Athens, Greece, which currently facing the economy crisis had caused a series of issues to the community, unemployment, family debt, businesses run down etc. Particularly in the Keramikou area, there’s a lot of abandoned buildings and spaces. Metaxourgeio, which is minutes away from Keramikou, was known as the silk mill. The idea of having a textile workshop in Keramikou is to reactive the area by continuing the textile culture from Metaxourgeio. With the concept of symbiosis, the project is to show the intertwining relationship between textile culture and the local community’s living. The interaction creates the unbreakable bond between each other.
With the collaboration of Makerversity, the project is to provide a learning program and co-working space of textile production for the local community. This is to inspire and support the younger generation in creative and practical minds in order to increase the diversity within creative industries. The local community would be able to start up their own business in the surrounding abandoned building after learning the skills from the textile workshop.
The main production of the workshop is fabric. Source of the thread will be from a local supplier which is kilometres away from the site. By producing the fabric, it can self-supply to the other workshops to do the printing as well as garments production etc. Meanwhile, the fabric can be supply to the surrounding clothing stores.
The internal space of the building was designed in layers of different function, connected by the folded metal sheets supporting structure in a criss-cross way, showing the interrelationship between each space.