The Magnificent Beauty Of Destruction | Ioanna Tsagkouli

A project in Santorini with many difficulties as its original condition, included three precipitated tunnels within a plot of which part of the slope of the upstream property had also suffered a slide, a second adjacent plot contained a ruined part of an underground house in subsidence and also under the plot, a tunnel covered most of the surrounding area. After a geotechnical inspection, a large thickness of soiled disintegration zone was found, i.e. weak quality of pozzolan land. Based on all these data, the architectural and structural study has been a wonderful challenge.

The shell of the cave house was made of reinforced concrete, two retaining walls on the roof hold 600 cubic meters of backfill and a third arched wall 6.5 meters long within the house, is the main support of the roof plate dividing the interior space into two sections whose roof is joined by a single sectional* dome. (*dome type)
The rest of the interior walls are designed as inverted arches and cooperate with each other in such a way that natural light and ventilation are diffused throughout the cave residence and at the same time they ensure the visual privacy of the rooms by removing the need for interior doors.
Most of the artificial lighting has been incorporated into the arches of the partition walls, leaving the ceiling empty of objects.
The building façade is made up of three different units of semi-outdoor spaces. The first is created by the extrusion of the traditional front gable and emerges as a rectangular semi-outdoor space which ends in the swimming pool of the residence, the second, has been designed as a semi-circular vaulted structure where the door of the central entrance is pushed towards the depth of the dome and the morphological typology of the third has been created as a juxtaposition of two sections. That of the semicircular* dome, (*type of dome ), an established architectural element of the island of Santorini, and that of the cross-section dome, an interior architectural element less common on the island, called "double dome".

Photography: Ioanna Tsagkouli