Onassis Cultural Centre by AS.Architecture-Studio in Athens, Greece
Completed last month, the Onassis Cultural Centre, designed by the Paris practice Architecture-Studio, stands in the Greek capital. Initiated and funded by the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the building houses three performance venues enclosed within a cocoon reached by glass walkways. This interior richness reflects Greece's cultural heritage and its living arts scene.
The building contains a 900-seat opera house and theatre, a 200-seat auditorium combining conference hall and cinema, and a 200-seat open-air amphitheatre. Around this core, a library, a restaurant and an exhibition room are set at the front of the building. The architects explored the relationship between glass and stone in order to create a building that feels light.
Parallelepiped in form on the outside, this Thassos marble building, set on a glass base, conceals the precious cultural core that animates the centre. The structure of the building pulls back from this core to leave a void. Only glass walkways span the void, giving access to the three venues at the heart of the building. The envelope serves as the foundation's stage set, a structure at the scale of the city.
The treatment of the façades, both transparent and opaque depending on where the visitor stands, generates a sense of movement and life. This urban scenography echoes the foundation's activities and its place within the city and the wider world. The simplicity of the volume and the abstraction of the architectural expression create a monumentality that a cramped site would at first sight seem to rule out.
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- © Nikos Daniilidis
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