Piraeus Underwater Antiquities Museum Competition Results

Written by Alison Furuto
Published on March 01, 2013

The results of the Piraeus Underwater Antiquities Museum Competition were recently announced with the collaborative team of architects Antonopoulos Evangelos, Vetta Thalia, Gavalas Georgios, Riga Maria – Kiriaki, and Stamouli Anastasia, and Pilarinou Maria announced as the first place winner. The challenge was for the design of a new landmark for the city and the port of Piraeus, with main reference to the culture, quality tourism and sustainability as well. Piraeus Port Authority is organizing an open exhibition with all the proposals that were submitted to the competition at the “Petrini” (Stonebuilt) Warehouse – future Museum of the History of P.P.A. and Museum of Immigrants – within the zone of the Cultural Coast. The opening of the exhibition is planned on 28th March 2013. More information on the winning proposals after the break.

1st Place: Antonopoulos Evangelos, Vetta Thalia, Gavalas Georgios, Riga Maria – Kiriaki, and Stamouli Anastasia, Pilarinou Maria
Team's Description: The restructuring of the coastal zone of the Port of Piraeus restores the broken relationship between the city and the sea. It takes recreational and cultural uses of various qualities and references, reflecting in the spirit of its planning, the hovering position of the Haetionian coast between land and water, urban and marine landscape, local and supralocal character. The flows of the city come to meet the flows of the marine routes which stream in the port. Urban fragments, green areas, and designed shores are the basic tools that compose the typology of the new coast. The planning of the intervention aims at redefining the activity of people and re-introducing the human scale in the specified area, without concealing the great antithesis that the physiognomy of the commercial port already contains.

Second Place: Uleia Andrei, Traian Bompa, Cristina Chelarescu
Team's Description: The architectural concept is based on the intention to expose the objects recovered from the sea
bed not as relics, some meaningless dead objects but as objects partially recovering the original meaning. The museum is structured around a strong vertical gesture, situated in a monumental space derived from ancient amphorae as well as the shape of ships. The building is simultaneously a ship that develops and supports the idea of the journey and an amphora built a symbol for the idea of content. The journey is not only the one that brought the antiquities to sea but also the one that the archeologists take in order to discover them. It is a trip back and forth between civilizations, in search of content, of truth. The duality of the architectural concept emphasizes the initial functional duality: a building for grain storage and a component of a transport network.

Third Place: Kizis Ioannis, Kizis Konstantinos, Mpelavilas Nikolaos, Trova Vasileia
Team's Description: The museum’s concept is based on the submersion from the highest level towards the ground floor where the cycle of the visit in the shop and the café comes to a close. The aim of the proposal is to convey the new contemporary character of the complex by recycling the material of the industrial monument. On the basis of ‘inverted archaeology’ it proposes the detachment of building mass from the Silo and its re-usage in the new project in order to connect with its roots. The structure of the Silo is receptive to such an approach: the present complex is the result of extensions on the 1936 original building. The minimum operational unit consists of the first body of cellules which are preserved. In the second body of the original building minor internal interventions are proposed in order to accommodate the Museum of Underwater Antiquities with the corresponding preservation of the 1936 façades.

Fourth Place: sparch Sakellaridou / Papanikolaou Architects
Team's Description: The concept is a ‘continuous flow of diving and emerging’, from the level of the sea to its depths and back again to knowledge. A continuous flow of people, via escalators sculpted to the body of the Silo, gives rise to the ‘sea level’ placed on top. Visitors rise, enjoy the view of the horizon and enter the mysterious world of the Museum in order ‘to dive to the sea-depths’. A large internal void, sculpted through vertical concrete-ribs in reference to the Antikythira Mechanism, becomes the heart of the museological narrative. A continuous belt of ramps winds around the internal void, bringing visitors deeper to the ‘bottom of the sea’. Natural light enters from above, light, shadows and flows of people wind around the shipping-wrecks. On top of the building, mirrored in a water surface that disolves to the horizon, emerge the winding forms of the cafe and the restaurant.

Fifth Place: Ventura Trindade, Architects, Joao Maria Ventura Trindade, Site Specific – Architecture, Patricia Marques Costa
Team's Description: In a place like Piraeus, and addressing a theme such as the ground, the complexity of the depth of time of the place cannot stop being the central theme of the work related to the outdoor spaces. The project develops the idea that the floor and the ground are rich in content, history, overlapped signs throughout time, lost logics, marks in which their meaning became diffuse. The analysis of the records that register each transformation of a place, the overlapping of those maps and charts, allow deciphering an important part of depth that the ground contains but its first appearance does not reveal. We propose to recover traces of the history of the construction of the place, incorporating them as a base of the new proposed structure, and make its operative and functional character a significant part of its future cultural program. The subsistence in time of a building often determines the transformation of its program into new uses.