Lycabettus Hill – Athens, Greece

At the top of Mount Lycabettus sits a contemporary monument, the Lycabettus theater designed by Takis Zenetos in 1964 at the site of an old quarry. The surrounding area has been awkwardly used servicing the theater, as a parking lot or informal hangout and the surrounding hill features pathways in nature that lead up to the top of the hill.

The view from the hill is breathtaking, spanning over Athens, all across Attiki and all the way to the sea.

It is the feeling of freedom once up there, the leisurely strolls under the burning summer sun or the shaded paths, the switching from warm to cool the charged history of the site and the glimpses of the manmade landscape below that render the site unique along with the dominating presence of one of the most important works of contemporary architecture in Greece.

The project calls for reuse of the area adjacent to the theater, as well as the revitalization of the immediate surroundings. We worked with an acupunctural process inserting objects in the landscape, small scale, and none overshadowing the theater. Their geometries pure, elemental and simple, and their materiality familiar to the site and the Athenian audience: concrete, pre-rusted steel, gabion walls reusing the existing paving stones removed, earth, crushed marble gravel.

As the theater sits integrated but alien as an object on the landscape, the supporting program pavilions follow a similar approach. They all seem as if they can be moved around, as if their positioning serves a temporary purpose and as if all can be taken apart leaving the site at its natural state.

A large plateau is intentionally rendered empty, a serene plaza with a sunken promenade at its cliff edge with a continuous seating element to enjoy the view.

Various other types of paths – soft and hard paved -, resting pavilions, viewing platforms, shortcut stairs up the cliff and hidden plateaus create a network of elements that are stand-alone objects that discretely serve the utilitarian purpose they were needed for and are all part of an experiential sequence with no specific order, a derive in nature.

 

Project Team
Leonidas Trampoukis, Eleni Petaloti, Anastasia Mangouta, Zoi Eleutheriadi, Eirini Doumani, Luise Krumbein
Project Type 
National Competition Entry
Total project area
35.600m²
Address
Lycavittos Mount, Athens, Greece