parkINpark

The parkINpark is conceived as a response to the ongoing increase of car traffic in the historic center of Thessaloniki and the future plans of the city council to address the problem by constructing a number of underground car park stations around it. The main challenge of the thesis is to prove that architecture can have a positive effect when applied to the rigor of transport pragmatism. The project reconsiders the conventional parking garage typology as a potential urban apparatus. By exploring the latent flexibility of its function and intensifying its station-character, the parking garage acquires the qualities of a hybrid multi-layered urban plaza ready to accommodate a variety of events together with the streams of cars. The scheme integrates an underground car park station with a digital film school, an urban plaza and a bus station, all of them seamlessly connected with each other in terms of form and structure, and with the surrounding urban tissue in terms of circulation and views, resulting into a catalyst of unpredicted urban events.
The form of the car park achieves to embody a diversity of programs into the parking experience in two ways. First by the way that the parking ramps are interwoven with the film school and second by the flexibility of the space on the ramps themselves.
The zigzag form of the ramps with the connections between them allows for multiple possibilities of how they can be used. Every ramp can be separated and function autonomously inviting different activities such as open markets, exhibitions, installations etc.

parkINpark by Ermis Adamantidis in Greece won the WA Award Cycle 3. Please find below the WA Award poster for this project.