project: Rigas Feraios Memorial Container

type: national architectural competition “new museum - documentation center "Rigas Velestinlis”

location:  Velestino, Magnesia, Greece

date: November 2024

founded:  Rigas Feraios Municipality Greece

team:       Dimitrios Moutafidis, Spiros I. Papadimitriou, Marios Papanikolaou,

The proposal of the new Museum and Documentation Center "Rigas Velestinlis" is a spatial “ichno- graphy” of the life and work of Rigas Feraios, 18th century significant Greek historical figure. The museum as a three-dimensional transcription of the monumental Map (Charta) of Greece that he created, becomes an emblematic and symbolic space that functions as a memorial container but also a reflection of his eclectic and idealistic work. The museum becomes a palimpsest of contemporary architectural gestures combined with transcriptions of local, traditional, classical and archaic spatial structures. Rigas Feraios multiple identities are studied and spatialized in the new museum. These mnemonic traces are re-materialized and re-termporalized in the museum while they acquire spatial scales, texturality, tactility and phenomenological qualities directing the users’ bodies, re-sensitizing their haptic sensibilities and re-orienting their visual perceptions. In the micro-scale the map’s cartographical elements are transcribed either as textural materialities in glyphs and embossed surfaces or as architectural elements in relief and full-carved surfaces. In the larger scale, the megalithic, archaic walls become reference to the ancient structures and typologies of Velestino. The upper roof zone commemorates the urban roof morphology of the village and the gray-stone roof of his school as it is represented in drawings by architect Dimitris Pikionis. Furthermore a grid of beams forms an independent structural system in diagonal dynamic deviation from the ground walls, creating a sense of levitation. These three zones are semi-encircled in the Northeast by a longitudinal, intermittent, monoline wall commemorating the Acropolis of Feres.