Piraeus Tower Athens | Greece

Pireas, Greece

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Piraeus Tower Athens | Greece

Pireas, Greece

Firm

Type

Commercial › Office Retail
Hospitality + Sport › Restaurant

YEAR

2010

SIZE

1,000,000 +

The skyline of the Piraeus harbour reveals an accumulation of dissimilar objects. Like a landmark, the Piraeus Tower with its new facade concept shall have a federating role, creating its own distinctive proﬁle within the heterogenous cluster of the urban collage. It has to represent a soothing element and to stabilize, to connect and to highlight the single parts within the whole patchwork, which forms the city. Eliminating the craning parts of the horizontal body forming the first and the second floor of the current tower outline, our concept evidences an intrinsic composition of three clear building volumes: the tower, its contrasting black „child“ and the canopied walkway between the two independent building parts, leading to the lateral entrances. The tower and its black opponent are extended by one floor to regain the demolished floor space. To dynamize their silhouette additionally, a volume - covering the supplemental staircase - is placed on the tower‘s rooftop housing two signal antennas for air-traffic security.A new external envelope forms a second skin and dissolves the classic typology of a high-rise building into an iconic seamless piece, transforming it into a loggia tower. Large scaled glass-fronted cubes mark the tower like giant footsteps ascending the sky and insert multi-layered, intimate green zones. These cubes remeasure the harbour skyline and absorb the critic urban heights of the surrounding building lines. The external shell incorporates the additional staircase as well as, on every floor, walking and recreational spaces between the cement structure and its transparent enclosure, offering a direct link with the surrounding city, the harbour and the sea. The structure is massive but open, restrained but bright. All together, the building volumes and the loggias express the composite, multipurpose aspect of a living urban programme, meant to create life. materials The external skin of the building complex will feature mechanisms to filter and exploit the natural daylight entering through 360 degrees. The use of sun as a renewable energy source will increase energy efficiency and reduce reliance on fossil fuel energy. A subtle interplay of laminated clear and tinted glass panels illuminates the interior spaces, reflecting a warm light inside. The translucent facade cluster is designed to cope with the extremes of the local climate: the single glass elements open and close to create a thermal balance through the managing of solar inputs and through providing natural ventilation in the hot months. Moreover, all roof surfaces will be lined with photovoltaic panels.The interior spaces present themselves in black and white. Two extremes, like the clearly drawn shadows, which characterize the Mediterranean. White sheathings diffuse daylight within the internal spaces of the tower, forming a neat canvas for the hourly changing interdependence of light and shadow. The adjacent building volume, the tower‘s child housing shops and coffee bars, is covered in black, wrapped in elegance and mystery.Pavement lights sign the way around the tower and underneath the longitudinal porch. In the evening hours a led illumination creates cold and warm tones of white light, which accumulate in several points of the building to evidence the most characteristic architectonical elements like the glass cubes and the staircases. This classic type of illumination can be altered with light concentrations in the primary colours red, blue and green on special occasions.