Archipelago of Protocols.
Aristide Antonas

The concept of Urban Protocol names a strategy concerning the condition of Athens today. It would serve as an experimental pseudo-methodology that faces the condition of the city. The Urban Protocols are meant to introduce legal temporary occupancies of the abandoned city center that will be accepted and controlled by a municipal authority; the purpose of an Urban Protocol would be to establish cluster-like micro-legislative constructions with communal functions. Urban Protocols are formed as systems of rules. Using a video game terminology we may say that the Urban Protocols are “play-tested” in the city, performed and improved via Internet. The system of rules they represent could be transformed and re-established easily.

The Urban Protocol challenges the relation between the city and the Internet; the concept of user would function better for its performance than the one of citizen. Nevertheless its most sophisticated part would have to deal with the relation between user and citizen. Its most challenging legislative part is ruled by the relationship between the Internet and the state; the Internet is understood as the quick functional basis for the formation, installation and function of an Urban Protocol.

Architecture seems to propose its own end if we forget its power to produce programs. An uninteresting lessez-faire will be the result of such an idealization of the free initiative. A city was conceived as a system of coexistence and its legislative system is already old. The Urban Protocol could be first and foremost the call for a new legislative phase for the city of the future. Athens is only a good example.

"Something like theatrical scripts, the protocols are deliberately authored in a way that relinquishes authorship to others. The best scripts offer not overbearing stage directions but a text that is really only a trace of, or a clue to, the action that the performer chooses to play. That action is meant to be the real carrier of information that may even overwhelm the text. Antonas designs a few details, critical dimensions, or settings that are suggestive of activities. Then, like a good playwright, he leaves the performance to the city itself."
—Keller Easterling, documenta 14

Title: Archipelago of Protocols. ANTONAS
Contributors: Athena Athanasiou, Keller Easterling, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Pelin Tan, and Thanos Zartaloudis.
Design: Numa / Merino
Languague: English
Cover: Softcover
Size: 15 x 21 cms 
Images: Color and b/w illustrations
Date: May 2016
ISBN: 978-84-942414-2-0
Publisher: dpr-barcelona

Additional info: Book launch at the Architectural Association bookshop reviewed by Gili Merin.