The choice of compactness, far from translating into a dense, blind and opaque mass, has allowed the emergence of an immaterial, changing object, an architecture made of lightness, glazing and concrete. An architecture whose game consists in blurring the tangible limits of the building by making the reading of a solid volume superfluous in a poetics of the blur and the evanescence. To achieve this goal, we have combined the thermal requirements with a graphic work that draws on the architectural and urban characteristics of the building.

The exterior façade is indeed a prefabricated concrete skin that frames the landscape and functions as a protection according to the needs to offer permanent views towards the surroundings.

Our choice was therefore to sublimate the thickness by proposing a circulation on the second floor of the project which, beyond linking the different exhibition spaces, proposes an almost erotic game between the mineral matter of the building and the wood species composing the park.

In order to assert its belonging to the site and to the Greek culture, the concrete is tinted with an off-white color in order to match the variations of colors offered by the rich natural light of Thessaloniki's geographical location. Thus, sometimes white when the sun is at its zenith, the project transcends the light variations to become gold when the sun sets.

Client: TIF-HELEXPO / Cost: 177M€ HT / Surface: 175 000 m² / Schedule: 2021 / Team: LAN (Commissioning Architect), Lina Ghotmeh (Architects), LOT (Architects), VOGT (Landscape), Tractebel (Structure), Systematica (Planification des transports)