Synestiasis : culinary gatherings in the center of Athens
The center of Athens is chosen as the area of our intervention and our main goal is the design of an open to all public space, a meeting point with food serving as a motive. Consuming food in public brings about liveliness to urban life. Food and its public consumption is used as a medium of urban regeneration as well as a way of triggering the citizens in order to start appropriating public space and taking part in social events . This inevitably leads into forming a collective consciousness.
The food in the city is a dense network of activities with numerous social and economic impacts that include complex systems. A wide range of connections and interactions proves at many levels that food may work as an educational, economic, social and nutritional mechanism that affects, either by improving or by hindering, the health of each individual, community, city, or a wide range area as a whole.
In this way food starts to be recognized as a matter of design and not simply as an agricultural one.
Basic criteria for designing in our proposal is not food simply as a final product, but also as a process. From growing, to processing and finally to consuming. This process is really important, as with the constant growth of the cities and the distance of people from the countryside and county life in general , the city de facto cannot be autonomous. Rather it depends on rural areas and its inhabitants in their majority are not aware of this cycle of food.
Our intervention deals with the unification of the uncovered spaces of the block of our plot, as well the design of a public building that hosts uses that revolve around food and eating. The main building volume consists of 3 parts. The first one is the greenhouse, which represents the production (growing). The second is the kitchen, where the process takes place (cooking) and the third part which is the eating space (consuming), takes place in big communal tables.
The main space is mostly used as a restaurant, but certain days of the week a community kitchen takes place. This kind of use derives from the fact that the last years the citizens of Athens gradually grow a communal consciousness . Many people start to self-organize in smaller groups and take initiatives in the frame of a community. Inside this framework even more community kitchens start to appear. These community kitchens are located all over Athens, mainly in the center, forming a network which connects people through solidarity and the common need for food.
With our proposal we wish to add one more node in this network, underlining and re –enforcing this turn in our society.
At the same time, in this framework of collectivity we include the use of a lending library as well as cooking and gardening lessons.
The completed building is a steel, assembled construction with the possibility of dismantling it. The structure thus is transformable, so as not to create a static condition, but presents a flexibility in possible future changes.
Besides the uses mentioned above , through this design we aim to promote individual expression in public space, as well as to establish social relationships and new forms of life and domestic life inside the city. This is further enhanced by the design of public space in order to accommodate activities such as a food market, screenings and gatherings.
The perception of public space as something transformable and not as static creates the need for transformations that should accommodate not only different uses but also different users. In this case, the opening of the urban block and the design of a building of public use promotes the idea of designing different situations in the street level that promote the gathering of groups and uses. More specifically, except from the indoor uses of the café and the grocery store, in the free part of the ground floor three different scenarios of ephemeral uses may occur, that alter the space respectively.
The largest formation is done by the operation of a food market, which may take place once a week in the open-air , but also in the sheltered by the building area. At the same time, in a more limited area of the ground floor, between the central staircase and the café, screenings and gatherings for discussions may take place. This area may be easily isolated from the other activities of the building with light partitions that allow the definitions of new properties of space with simultaneous internal and external qualities.
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