Protective yet porous walls and an adaptable interior by AREA (Architecture Research Athens) make this the ideal home for peaceful introspection
Commended in the 2021 AR House awards: read about the full shortlist here
Salamis is the largest Greek island in the Saronic Gulf and the closest to the coast of Attica, easily accessed from Piraeus, Megara and, more frequently, from Perama. A century ago, as Piraeus concentrated on commercial purposes, shipbuilding and industrial activities were transferred to Perama; a new workforce settled around the port before spreading to the coast and hills of Salamis. Low-income industry and dockyard workers from mainland Perama acquired small plots of agricultural land and built modest accommodation on the island. First used as weekend residences in summer months, they later developed into primary homes, forming a community of permanent residents. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the military junta period, changes in land legislation allowed the subdivision of plots, opening the island to extensive unplanned and unregulated urban and suburban development. Having kept its shipyards, and still oscillating between labour and leisure, Salamis has evolved into an extended suburb of Athens.
While industrial activities are concentrated in the northern part of the island and forests of pine prevail in the southern half, dense urban areas developed near the port of Paloukia and spread longitudinally inland, to reach the western coast. The residential district of Agia Paraskevi sprang up from a sprawling silvery olive grove, with gardens and land plots separated by dead ends and rudimentary roads. On one of these is a house designed by AREA (Architecture Research Athens). There is no pavement, only well-kept yards and orchards, filled with plants and bound by decorated walls. Life here largely takes place outside, making the most of the mild climate. Small, single-level houses are scattered on either side of the narrow road; some are primary residences while others are homes for the weekend, but all are the result of incremental construction with improvised additions and extensions. Small masonry cores were transformed in unpredictable ways to accommodate the ever-changing needs of families.
This eclectic panorama prompted the architects to design a house turned inwards, integrating the two pre-existing elements on site: a large olive tree and an old well. Their preservation is a testament to local history and customs, and was important to the owners personally as they evoked childhood memories. The plot, building code and a relatively small budget were the project’s starting point, but there was no actual brief; unusually, specific needs and requirements or ideas for the house’s formal and functional attributes were not prescribed by the client. Having previously commissioned the architects, the owners favoured an open-ended, participative process.
AREA co-founders Giorgos Mitroulias, Styliani Daouti and Michaeljohn Raftopoulos assume a critical stance towards the island’s vocabulary of self-built architectures, questioning what constitutes its sense of place today and how a holiday home could find footing on a territory defined by production and labour. ‘Critical localism in Greece, as shaped by eminent architects in a number of holiday homes or tourist sites, was a reaction to a pure and almost untouched Attic landscape, which, prior to reconstruction and postwar development, still retained a mythical or archaic dimension,’ they explain. ‘In the post-industrial landscape of Salamis, a new type of “Mediterraneanness” emerges today, reconciling history and tradition with the “ugly” vernacular architecture or the spaces of the island’s shipbuilding production.’
The indeterminacy of the programme was tackled through a series of physical models, ideas, objects and processes in unending play to test configurations of indoor and outdoor spaces, gradations of public and private areas, and various hierarchies of function. Different iterations were born: the solid house, the house as shack, the unfolded house, the dispersed house, the house with courtyards. These models revealed that the building would be the result of subtractive moves. Instead of the additive process of improvised extensions preferred by its neighbours, where form results from necessity and limited resources, this house introduces and organises itself around the voids of its outdoor spaces. ‘The additive logic consumes the outdoors, while the subtractive logic presupposes the existence of surplus and produces the outdoors, in the form of courtyards,’ argue the architects. But ‘it is no longer the productive outdoors of the olive grove or the well; instead, it is a space of aestivation freed from everyday material needs and opened to free time.’
The house is set back from the street, accounting for an impending new urban plan that will augment the width of streets and regularise the layout of land plots. A garden of cacti serves as buffer space at the front and the monolithic walls fold inwards to frame the entrance. But ‘inside’ is a relative notion. The square carved out at the centre operates as the heart of the home, divided into four distinct quarters: the entrance patio, two indoor rooms for the living and kitchen-dining rooms, placed diagonally opposite, and the patio with the olive tree, which opens onto the back garden. When the glass partitions that compartmentalise these four spaces slide open, it becomes a generous living area, partly shaded, with indoor and outdoor spaces connected and united as one. Being able to reconfigure the central space gives the owners ‘the feeling of waking up in a different house every day’.
Bedrooms, bathrooms and their adjoining courtyards are all sheltered in the heavy exterior walls surrounding the central core. The walls’ thickness might be deceptive – subtractions occur in section as well as in plan – but it feels fortress-like: a carved-out protective space closely connected to the ground. Courtyards frame views of the sky, while letting in abundant light and providing optimal ventilation; in spring, summer and autumn, the living space expands into these courtyards, while during winter passive heating travels around the glass partitions.
‘Fixed boundaries between inside and out are dismantled: the house is both porous and enclosed’
The visitor is reminded of architectural typologies encouraging introversion deeply rooted in Greek culture. A few kilometres away, the Faneromeni Monastery is one monument that testifies to the island’s historical significance before industrial activities saturated the landscape. Both the monastic life and the building’s architecture embrace inwardness, enhancing feelings of detachment, isolation and tranquillity. Ancient Greek houses are also defined by introverted forms, with a courtyard at the centre as place for gathering and, crucially, as means of circulation providing access to all spaces of the home. While this new house on Salamis inherits Greek attributes and follows established ideas, it also invents a new type of dwelling and suggests different forms of living. Rusted gates as tall as the walls close the central square’s perimeter and, in doing so, transform the large living area into a walled garden and peaceful haven. Fixed boundaries between inside and out are dismantled; the private courtyards attached to bedrooms introduce a further layer of interiority – a step further into seclusion and self-reflection.
Characterised by duality and ambiguity, the house is both porous and enclosed, solid and transparent, heavy and light. As a monolithic and monochromatic envelope, it is reminiscent of the ancient Greek house, a self-sufficient cluster sealed off from its surroundings, and suggests an eremitic way of life. But when the gates and sliding doors are open, it is fully porous, filled with an uninterrupted flow of sounds and scents travelling through from the outside. The covered spaces of the central living area are lightweight metal structures that contrast with the solid enveloping walls. They are painted with rust-coloured boat primer and, together with the sliding gates, are reminiscent of boat construction: a tribute to the maritime and industrial history of the island. A discreet staircase, built into the side of the olive tree patio and half hidden by its foliage, leads to a roof terrace from which one peeks down into the enclosed courtyards, gazes to the surrounding topography and the sea beyond the olive grove. It is a microcosm of a house, which chooses when to seclude itself from the world around, and when to let in the wind, the salt and the horizon.
