low budget story
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client: Board Sports Distribution

location: Kifisia / Athens-Greece

architectural design: archivirus in collaboration with Nick Tsitsimelis

construction: Rebuild

photographer: Athanasia Psaraki / RSP

date: 2010

 

Finance crisis is a reality. Commerce has been one of the first victims. Stores are struggling to remain alive and win peoples’ attention. The client requested a new shop with the lowest budget. The target group mostly people who are involved in the skate-snow and surf scene but also people who prefer a more casual look. The market location, Kifisia center. An area with a rich past, an alarming present and a doubtable future. Luxury antique interiors of the remaining past in contradiction with cheap raw materials of the present, was the main concept for the shop. An existing wooden floor stripe in the middle of the ground floor has been preserved as a remaining of the luxury past. The proposal suggests, this wooden stripe to get trapped between two stripes of raw concrete representing the hard present state. Raw materials like concrete, hydraulic tube pipes and cheap wood are the main substances of the shop which overflow around and above the wooden floor. Some antiques like an old mirror and a showcase which used to have a value, now found really cheap are placed in the shop to remind old luxury times. A table made of cinder blocks, constructed on site on the wooden parquet, marks the possible victory of the raw. Old and new, luxurious and raw, wealth and crisis, all contradictions that represent the reality of today from which new commercial values emerge and try to establish a brand new identity.