flow_transition
2007 Ευδοκία Βουδούρη
επιβλέπουσα Βάνα Τεντοκάλη
Subject of this experimental architectural project is a Metro Station
located in “Sintrivani”, Thessaloniki’s hub, a crowded borderline area, “in between” three different urban zones: the historical
center, the university campus and the international trade fair.
It is an experiment of the translation of the underlying, both
conceptual and contextual, power mechanisms in spatial structure.
The basis of the conceptual process was the reading of the
transformation of the urban grid during three different periods of the city:
the Roman, the Ottoman and the present day.
It addresses the activation of two issues: First, of the site that
already comprises its own power and acts as a palimpsest. Second, of the concepts of metro and station,
as expressions of multiple dynamic mechanisms. The
double concepts of metro and station as a bipolarity and also the site as a
borderline consist of a variety of oppositional bipoles, pause-motion,
solid-liquid, permanent-temporary, old-new, continuous-free structural system. Thus, the
initial intention was to overcome the bipoles and the borderline, in other
words their reaction as a mechanism of shape and transformation of the urban
space.
The metro station in this
experimental approach is read and translated, literally and metaphorically,
through a double gesture of the notions of excavation, palimpsest and
reception. It takes place as an
excavation process through the palimpsest of the ground resulting to its
“receptive” reformation. “Reception”, according to Plato’s definition, “is
something between the object and the context, the content and the container”.
He compares the reception to the beach sand and the linear traces of high
waves. The reception exists as a temporary arrangement that consists of motion
and pauses.[1]
The contemporary city, as a dynamic field of experience in time and
space, is made of “thousand plateaus”[2],
multiple formed matters, data, speeds, flows, paths, areas that set up a
difficult elaborated aggregation which call for ‘other’ ways of thought and
process like the diagram. “The diagrammatic process as an alternative
morphogenetic design process can result in multiplicity of forms”.[3]
Since, according to Deleuze “the diagram can draw unexpected
conjunctions and incongruous continuities”[4],
in the proposed diagrammatic process, some unexpected conjunctions between
conceptual principles and diagrams are introduced: The conceptual principles
are superposition, striation and interference.
The diagrams are related either to historical traces of the region or
the prospective passenger flow for this metro station. The diagrammatic figure
that emerges can act as source for the development of virtual forms and dynamic
relations, as it is still open for different readings, interpretations and
transformations.
Finally, through the process of folding, the union of the liquid space
of flows and data with the various historical fragments is accomplished. The
fusion of all these spatiotemporal snapshots into one structural element
constitutes the time-grid, as “a topological space”.
The subway as a cavity in space pertains a dynamic as an “open space” in
time. The concept of the palimpsest introduces qualities that urge the users
towards an internal research. It can also make them reconsider the continuity
of the interrelations between themselves, time, power and space.
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