Asklepieion | Moritz Mayer

Project Report:

The site is located on the island Kos, Greece in the east aegean region. Most of it‘s flora consists of olive, cypress and pine trees. In this context a concept for a vacation home had to be developed.

The main intention of this vacation home is to merge with it‘s surrounding topography and to have something vernacular which anchores the building in it‘s mediterranean setup.
The building itself consists of two volumes. The top one creates one platform together with the topography behind it. A visitor has the sensation of walking towards a viewpoint which celebrates the view on the two kilometer distant mediterranean sea and the aegean islands.

Stairs lead downwards to the main entrance of the house. In the top volume are the living room and kitchen area and an access to the terrace and the pool. The lower volume has two bedrooms, both with baths, in it. The stair case is the key part which connects both volumes in a straight dynamic. The inspiration for the stairs is the not so far-off antique Asklepieion with its platforms which are connected through stairs, which give the different views onto the sea something particularly.
In the building a visitor gets the same kind of impression. You start with the wide panoramic view when you walk towards the entrance. Then you immerse yourself into the building into the first privacy layer. The platform in the lower volume is the most intimate one with it‘s garden view.

The building has besides that antique local reference a peculiar form of timelessness, which strengthens the idea and juxtaposing it against the continuity of time. This method is expressed with a radical abstract approach. Simple geometrical forms shape and carve the volumes that results in the construction of spaces in a constant relationship between empty and full. What is truly essential, what makes it part of contemporary architecture, is what is left besides this carved out matter: air, emptiness, silence.
To find the absolute form of abstraction and to define thoughts which resist time is a continuous flow of research, where only the future events in time can give certainty if the chosen way would prove it‘s validity. Time will maybe change it‘s appearance but the most valuable part, the idea, will outlive the eroding stream of time.