The semester Fall 2008 was a little bit different in my university. The Riots of December had as on the road for at least 2 months so when we got back into “normal” no-one was in the groove of doing something ordinary. As a consequence some courses gave as the opportunity to express ourselves more freely, partially inspired by the things we experienced during that December.

Plastiki 3 was such a course. The subject of the “ordinary” course would have been the exploration of the meaning of a shell-shelter and how we interact with such a form of space. Given that, me and my fellow student Xristos Stavrakakis started to envision an shell-centric approach for the urban space

The idea is pretty simple. We can consider down-town Athens with its building and structure as the “shell” in which we live our every day. We interact with it and some certain patterns of motion and usage are emerged. Nevertheless, during the December Riots these patterns were altered. New urban cores were established, and a whole new motion system was build upon them. The central Universities were now the “cores” and the demonstrations marked new ways of “moving around the city”. Complex urban grid was now more appreciated during the search of a shelter after a mass-protest.

Some initial drafts where designed and we decided the usage of materials. Plaster was used for the static cores (mainly universities) and Fabric on fire was used for the active cores (mainly plazas). The result was photographed and displayed at the end of the semester.