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ELVAL S.A. Hellenic Aluminum Industry (VIOHALCO group) is a leading company in aluminum rolling worldwide. Installation of the new SMS “TANDEM” hot finishing mill (2018-2020) is part of a EUR 150 million investment to further upgrade the company’s position in the global aluminum industry, by increasing both production capacity and variety of flat rolled aluminum products.
A multi storey commercial building including a four-storey underground car park. In addition to maximum exploitation of a valuable piece of land, key requirements included flexibility with regard to the division into retail shops of various sizes, and emphasis on a café-restaurant at one end of the long rectangular plot.
The structure was divided into cubes that match the size of the neighbourhood’s buildings, while the large glass window of the front facade, favoured for its northern exposure, stretches the length of the building. Arranged as a distinctive unit, the café-restaurant’s design forms a link between the large structure and the smaller neighbouring buildings. Furthermore, our building’s overall design helps incorporate the adjacent large warehouse type commercial building (super-market) into the neighbourhood. Carbon black colour of the facades’ panels create a neutral frame to the colourful window displays.
“Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together” (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe).
Two equally sized cube-shaped structures, arranged one behind the other, create an open courtyard in between them, with an olive tree to serve as the focal point of the house. The rather simple cubical synthesis ensures maximum daylight to all rooms as well as privacy from the adjacent apartment building, and also results in the visual down-scaling of the total volume of the house. Interior layout is equally simple and ordered.
This summer house is arranged into three separate wings (main, children, guests) that fan out in different directions. The meticulous though subtle order of the composition is formed around three cube shaped main units and offers the advantage of having windows on three sides of every single room, while also allowing for a number of outdoor spaces that provide privacy and versatility in regard to the surrounding landscape. Long stone walls extend from the building, integrating the outdoors with the composition.
The storage buildings were divided into smaller volumes, like shells that come out from each other. The office building forms a smaller shell, of its own, set detached from the storage buildings.
The Athens Suburban Railway runs along the central axis of the Athens Peripheral Highway (“Attiki odos”). Stations are located on bridges over the highway. Platforms and staircases are formed in concrete, whereas metal structures with various types of aluminium panelling were applied to the stations’ buildings and shelters.
The reconstruction of a small sixty-year-old hotel (4 floors of 335 sq.m. area each) into an office building. While the existing volume had to be retained, the old structure would be fully reconfigured. All internal columns were to be removed, the leveling and height of the floors were to be changed, a conference room would be added on the roof, along with a roof garden, creating a fifth floor to the building.
The back of the building, facing a large garden, was reconfigured as the main entrance façade, with the addition of an added-on metallic structure to form a series of balconies with a vertical screen of climbing greenery. A curtain wall of vertical wooden blades would wrap around the street facades, offering shade from the sun as well as privacy from the street corner.
