
Thessaloniki Community Center
LOCATION: Thessaloniki, Greece
PROGRAM: Social housing, refugee memorial, kindergarden, senior center, cultural center, library, health center and sports areas
CLIENT: Thessaloniki Municipality
TEAM: sastudio | Tiago Sá, Larissa Lira, Matheus Alves, Mariana Cardoso, Augusto Zamperlini. A&M Architects
Size: 5 000 m2
Finalist 2nd round
For its uniqueness regarding program complexity and functional complementarities, this project represents a great opportunity to explore new concepts of spaces for living, learn, growth and play, breaking the conservative approach of traditional community centers and binding together all generations.
It aims to represent a new beacon of life. Beyond an architectural project, the New Center is as well an urbanistic statement: connecting the surrounding territory with the creation of a public plaza and a green park, and extending the public realm to its interior by allocating program that will be used by all inhabitants.
The architectural concept interprets the new center as a place of community. The central space of the new building is a courtyard framed by public program, where buildings stack on each other, creating passages on the intersections in an inviting gesture.
The buildings revolve on themselves in order to create the environment of a communal space, a continuous loop that merges contextual architecture with a contemporary language applied to the local scale and formal elements.