METAXI

This project is a renovation of a silk shop. The store is in a two-storey, preservable building in the historic centre of Komotini. From our first visit, the need for highlighting the specific features of this building was in our mind. Simultaneously, we wanted a modern element and an aesthetic approach to the exhibition's identity. However, we needed a modern breath and an aesthetic approach to the communicative identity of the exhibition. These thoughts and the data we had led us to a model of contrast. We stripped the building of any intervention it had suffered over the years. Drywall hid the wooden ceiling of the ground floor. Plaster and colored plastics had covered the original textures of the walls. We reverently cleaned them and kept them as they were, unfinished and wounded. Their beauty and romance of another era remained, as if in an archaeological excavation. The new function of the space had to keep the history of the building intact. They had to interact but not come into contact. The breath taken by the materials of the "excavation" had to be maintained. Thus, an inner shell was made. It constituted a second skin far from all the elements of the existing space. Roof, masonry, floor, everything breathes. Our new skin is light and colored to stand out. Inside it is hidden the storage spaces, the exhibits, the electrical installations, as if it were an independent organization which, however, coexists harmoniously with the building.