Ioannina Municipal Market
2025, Ioannina, Greece
Type: Architectural Competition
Prize: Follow-Up Prize
Size: 3500 m²
Status: Ideas-drafts
Architects: Giannis Papadopoulos, Georgia Daskalaki
Architecture students: Melina Kontosfyri, Kyriakos Bozis, Vasilis Papadopoulos, Maroulita Stefanakis
The proposal for the New Municipal Market seeks to form a unified whole with the existing surroundings, creating a palimpsest in dialogue with the historic buildings of the area, activating collective memory and a sense of place. The central concept is the exploration of the market as a social space, where commerce and the city intersect.
The main compositional tool is the notion of the wall–fortification, functioning as both a structural and organizational element, recalling the morphology of a castle. The concrete block walls constitute a system for generating space and landscape, through which the new market is organically integrated into the city, acting simultaneously as infrastructure and as a landscape intervention.
This system of walls “receives” the main building volume, utilizing the existing topographical difference, and embeds it into the landscape by forming an elevated planted park — a key requirement of the competition. At the same time, the structural articulation of the walls produces spaces of varying scale and atmosphere: tall and low, public and semi-private.
The site is organized into two main parts through the creation of an elevated planted plane — a kind of platform rising 3.5 meters above ground level. This gesture generates two functionally and topographically distinct zones: the upper level, which functions as a belvedere extending the adjacent urban greenery and unifying the new landscape with the neighboring parks and pedestrian routes of the upper neighborhood; and the lower (southern) level, which remains at the natural ground elevation and is left as an open public space — a large plaza that extends the pedestrian route of Agia Marina.
