marble-works-1

The set of drawings exhibited in the G_A_P Gallery represented the Athenian marble quarries not only as spatial discontinuities within the Athenian landscape, but also as measures of intelligence for more complex configurations of the city, drawing attention to incidents from three specific periods of the urban history of the Metropolis: antiquity, the nineteenth century, and between 2008-2012.

Athens encountered a great transformation in 5th century; quarrying began and the first urban marble program was materialized. Marble production at these early quarries gradually ceased, until they were put back into operation in the nineteenth century in order to provide material for the construction of major public buildings, all of which complied with the rationality of a style understood as associated with a language of the marble-as-veneer. In 1900, the private company responsible for the exploitation of marble was made bankrupt, but a few years later a development in technological knowledge allowed for the establishment of underground quarrying, introducing a new technique of inscribing the Athenian landscape. More recently, in an era of economic collapse, the political riots that manifested an immense urban decay have left behind a number of marble stripped edifices (those nineteenth century public buildings that are now listed).

Drawing on these incidents, marble is researched here through the various techniques employed: in the solid marble landscape structures; in the architectural constructions of marble veneer buildings; and in both of these contexts as ruins. A quantitative design survey of the marble remains, which also unfolds the tectonics of Athens' materiality, is then juxtaposed to a qualitative research of the social movements around Syntagma Square and the political meanings with which these events are endowed.