Greece | EPFL Graph Search

Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe, situated on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula. Greece shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Sea of Crete and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin, featuring thousands of islands. The country consists of nine traditional geographic regions, and has a population of approximately 10.5 million. Athens is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki and Patras. Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilization, being the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, theatre and the Olympic Games. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into variou

Public housing for domestication: The socio-spatial politics of settling the Bulgarian immigrants in Turkey after 1950 and 1989

Sila Karatas Basoglu

Turkey has been allowing immigrants from the early years of the republic. Most immigrants were from Greece due to the nation building policies after Lausanne Peace Agreement of 1923, forced to displacement through population exchanges between Turkey and Greece. However, the immigrants were mostly from Bulgaria after the Second World War, forced to displacement based on ideological and political tensions between the Bulgarian and Turkish governments within the two-poled world system. The displacement of the Bulgarian immigrants continued at intervals through mutual opening and closing of borders during the Cold War, but 1950 and 1989 are of significant importance in scenarios of domesticity. The Turkish Government initiated two different housing programs for settling the Bulgarian immigrants in Turkey after 1950 and 1989. Both programs were performed as part of ideological dispositions against communism whereas they differed in socio-spatial tools of integrating immigrants to their new homes. The former settlement program was assisted by the financial and technical assistance programs of the Marshall Plan whereas the latter was performed by a national institution called as the Migrant Housing Administration, which was founded as a branch of the Mass Housing Administration to perform planning, design and construction of migrant housing. The experiences of 1950 and 1989 share a top-down policy in the application of few housing types in all regions regardless of local characteristics of populations, but differ in terms of socio-spatial policies as well as settlement morphologies and housing typologies. The former program was headed towards rural settlement in single-family housing blocks of vernacular characteristics whereas the latter was focused on urban/suburban settlement in low-cost and standardized multi-family housing blocks. In this regard, this presentation aims to discuss public housing experiences of both periods via discursive formations in socio-spatial practices of settling and home-making by comparative analysis of multiple cases.

2019

Architecture Without Content 8: Places Of Accumulation: Temporary Residence

Jelena Pancevac, Giovanni Piovene Porto Godi, Dries Rodet, Andrea Zanderigo

Another Short History of Architecture without Content The second iteration of Architecture without Content at EPFL is the eighth incarnation of a studio that started three years ago at Columbia University. Back then it was intended as a study of the Big Box, a big industrial building that can contain many things. Over time, Architecture without Content came to represent an idea of a possible architecture of the perimeter, a pragmatic kind of architecture that remains radical and precise. The first incarnation of Places of Accumulation — entitled Machines — concentrated both on places of production and places of storage. Buildings that concentrate the very essence of our contemporary infrastructure. In most cases they are not considered as possible sites for an architectural project. Machines thus investigated the possibility to accumulate formal knowledge in buildings that do not deserve a specific architectural treatment. We claimed: “Their presence is all they have, but perhaps that is enough.” Temporary Residence is in many ways the inverse of Machines . Site and territory are the defining factors for the architectural type. As much as each of the designed buildings are considered autonomous, it is precisely their performance ‘on site’ that was considered. At first, the project tackled fifteen sites of a wider series of temporary detention centres for migrants in contemporary Greece. As with the Machines , these buildings play a role on a global scale and regulate flows in the even covered field. The sites sprawl around in the entire territory of the country, and are more densely distributed close to the Turkish border and around Athens. During the studio, we drifted away from that initial thought. The buildings in Temporary Residence accumulate people, not machines or data. The temporary residences designed here are to be objects that permanently mark and deal with the specificity of a given territory whilst being able to accumulate transient fluxes of people — now temporary detention centres for immigrants, in the future something else. Ultimately, Temporary Residence considers inhabitants a temporary fad. The ambiguity towards its user is the code of arms of this ignorant piece of architecture. As a true Architecture without Content it turns the inhabitant into its alibi.

2014

Architecture Without Content 8: Places Of Accumulation: Temporary Residence

Jelena Pancevac, Giovanni Piovene Porto Godi, Dries Rodet, Andrea Zanderigo

2014

Public housing for domestication: The socio-spatial politics of settling the Bulgarian immigrants in Turkey after 1950 and 1989

Sila Karatas Basoglu

2019