Valère Hoguait : ΔΣΔΤΑ - Athens Public School of Dramatic Art
  • Slideshow
  • Mosaic
  • Text
Implantation - Between the Districts of Kolōnós and Akadimía Plátonos
Implantation - Between the Districts of Kolōnós and Akadimía Plátonos
Situation Plan
Site Axonometry - West Side
Site Axonometry - North Side
Site Axonometry - East Side
Site Axonometry - South Side
Territorial Section - A Morphological Connection Between the Districts
Atlas of Plans - A World in a World
Ground Floor - Opening to the City
First Floor - Principal Theatre Room, Library and Workshops
Second Floor - Principal Theatre Room, Gymnasium and Workshops
Third Floor - Amphitheater, Workshops, Gymnasium and Residences
Fourth Floor - Amphitheater, Workshops, Music Rooms and Residences
Fifth Floor - Hellenistic Theatre, Workshops, Gymnasium and Residence
Sixth Floor : The Continuity of the Street
Roof Plan : Suspended Garden
"A town
"A town is
"A town is like
"A town is like a
"A town is like a big
"A town is like a big house,
"A town is like a big house, the
"A town is like a big house, the streets
"A town is like a big house, the streets are
"A town is like a big house, the streets are only
"A town is like a big house, the streets are only the stairs."
Sectioned Axonometry
Perspective Section - A Theatre Overlap
Longitudinal Section - Stairs Following the Overlap
South Elevation - Workshops
South Elevation - Workshops
North Elevation - Residences
North Elevation - Residences
East Elevation - Backstages
East Elevation - Backstages
Transversal Section - Dialogue with the Site
South Elevation & Details - Workshops
North Elevation & Details - Residences
Opaque and Reflective Material
Following the Streets...
...To the Stairs
A Resting Hanging Garden...
...Becoming a New World in Athens...
...Which Overhangs the Atrium
Working in a Theatrical Space...
...Until the Concecration on Stage.
Close

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.

Close

According to John Cage, “an experimental action” is one “the outcome of which is not foreseen.” Titling this course Architecture & Experience celebrates on the one hand its attachment to the question of high architecture as a discipline forged in historical and theoretical projects and, on the other, the experimental nature of an explorative approach that has been an operative concept of said discipline ever since the Renaissance – explorative, but still grounded in concrete reality.

Theory, by identifying the working principles defining architectonic forms along time, makes possible every kind of parallel while transforming every sort of question into potential architectural problematics. This is our main field of exploration.

Theory allows us to write the narrative that defines the rules of the project on the one hand and give it a mean on the other hand. Reason helps us to imagine narratives that, considering the rules of nature and reality, allow us to justify from a rational point of view disposals that would be irrational in a different conceptual context. Thus we can succeed in building dreams from the ordinary condition.

Athens is a condensator of the most glorious Antique European architecture and of the almost non planned urban forms of today that makes of it a laboratory for exploring the contemporary status of architecture and city. As usual, students have not traveled to Athens, to work more from the imaginary of the city than from its reality.