Strip in Transition

Abstract

The ongoing shift away from fossil fuels holds the potential to restore lost qualities once associated with “open land” that linger in the relationship between humans and nature. The project takes place in Kozani and Ptolemaida's greater area where coal mines and PPC infrastructure are to , cease their operation and the area will enter in a post traumatic era.

A “ virtuous” Strip of 6klm long, acts as a sample mechanism, a linear framework that links various settlements and ecological and industrial fragments into infrastructural strips that aim at reclaiming a latent landscape that is under transition. 

 The sense of collective ownership, resilience in time and local unity is the essential challenge of the project. By reviewing architecture as a performative act under which the territory becomes an open framework for diverse activities, the project seeks, records and codifies familiar spatial typologies found around the region to reintroduce familiar spatial assemblies and qualities of open space that respond to an urgent era of transition. The strip aspires to host activities of inhabitation that create a festival of open stages and common ground for collective energy governance.

At the centre of the Strip, by extending the existing PPC infrastructure, a monumental building is proposed. A performative space with several and diverse programmatic layers that triggers new relationships and provides an open public space for all.

All of these successive layers construct a weaved new balanced landscape, both rural and urban, social and ecological at the same time adopting the morphological vocabulary and the planetary infrastructure, in an attempt to redefine a postlignite paradigm by giving the land back not only to the people but also to other species as well.