LOTOS TEA HOUSE / NEO PSYCHICO

Glafkou, Neo Psichiko, Greece

Add To Collection

LOTOS TEA HOUSE / NEO PSYCHICO

Glafkou, Neo Psichiko, Greece

Firm

Type

Residential › Private House
Government + Health ›

YEAR

2002

SIZE

5000 sqft - 10,000 sqft

BUDGET

$50K - 100K

Lotos, Teahouse (Tolios Residence)
Neo Psychico, Athens, Greece 2002-2011

This project can be described as an addition by
extension to the second floor of a residential building, built in 1933.The
building comprises two residences in the second and the third floor. The first
floor is converted into a coffee shop.
The family
living in the second floor had the need for a new children’s
room for their two kids, making the
addition inevitable.
The complexity
that arose with such a simple project consists of two problems looking it from
a different point of view, and a third. In the first place was the intriguing
morphological interest of the old building, not allowing any kind of
appendixes, as previous not so successful additions had proved. In the second,
not even the technical approach was so conspicuous, the building being built
mainly with stone and the addition having to be made right on the balcony
projecting from the second floor, over the area dedicated for the open air
space of the coffee shop – exactly in the main façade. Consequently the
additional room couldn’t prop from bellow and couldn’t lean on the edge of the
projecting balcony.
The
solution given, answers in the same manner to both this two different problems
and hopefully tries to satisfy the third, being to make alterations to a
characteristic building in a neighbourhood that wouldn’t allow high handed
acts.
The motto:
“opposing + embodying = ensomatosis”,
explains in an emblematic way the solution, both statically and
morphologically:
A) The
appendix is conceived statically as a box, supporting its self, transferring
only vertical loads to the stone infrastructure bellow.
B) The same
thing happens morphologically, with the appendix volume’s independency together
with it’s embodiment to the infrastructure.
Isn’t the
problematic the same, even if we talk about putting a new building in an
already built environment within the city index?
“opposing + embodying
= ensomatosis