Yvonne Fu

Desert Islands / Urban Voids
A Cyclical Speculation for Kerameikos, Athens




As cities become privatized and public space shrinks, liminal urban voids become visible and significant. These voids are to the city what desert islands are to an archipelago: invisible spaces made visible through change - entropy, collapse, and accumulation of waste. How can architecture take on this temporal challenge, not as a monument-making enterprise, but understood as tidal motion, recording erosion, flux, sediment, and growth? Can we rethink the transformation of urban waste through architectural invention and, perhaps, also reinvent public space? This thesis imagines an organization and process of reconstruction and rewilding across a series of abandoned plots in Athens, Greece.

















































© Archipelago Studio 2020 @ the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.