This was an Open Competition, in a City I had once visited and researched.  But I never knew of this particular part of the Port, and how its Historical Gate, the Ietoneia, was one of the last remaining sites with significance and is now kept as a Park, seldom visited.  Most of the environment in Piraeus, itself an ancient city, is now covered with modern development.  The notion, that the concept of Naval Force, with the Greek Trireme ships, was started here, is interesting to me as an architect with a taste for history and technology.  While there were other Navies for sure, and sea powers, this site culminated the development into a State and Polis structure, that lasted for some 200-years.  It became absorbed into the Athenian and Attica history, but it had an acropolis, temples, and series of stoas along the water front, making it a "place to port, import, and export goods, services, and renown.

The Idea of this Competition was to link the Park to the abandoned factory across the street.  It was essentially an Interior Design Project.  But with limited ground floor space, additions were required, and the upper floors have excess, potential erasure of part of the building was to be entertained.

My IDEA, was to make the build a ship, cruise ship of sorts.  As within 200-meters of the site, the port for the travel, ferry, and cruise industry is on display.  The ships are large, long, and brightly colored, and modern.

The additions I proposed were to take a chapter from Mies, and add on a classical framed structure, a temple space, that would serve as a foil to the self-contained existing grid and structure.

The other element, suggested in the Brief, was to some how relate this new Museum space, to the ancient architect Philon of Miletus, who developed a linear and classically inspired Storage Shed for the Ship's Accessory Gear.  I placed this with a concourse area of the existing structure, providing a new front door, a linear hall with competition pool, one lane wide, to allow lap sim and one redeeming aspect.  To allow the modern visitor and youth to test first hand, what it was like to row on a Greek Trireme.  A machine to row, in a natatorium, which was called before a Skevotheke.

This underground hall, lit from above and along the street, would serve to connect the Park and the Building Site, via an underground extension below an existing street, which could not be removed or re-routed.  Then the entrance to the Park, controlled by the New Thematic Museum, would be just a glass elevator and series of low glass handrails, as circular stair, which terminated and re-directed the axis to the Ietoneia gate towers.

What an Amazing Race, what an complete design, and submission.  It may not win or even be considered, as it does not have the modern sense of "dis-location, warped-plane, and folded-sapce" that much of today's elite architects, seek to propose as monumental.

But I think what I envisioned, drew, and rendered is and was relevant.  That is all I can ever wish for, or attain, is relevance in our thoughts, deeds, work, and prayers.