Designing to resist soil artificialization, Call for competition sites for TerraViva, Collectif Supercali, finalist proposal, 2024
Hellinikon lies to the south of the Athens and is home to its historic airport. As part of its relocation in 2004, the site was temporarily taken over by the Olympic Games infrastructure. Since then, Hellinikon's site has been abandoned, and is at the heart of fierce criticism surrounding its suspicious sale to a developer seeking to transform this historic site into a luxury district. This case of economic corruption is emblematic of the difficulties facing the public sector in Greece.
The aim of the Save the white elephants Save the white elephants project is to document the economic and social weaknesses of the project being developed by the multinational real-estate company Lamda in partnership with Foster + Partners. At a cost of 9 billion euros, the project aims to transform the airport into a gated-community for the wealthier classes. Several skyscrapers, canals and a dozen mega-infrastructures, including several shopping malls, tourist attractions and casinos, are planned to gradually emerge around an urban park. Despite the sheer size of the project, it could join the many abandoned real estate projects littering the profit-seeking area. In fact, only 300 million euros are already available to fund the casinos and shopping malls on which the project's economy depends. These very structures are currently considered unviable, making the project's success all the more uncertain.
Save the white elephants Save the white elephants proposes to rely on the local resistance of inhabitants, associations and public counter-powers to propose a viable and desirable counter-project for the Athenian metropolis. This documentation would have enabled TerraViva to propose an architectural competition of international stature, thus providing a counter-proposal to this new district.