The ground floor arcade is located in the center of Piraeus, one block away from the Municipal Theater, within a dense urban grid and with an only access from Tsamadou Street. The arcade is the entrance to a 1950s building, a typical typology building of that period with shops and cafes on the ground floor. The architects’ main challenge was to establish the arcade as part of Piraeus urban fabric, by rendering more welcome a narrow, tall and initially dark space.
The use of mirrors widens visually the space by creating a spacious feeling to a just 2.80 m existing width through the multiplication of natural and artificial lighting. The design incorporates elements that highlight the geomorphology of the commercial port as a natural background of merchandise and commodities. The wall-mounted sculptural composition refers to the stacked containers of the port and the floating metal structure at the ceiling, bearing the lighting fixtures of the arcade, resonates with the metal cranes viewed in commercial ports as in Piraeus.
The old mosaic flooring was kept as a connecting element between the past and the present of the arcade, since this type of flooring is met in most of the old arcades in Athens and Piraeus. The diagonal stripes of the flooring extend on the walls through the sculptural composition, as well as the pictures composition that depict the past and the present of the city and port of Piraeus.
Ilia Detchaves, Electra Kontoroupi