George Genovezos

In this project we focus on Agiou Nikolaou Street with the famous stairs in Patras, Greece.

Firstly in order to understand the surroundings and get a sense of the space and materiality we created a montage of photos from store facades along with their entrance patios (part of the sidewalk under the stoa). We compared the whole stairs with a 12 floor building and took 12 photos looking down at the sea from each landing as if it was the view of each floor of the tall imaginary building.

For the proposal we reimagined the Agiou Nikolaou Molos by converting it to an extension of the Agiou Nikolaou street, at least as viewed from above. We took some apartment building shapes from the main street and put the traces of them as platforms alongside the new metal pier. In these platforms a lot of activities are possible from utilitarian to recreational. We moved Othonos-Amalias street above the Treion Symachon Square so as to create a stronger bond between it and the water. We made a section of both Othonos-Amalias and Agiou Andreou underground resulting in a non-stop circulation from the new molos to the rest of the Agiou Nikolaou street, enhancing the natural movement of pedestrians without the need to stop for the cars. A big intervention was also the placement of a museum about the history of the port of Patras under the square. One side of it comes into contact with the water, so we thought the wall could be made of very thick glass, allowing people to look into the sea. This is possible because we replaced the old concrete pier (molos) with a lightweight metal one.