Archaeological Museum Piraeus

2014, Piraeus

Type:  Architectural Competition

Prize:  Follow-Up Prize

Size:  9500 m²

Status:  Ideas-drafts

Architects:  Georgia Daskalaki, Giannis Papadopoulos

Architects collaborators:  Anna Moraitou, Vasilis Papadopoulos

Architecture student:  Nicol Andreou

Consultant civil engineer:  Thanos Giannimaras

We do not perceive the Museum as an independent “box” in which objects are exhibited, but as an integral part of a wider urban development scheme which provides a vital urban space for all: visitors, the neighborhood, the citizens of Piraeus.

Our proposal is based on the idea of a museum maintaining a dialectic relationship with the existing archaeological site and landscape (as well as to the proposed park) – in terms of visual and functional connections, scale and aesthetic expression. A Museum which does not antagonize but integrates into the landscape, which becomes a local landmark, not forcibly, but while “conversing” with the landscape. This way the Museum and the landscape become an inseparable and cohesive whole, an organic composition.

We approach the competition’s objective regarding the existing building critically: we consider that the large volume of the existing building deprives the possibility to visually connect the archaeological site to the park and the surrounding neighborhood to the sea, overshadowing the archaeological site’s importance.

Therefore, we restore continuity within the landscape by removing the first and second floors’ skeleton of the existing building (which is allowed according to the competition’s brief) maintaining the entire building shell up to the first floor. In the extension of the maintained south side of the building shell, two autonomous volumes are added,with the entrance of the museum placed in between them.

The unifying compositional element is a green roof covering all building volumes, which is formulated by the extension of the existing roof of the first floor.

The roof is the main compositional element and has multiple functions:

It is the main symbolic point of reference of the new Museum.

It organises the Museum’s public space by signifying the entrance and ensuring important semi-open spaces with uninterrupted views towards the archaeological space, the park and the sea.

It completes and restores the continuity within the landscape as a planted “fifth view”. This way the Museum is formed within a “natural cavity” created between the ground and the roof.