Drapetsona pier. Between habitat & infrastructure

Drapetsona Pier is a concrete piece of infrastructure that is located at the western part of the Piraeus Commercial Port in Athens and is officially designated as a ship construction and repair zone. Today, it stands as an industrial dystopia in the sea: it is severely underused, and it lacks any kind of character or future. It is part of the irretrievable diffusion of the Athenian urban sprawl, that has extended all the way to Piraeus and its port, during the last decades, making it an agglomeration of industrial fragments on the fringe of the modern city, without any intrinsic relation to the existing urban organization. These fragments stand on the intersection of the city and the natural landscape, as a reminder that the issue of the “common spaces” appears more urgent than ever. They raise the questions of where architecture could happen and how can it relate to human scale? The project proposes a semantically and spatially rich architectural element that explores the possibility of the construction of a dense urban scenario in which the metropolis and the industrial port co-exist. A yacht construction industry is combined with other public functions, such as a training school and a conference centre. It is conceived with a reduced vocabulary of shapes and materials. The spartan logic of using the minimum means to achieve the maximum effect becomes a driving force. Instead of competing with the massive piece of infrastructure the project embraces it and endeavours to provide elements of reference in a situation that is hard to control. The shaping operations explore the notion of trabeation. Trabeation is defined as the use of beams in architectural construction. However, it denotes something deeper than the mere fact of a spanning beam. This primitive way of building illustrates a natural ability to provide appropriate settings for human activity and interaction. It enables architecture of multiple typologies and scales that can be comfortably brought together. It has the remarkable capacity of transcending scales. In the project, a main section is defined and then it gets repeated and adjusted along the pier. The resulting structural grid offers an intrinsic order, repetitive rhythm and neutrality that releases the form from any functional determinism. A link is established with a timeless classicism that now becomes independent of the figurative language. The limited palette of materials and construction techniques used in the project is a response to the monumentality of the existing pier. The long light-weight structure touches the ground without the need for foundations. A temporal character is attributed to the project, while abstraction is achieved through the precise use of the materials.