Astir Marina Landscape / Neiheiser Argyros

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Text description provided by the architects. The site for the Astir Marina is the Vouliagmeni Peninsula, a lush pine forest along the south coast of Athens, Greece. However, since it's a marina, the actual site is also the new engineered ground that is being constructed in the sea. The concept for the project emerges out of the unique challenge of designing a landscape where there is currently no land. One way of thinking about this lack of land is that it's a blank site – a void – a tabula rasa. But of course, this isn't the case. The sea makes invisible the complex and dynamic ecosystems of the sea bed which is continuous with the visible ground. We started by looking at ways of representing this sea landscape; the nautical charts and maps that use elevation marks, contours, wind vectors, gradients of color, and hatches to represent the territory that is both above and below the water line. We were particularly inspired by the aesthetic of topographic contours, traces of the ground projected onto a flat 2d surface.