“Life is a play : what matters is not that it lasts long, but that it is performed well. »

Seneque

            Greek theater is the very essence of Western theater. It is an integral part of Athenian culture and has been the generator of social exchanges since Antiquity. It is a community entertainment that has a strong architectural image, crossing Hellenistic theaters in a hemicycle.

The city of Athens retains traces of these open-air theaters, and has a private drama school and a conservatory. The ambition of the project is therefore to enrich and perpetuate this culture of the spectacle in the Greek capital, by developing a public drama school, at the conjunction between the district of Kolōnós and Akadimía Plátonos, close to the ruins of the famous academy of Plato.

The spatiality of the theater, both ancient and contemporary, induces the notion of tiers, a morphology intrinsic to contemporary Greek architecture, essentially in concrete. This is why the project proposes to establish a stepped evolution of different performance rooms, all served by a public staircase which is, on the one hand the founding element of the building, and on the other part which begins a morphological connection between the different neighborhoods. It is both a private distributive element for students and an interior street which naturally rests the city on a suspended public garden. Between these two urban layers, the school becomes a world in itself, containing a variety of programs, both private and public.

The Athens Public School of Dramatic Art shows a distributive singularity, while maintaining an architectural humility respecting the site, as well urbanly, materially, colorimetrically as morphologically.