#ron walkey

Workshop with Ron Walkey 10 October – 4 November 2016

The problems with apartments in central Athens include wide spread vacancies, increasing dilapidation and the pressure to accommodate and integrate new immigrants. Yet there is a problem more serious, one that is not limited to Athens.

The contemporary world lets us see an atomization of life, the isolation of each person from the other. Individuals are spending most of their lives in closed rooms glued to screens, unaware of other types of life. The apartment cubicle becomes a refuge, an escape into privacy. It is a privacy without neighbours, only strangers, or threats. The decline in communal awareness, in collective understanding and mutual respect is a new challenge to an ever-changing urban life. We need to address this situation if civic life is to continue.

Neo-classical Athens expressed an adopted sense of 'we,' a collective pubic statement of belonging to place. It was exhibited in the facades, the entrances and the floor plans of these buildings. This public coherence was continued with creative elegance into the apartments of the 'mesopolemo'. During the post war years the city was transformed as Greek families from villages poured into the city with no social connections either to their neighbours or to the existing city. There they set up homes in faceless 'units' — the perfect modernist city as Kenneth Frampton once said — and this has led not only to the near total neglect of the wider public realm but to never-ending 'wars' within each polikatoikia that continue to this day.

There are both social and economic reasons for this condition. We address the architectural issues. As architects and urban planners we must recognize and articulate this loss of public coherence then suggest new forms of dwelling that can encourage the 'interaction between the edges of difference' which is critical to any sense of community. If all life is defined by the edges of the organism, then it's the 'membranes' of our buildings that count: Do they welcome integration, or deny it? How do they prescribe integration?

Despite the current economic problems, the empty buildings of central Athens offer a unique opportunity to experiment with accommodating other activities in new forms and spaces that foster inclusion. If it's urban negotiation, not just form that is the essential ingredient in shaping a different type of pubic life can we suggest built situations where social boundaries are continually negotiable?

Ron Walkey

Ron Walkey is an Architect and Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. On completing a Master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley he remained to work with Christopher Alexander at the Centre for Environmental Structure on the preparation of "A Pattern Language". In Vancouver his private practice included community centres, housing for the disadvantaged and a number of inner city projects, several of which received national awards. In the Graduate Program at the UBC School of Architecture he taught design, design theory and urban design using projects that were based within the living community. Most studios were conducted in downtown areas. As director of the Studies Abroad Program, he initiated full term design studios in Venice, Jerusalem, Athens, Barcelona and Cairo. He is currently a consultant with The Design Centre for Sustainability at UBC, where he contributes to the intensive community design processes they undertake.

Workshop with Ron Walkey Location: Municipal Art Gallery of Piraeus 5 – 23 October 2015

The only constant, is change. Cities designed for permanence, attempting to resist change usually find themselves in decline, unable to meet new emerging needs. Look at modernist cites from the 1960s, Stalin Allee in Berlin, New Towns in England, the American Suburbia. Continuing decline into slum is one future for them. Bulldozing and rebuilding anew is another — just sweep away the old, plant the new — action that is environmentally irresponsible.

A vital city is one that can accept change over time, dance with it, one that maintains its deep structures, its spatial integrity — yet allows innovation and invites complexity. But what are the spatial relationships and characteristics of a city that could allow this to happen? This will be the central questions of this studio.

We need to understand what effect the digital revolution is having on the workplace? Will social media erase the need for face-to-face interaction? Will publicness become just a collection of privacies? Is 'the other' no longer to be seen, present or confronted in modern cities? Will the physical public realm in its current form no longer be viable?

This studio will look at a critical piece of the urban fabric of Piraeus, one that for many years served as its commercial and social focus. Changing patterns of living, of shopping and of working have sidelined this area, left it in state of accelerating decay. Although remaining centrally located it has lost its energy, and its heart. But does centrality mean anything any more? Left as it is what will be its future? With thoughtful and sensitive repair what might a better future look like?

We will undertake a historic, spatial and social interrogation of this area, We'll map it, model it and make architectural and public space proposals that can point towards rejuvenation based on the central premiss that in a democratic and pluralistic world place still matters. Place is space plus event: just space is a nowhere.