Thickened Practices: Seeing, Drawing and Designing (for) an Athenian Ground–Garden

This paper — presented in three parts, and a prologue — proposes a multiple reading of the arboreal and marble materialities of two Athenian sites: Syntagma Square (once Garden of Muses) and the National Garden (once Amalia’s Garden) as complex and animate matters. Through a series of representations that draw attention to the current disengagement of the two sites from the broader urban and natural Attic terrain, we reimage and reimagine Syntagma Square and the National Garden as a thickened ground–garden, and propose six speculative and situated architectural design briefs that activate that thickness.