unit-code
Set in the central Athenian meat market, Varvakeios Agora, the project explores the complex topics of globalisation, nationalism, and culture in the context of traditional food chains.
Southern Europe is characterised by short, traditional food chains, where the origin of a food product is the main way of determining that product’s quality. With the rise of technology that origin becomes increasingly harder to evaluate and has led to the rise of gastro-nationalism.
In this context, the project theorises a near future where synthetic food has become the norm, and it is now impossible to assign any symbolic quality to a food product using its origin. The project predicts a social over-reaction and a turn to ‘auto-cannibalism’ – the consumption of synthetic human meat – the ultimate shortening of the food chain, where the producer literally becomes the product.
A market for ‘humain’ is built within the Varvakeios Agora through the cannibalisation of Athens’s classical disused buildings, creating an architecture of decontextualised building fragments that is an echo of Greece’s marbles still resting in the British Museum.
A timeline that traces the transformation of the Varvakeios Meat market from its impoverished state in 2012 – the years of the Greek economic crisis – to its rebirth as a ‘market within a market’ for the consumption of synthetic meat.
The plan correlates the timeline of the building materials from their earliest extraction to their deployment across various buildings.
Point cloud of a sectional physical model testing the cannibalistic construction techniques.
The ground level is an open-air market with fragments creating negative spaces using crowd dynamics theory. The upper level is constructed as a structural system using a single column supporting a spiral staircase and an internal production space.
Athens’s disused classical buildings are deconstructed, 3D scanned, and recombined; gaps are filled with 3D printed jesmonite. The upper level is post-tensioned; water tubing is integrated for heating and cooling; a zero-carbon architecture.