patras industrial landscape, the zone of the new port area

PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE

PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, the zone of the new port area1

Katerina ZISIMOPOULOU, architect NTUA UCLA (*),

Alexios FRAGKIADAKIS, architect NTUA UCLA (**)

(*) Doctorate Candidate, National Technical University of Athens, +306944730377,

[email protected]

(**) Postgraduate Student, National Technical University of Athens, , +306944697915,

[email protected]

Abstract

The harbor of Patras in Greece has been functioning as an immigrant circulation hub for the past two

decades. The relocation of the port along the abandoned industrial zone and railway at the south of the

city, where riot conflicts also took place, define the identity of the urban landscape of the site. As the

Greek crisis continues to variably affect the landscape, the particular characteristic topography of the

deserted industrial complexes, the derelict factory landscape of the southern region, creates an urban

character through its new monuments, the vast void shells, streets and sites.

Keywords

Industrial Landscape, Cultural Heritage, Identity

Introduction to the notion of the zone

The zone in study demonstrates a dense concentration of inactive industrial sites, building shells and

open spaces. Some of the Achaian former prominent industries, e.g. Ladopoulos paper factory and

Peiraiki Patraiki textiles industry, take up considerable land areas and could be characterized as non-

places, interstitial spaces, or urban voids. The decay of the environment has started years ago; layers

of compiled dust and waste erode all material rapidly. Is it possible now to stop or deter the territory of

dereliction, and how? Can the spatial inertia of many years of accumulated dust be reversed?

Patras’ new port, a former industrial area The damaged buildings and equipment have been attempted to be restored and rehabilitated in certain

occasions by the Municipality of Patras, i.e. with the relocation of municipal administration and

athletic services in the buildings of Ladopoulou paper factory premises, and the Patras port authority,

i.e. with the attempt to develop a container center and multifunctional park in the Peiraiki Patraiki

complex. However the social groups of homeless and immigrants that inhabited in thousands (and

some still do even after their violent evacuation by the police) the majority of the uncharted abandoned

shells have been either ignored or persecuted, but never really taken into account in the future plans

for the area.

The zone of southern Patras is no longer a spatial organization with mere urban voids, but a social

discontinuity in the modern city. The state authorities strive to recover propriety and order, which are

not easy to achieve in vast empty space full of ruins, derelicts and holes. The city public still refuses to

inhabit the land of the new port area, developed along Akti Dymeon avenue and the deserted railway

tracks.

Immigrants still move in gregarious groups on the railroad tracks and mark their territory in the void

spaces between and inside industrial buildings, a land for which no one shows a fertile interest and

1 Abstract and Paper, accepted for the 18th ICOMOS General Assembly and Symposium 2014: “Heritage and

Landscape as Human Values” Theme 2 [Landscape as cultural habitat], as Pertinent. [As the Scientific Secrariat

ICOMOS Italia stated in the relevant correspondence, all the uploaded papers would be published online

(ebook)]. Until then please refer to it as: PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, the zone of the new port area

by Katerina Zisimopoulou, Alexis Fragkiadakis is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

NoDerivatives 4.0 International License found at

http://www.academia.edu/12615890/PATRAS_INDUSTRIAL_LANDSCAPE_the_zone_of_the_new_port_area

http://www.academia.edu/12615890/PATRAS_INDUSTRIAL_LANDSCAPE_the_zone_of_the_new_port_area


PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, the zone of the new port area by Katerina Zisimopoulou, Alexis Fragkiadakis ((PDF, GIF, HTML)

is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

2

nowhere does it feel to organically belong. A comparative evaluation is attempted through the process

of retelling the history of the place, the people, the shells, the mechanisms of wear and tear sold,

massively by their mere iron weight value. We can try to be taught by the landscape in situ. The index

record (fig. 1) of the industrial sites in the new port area reveals a vast in extent and intensity potential

in a critical position between the city and the sea, between the urban housing fabric and the new port,

abandoned in neglect.

The urban voids in the zone of Patras emulates in Robert Smithson’s words “what Flavin calls

‘inactive history’ or what the physicist calls ‘entropy’ or ‘energy-drain.’ They bring to mind the Ice

Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov's observation that,

‘The future is but the obsolete in reverse’2.” Just like art, spaces transmit messages, signs, values,

ideas, stories. Even when they rot. Or especially when they are rotten.

Dust, a symbol of deterioration in space Beyond Ruskin’s Romantic reflections on ruins, Georges Bataille captures a model of reverse

thermodynamics3, as part of his own notion of materialism (developed also in his books ‘the Notion of

Expenditure’ and later ‘the Accursed Share’). Read from an architectural as well as a material

perspective, according to this model, since the solar energy stands in redundancy, we as a society

doomed to an ever increasing overproduction and consequent overspending. Bataille considers that the

inevitable result of this uncontrolled overproduction is the vast concentration of uncontrollable waste.

Using the notion of dust as his emblematic motto, he describes the vain process of the repression this

produced waste is subject to when “(...) dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and

uniformly defile them (…) plump young girls arm themselves each morning with a large feather-

duster or even a vacuum cleaner, they are perhaps not completely aware that they are contributing

every bit as much as the most positivist of scientists to dispelling the injurious phantoms that

cleanliness and logic abhor4.” He concludes that the battle is unequal and hopeless: “One day or

another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over

domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards3.”

Zone, the spatial dominion of dust If we define in Yve-Alain Boys’ term as Zone

5 the territory of dust at the scale of the city, i.e. the

gathered space of building waste and their environment (what Bataille describes as ‘abandoned

buildings and dilapidated shipyards’), architectural and cultural heritage studies may take the lead in

the ongoing discourse. The zone of Patras emerges as the current landscape of the new port area and

the nearby abandoned industrial sites at the south of the city: this is the architectural urban waste

product that inevitably follows overproduction and redundancy. As time goes by, dust leaves its traces

in the zone, as it accumulates for years in overlapping layers. The dust but also the rust, moist, mold,

erosion, until everything falls into ruins; these are the temporal markers of deterioration in the territory

of the zone.

Patras’ new port in Akti Dymeon area as a zone

The idiosyncratic region of Akti Dymeon, where the new port is situated, is a zone in decline however

peculiarly also in vantage, for better or worse. Being devoid of uses, it stands ideal for urban planning

interventions that have the potential to enliven the urban complex of the whole city. Located between

a long gone industrial past and the indeterminacy of a sustainable future, the critical land of the large

closed factories of VESO II, EG Ladopoulou and Peiraiki Patraiki (image 1-2), which were founded

between the two major wars, stand today empty, as the key area between the body of the city and the

heart of port.

The relocation of the new port in 2011 in the sea area of Akti Dymeon strip inevitably attracted

numerous transit immigrants in the abandoned sites. Before they continue their journey to the west,

2(Smithson, 1996, 10-11). 3 (Boys, 1997).

4 (Bataille, 1995). 5 (Boys, 1997).




3

they found their temporary shelter in the empty shells of the former industries. The inner area of the

deserted factory land multiply exceeds in surface the whole size of the port site; it is vast in volume

and empty of use: it cannot be surveyed or controlled. Only Peiraiki Patraiki textiles industry owned

by Patras port authority covers 194.524,74 square meters and the buildings are estimated to

121.492,93. By 2012 the illegal immigrant population of the area was estimated, before the violent

evacuation of most, in 2.000 to 5.000 thousand people. However nobody really knows for sure exact

numbers. The uncalculated transit population of immigrants lived in the ruins as ghosts without any

state attention or assistance. They created a ghetto within a land of neglect.

The interventions in the territory of this zone have to manage complex tensions so as to implement

new uses, attract the public to the area and eliminate the stalemate to the seashore: the Municipality of

Patras has initiated a bold fight against wear and tear in the inert Akti Dymeon factories. With modern

intervention in the former industrial site of Ladopoulou (image 3), it aims to accommodate various

activities, as it did in 2006 with the housing for the Cultural Capital of Europe functions. The services

occasionally planned by the municipal authority to be hosted in the territory of the zone of Akti

Dymeon are not negligible: design hotel, convention centers, indoor theater with a few thousand seats,

showrooms and exhibition halls of several thousand square meters... Patras port attempts to achieve

almost the same results in Peiraiki Patraiki, aspiring to combine a container storage center with

shopping and athletic malls.

This is a substantial reversal of the entropy of the zone, as it is described by Robert Smithson. Just like

Bataille’s ‘plump young girls’, the authorities are fighting the inertia of the zone, cleaning the area out

of material waste, dirt and dust, and attempting to fill voids with actions. Nevertheless none of the

state authorities or private owners refers to the immigrant issue when planning the future of the zone.

Since the majority of the illegal inhabitants of the place has been transferred by the police in camps in

other areas of Greece, the matter seems resolved for Patras; small numbers are considered to be

‘manageable’ and as the zone consists a void for the city, what is happening inside it is of little public

interest, as long as no violent attacks occur and propriety is achieved.

However immigrants are people, they experience space just as native workers and inhabitants do.

Moreover, these people have been the last inhabitants of the zone; they have also left their mark in

space. A story to remain alive has to be narrated by someone, just as a building to remain alive has to

be experienced by some. The story of the immigrants living in thousands in the zone of the new port of

Patras is a story yet unsaid, just as the buildings of the deserted industries are still void after their

departure.

Entropy, a symbol of decay in time

The case study examination highlights the effects of time in the industrial landscape of Patras; it

implements the landscape’s entropic quality. According to Robert Smithson’s theory of entropy,

architecture creates a new monumentality, just like artists Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol Le Witt,

Dan Flavin handle the notion of energy drain or, as Smithson prefers to call it, entropy. For him it is a

‘visible analog’ to the second law of thermodynamics, at least as the law is interpreted by Smithson.

As energy is lost rather easier than it is created, the range of entropy6 measures the energy drain degree

of the universe. In an infinitely distant future energy runs out and turns everything into an

encompassing uniformity (Smithson’s definition of entropy has little to do with its physical or

statistical definition; we might consider it a ‘visual’ or ‘optical’ definition of the notion of entropy).

In order to prove the existence of visual entropy as an irreversible phenomenon Smithson describes an

imaginary experiment:

“I should like now to prove the irreversibility of eternity by using a jejune experiment for proving

entropy. Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on the one side and

white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box

until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the

result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase

of entropy7.”

6 (Smithson, 1996, 10-11).

7 (Smithson, 1996, 74).




4

The new monuments of Patras in Akti Dymeon zone

According to Smithson the new monuments are there where ‘time becomes a place minus motion. If

time is a place, then innumerable places are possible8.” The entropy of the zone of Patras industrial

landscape visually reveals the material and immaterial conditions that have shaped the site in study in

their historical and socio-cultural configuration. Entropy in the zone visibly reveals the decay of both

society and spaces through time. The built environment of the zone forms a palimpsest that contains

all the marks of the activities of the people who experienced the places in the past, since the closing of

the factories and even before that. The stories are there written in space, waiting to be narrated.

In the congested urban landscape of Patras, the pursue for identity leads the city to its deserted edges,

the leftover boundary conditions, where entropy reigns and reveals social change and tensions. The

interstitial spaces, the deserted urban voids at the zone of the new harbor in Patras resist to the

pressures placed by the surrounding new uses that are developed without provision for the character of

the industrial landscape. The city’s new monuments, the industrial landscape of Akti Dymeon, deserve

public attention and respect as artifacts of the historical stratification of cultural and natural values.

They are connected with the question of the multilayer conservation principles for contemporary

architecture.

Looking back at the relationship of the industrial landscape with art and the urban condition, after

Smithson’s entropic approach, we conclude that the industrial landscape remains are considered both

as art object and as containers of art. Smithson himself often worked in abandoned mines and quarries

for his terrestrial projects. The work of the Broken Circle-Spiral Hill was built in 1971 in an inactive

quarry near Emmen in the Netherlands and was returned to the local residents. This work investigated

the relationship of the industrial landscape with land art, showing options for an alternative recycling

of inert industrial zones.

Particularly timely in architectural theory is the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who presented in 1975 on

dock 52 in New York his installation in an abandoned industrial shell of the 19th century. By creating

large cutouts on quay walls and roofs, he permitted the controlled entry of water and light in space9.

His goal was to reverse the passive destruction of the building as a result of its disuse and turn it into

active disaster, which strengthens the mnemonic ability of structures. This was a violent intervention

in abandoned buildings, just as violent as the remains of immigrant-police battles in Peiraiki-Patraiki

factory in Patras or the liquidation of historic mechanical equipment of the factory by the owning

authority, all leaving holes behind to remind us what was there and today is absent.

Andy Warhol marked the shift in modern art exhibiting conditions with his production and the factory

in 1963 in unused industrial shells, as Reesa Greenberg describes10

. Subsequently contemporary art

exhibitions in the decades from 1960 to 1970 have repeatedly taken place in void or derelict industrial

sites amidst multiple traces of previous past conditions of the spaces. However poorly designed it may

have been, the Cultural Capital of Europe in Patras attempted to emulate the effect using various

deserted factories, including Ladopoulos in the zone, as exhibition halls. Regardless the effort of the

municipality of Patras, a further development of exhibition and recreation services in the area, has not

yet been achieved. On the other hand the few athletic facilities that have been sheltered in some of the

void buildings have been functioning with some success, mainly because of the acceptance of citizen’s

collectivities and organizations.

The pursuit for identity

Akti Dymeon as a physical presence is the name of an avenue, but it means for Patras much more than

that: it has become a most critical region; the port at its west, the empty factories at the east, residential

areas further east and derelict immigrants along the railway lines running from north to south. Akti

Dymeon stands as a name for all that has been going on for years at the south of the city of Patras, a

strip of land that separates the coast from everything that could be there and still is not.

8 (Smithson, 1996, 11). 9 (Gonzalez, 2001).

10 (Greenberg, 1996).

5

Major highways cross the railway line leading to the harbor. The lines of river beds define the form of

the highways connecting the ring road to the new port. The zone landscape of the void industrial

complexes of VESO II, Ladopoulos and Peiraiki Patraiki are considered impassable for most of the

citizens of Patras. The zone of Akti Dymeon is still a ghetto with a bad reputation. Distinguishable

parts or entire buildings of the zone’s clusters show clear analogs to art examples mentioned above.

The industrial activity has left its marks on the landscape: the soil in VESO plant still smells of spilled

oils and huge spots stain the earth due to the processing of old waste oils. Some factories in the zone

were abandoned so suddenly that the equipment but also unsold merchandise were left there. Of

course all that material that proved the story of place is gradually being removed. The unplanned

immigrant camps were evacuated so violently that traces of habitation within the buildings are still

visible. Or maybe the zone is still inhabited by ghost immigrants not to be seen in daylight?

The entropic inertia of the zone has been the obvious target for all local state authorities to reverse.

The industrial landscape as historical stratification of cultural, social and natural values suffers from

their neglect, their poorly designed and executed development plans which are only depriving the area

of its past and future potential. When reconstructing the identity of the city in view of a sustainable

growth policy (whether it will be realized or not) the focus must be on the protection and enhancement

of the spirit of place and community identity.

The situation in the zone in question often resembles industrial photography of Andreas Gursky. The

process of cleanliness against the dust and rot in the factories of Ladopoulou and Peiraiki Patraiki

began with the liquidation of mechanical machinery and leftover products, essentially destroying the

dynamics of the industrial landscape and the future potential of the artifacts. When the shells and

equipment of unused industrial sites are degraded or eliminated, the city is deprived of one of the most

critical components of urban and community identity; maybe even the reason it was originally born.

The paradox is that Patras is destroying its history and stories, while trying to give birth to a

contemporary identity. Only to paraphrase the cosmopolitan Rem Koolhaas when talking about

Barcelona “sometimes an old city, simplifying its identity, becomes generic. It becomes transparent,

like a logo.11

” The risk of identity oversimplification is visible through the deliberate selection of

which specific memory to preserve; and the extinction of all others. There are more stories to preserve

than one in Patras, and the zone is still there to prove it.

Bibliography

Bataille Georges. 1995. Critical Dictionary. Definition Dust (“Poussiere”) in Encyclopaedia

Acephalica, Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts – the Encyclopaedia da Costa.

London: Atlas Press Reprint. 42-43

Bois Yve-Alain. 1997. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books. 224-226

Gonzalez Itzar. 2001. Essay Venus Attempts to Detain Mars, in Rosell Quim, Marcos Pilar, Pla

Maurici, Bahamon Alejandro, Gonzalez Itziar. Remaking Landscapes. Barcelona: Editorial

Gustavo Gilli. 132

Greenberg Reesa. 1996. Essay 22. The Exhibited Redistributed in Ferguson Bruce W., Greenberg

Reesa, Nairne. Thinking about Exhibitions. London, New York: Routledge. 250-254

Koolhaas Rem. 2004. Essay Junkspace, in Content. Koln: Taschen. 162-171

Smithson Robert. 1966. Entropy and the New Monuments, in Robert Smithson: The Collected

Writings. Edited by Flam Jack. Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press. 10-11 &74

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width:0"

src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png" /></a> PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, the zone of the new port area by <a

xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"

href="http://www.academia.edu/12615890/PATRAS_INDUSTRIAL_LANDSCAPE_the_zone_of_the_new_port_area" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Katerina Zisimopoulou, Alexis Fragkiadakis</a> is licensed under a <a

rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0

International License</a>.

11 (Koolhaas, 2004).


PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, the zone of the new port area by Katerina Zisimopoulou, Alexis Fragkiadakis is

licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License..

6

figure 1 –Index of recording the industrial buildings (used / unused) of Akti Dymeon region at the new

port of Patras, table & map combined.

PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, the zone of the new port area by Katerina Zisimopoulou, Alexis Fragkiadakis (PDF, GIF, HTML)


7

image 1 –Peiraiki Patraiki landmark tower. image 2 –Peiraiki Patraiki building.

image 3–Ladopoulos factory owned by the Municipality of Patras (view from bing maps).

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png" /></a> PATRAS INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE, the zone of the new port area by <a

xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://www.academia.edu/12615890/PATRAS_INDUSTRIAL_LANDSCAPE_the_zone_of_the_new_port_area"

property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Katerina Zisimopoulou, Alexis Fragkiadakis</a> is licensed under a <a

rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.

patras industrial landscape, the zone of the new port area

Documents