Athens Derelict Plug-In proposes an investigation and a set of designs taking place in Athens. Projected at the many layers of the city, the design process is addressed to a palimpsest of different phases of the urban landscape. After many decades of decline of the downtown, an idiosyncratic functional void in the midst of the built city center is created. The city center was mostly used at its ground floor, hosting mostly shops, bars and restaurants, while the multistoried buildings in it (polykatoikies, or office ensembles, and high manufacturing buildings) were usually abandoned at the upper parts of the modern constructions. Today partly inhabited by users of the common internet infrastructure, Athens downtown is more and more served by independent courier and food delivery services that circulate goods and food coming from invisible peripheral warehouses and ghost kitchens. It is operating by elaborate ordering or more complicated logistic systems of classification, digital control of the provisions and response to order making. In this sense, the project beyond its specificity becomes an architectural essay about the transformation of the decline of the city into a post-pandemic state; an unconditional investigation about the use of infrastructure operating on a multitude of scales. Such new urban arrangements become important not only for Athens, but also for cities becoming ghosts elsewhere. This generic new field of research is projected at an existing unfunctional urban organism in order to test the options of its possible promises for new forms of life.
Athens Derelict Plug-In is a project that investigates the relationship of the general condition of networks to the idiosyncratic field of a doubly ruined city. The presence of the ancient layers of the city, whose remains still lie under the new constructions of modern Athens, is doubled by this modern ruin being touched by the economic turmoil of the last decades; both invisible and visible ruins act as a promising field to deal with a different architecture. The abandoned existing structures in the midst of a developed network can open alternative understandings of what their inhabitation could mean. “The program for an unlimited extension of networks to a neutral field” – if we can name the process of urbanization this way – is expanded already on the internet and reinforced as a new set of facilities to which the derelict material city can be connected. Data infrastructure, besides determining the functioning of the city, can open the city for a different character of use. The presence of the infrastructure constitutes a new type of empty space which can be experienced as hybridic in many senses.
