Krafsidonas' torrentscapes

The undergraduate course "Reconstructing the Ground: Design Studio III-Va" is adressed to 3rd-4th year students of architecture.  Students are asked to approach the landscape experientially, as a complex assemblage of variants, processes, and beings, not as an image. This was the starting point for investigating through design of the lower catchment’s riparian coastline, and the torrent-bed of Krafsidonas torrent, which springs from the mythically renown Mt Pelion.  However, along with the students, our observation is that while Krafsidonas is a dynamically changing landscape, a potent ecological corridor, which along its flux hosts local and mostly ephemeral aquatic ecosystems, this variability is not accounted by the top-down initiatives, as gray infrastructure solutions are usually implemented, and thus its torrential ecosystems often destroyed. The student projects chosen to be presented in the framework of the Biennial's theme “¿Natural Inteligence?", encompass strategies of approach that -in a multitude of ways- co-weave mutually optimal envisioning, between the city and the torrentscape’s ecosystems.  Among them: the creation of amphibious landscapes that can respond to the abundance or the scarcity of water -basic characteristic of Mediterranean torrents; the flexibility to design flood-rooms as public spaces, open and inclusive towards the city and its inhabitants but also the torrent. Moreover, thinking about more-than-human life forms, treating the torrentscape as a dynamically variant subject rather than as a flow confined by grey infrastructures, are the directions which were emphasized in this brief collection of student’s design proposals and their strategies, entitled “Krafsidonas’ torrentscapes”.