glimpse of the driver-voyager through its “monumental” poetic heaviness.
