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Architect / Illustrator / PhD candidate in Architectural Design / Senior Teaching Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL liangifi_at_gmail_dot_com / Unless stated otherwise, all work on this blog is made by Ifigeneia Liangi, Athens, 1988.

18 February 2011

DINOSAURS OF THE FUTURE

What is the most possible thing that could happen to a building in the middle of a city that has fallen into despair? -Possibly burn down. Riots, sun, police on motorbikes with shiny helmets reflecting uncertainties. The dust of desperate boredom that is tired of being an excuse for the memories of a place whose history buries it day by day, finally stops being the everyday enemy of the housewives. The crisis is there. And of course it's not economic... How could it be just that? The building gets on fire. It is made out of colourful metallic pieces like in playgrounds. Metal is covered with wood at certain places; no one would ever want to touch metal in the middle of August in Athens, nor be in a place that can melt in ten minutes if it gets on fire, so wood would slowly burn and give people the time to get out. And the building would then be left bare, with its skeleton being like a dinosaur that had a car accident. No walls, no ceilings, just a few concrete blocks here and there, up and down, in between the colourful metal beams, reminding of a neighbourhood's class divisions that once lived in a block and flat architecture; squared in theory and practice. The building, becomes a monument in the middle of the piazza. Or an abandoned canvas of abstract geometries that the city has no money to reconstruct, replace, or redamage. And maybe this is a good thing because when no one has money, no one cares about it anymore.
And people start playing.