What Should Become of the Acropolis of Athens?

»Architecture museum with a mix of new and old and a star ball.«

»That is a swimming pool with a slide and a baby slide, a spring tower is also there, 10 meters and 5 meters.

»Tripsdrill, 120 m long, 60 m high.« Eva-Maria

»Very high is a restaurant with a watch, in the middle is a museum with things, at the very bottom there is a little swimming pool and a little changing room.« Charlotte

»This is a Luxury villa with a big water bed, an office, a party kitchen and a giant pool with artificial grass around.«

»Akropolis – the crazy museum. In the new museum Akropolis you find many crazy art pieces, that the artists have drawn, painted, and built. As well as a beautiful fountain.« Mishal

»Restaurant Akropolis. Here they have food as you ate it in the past. There is also normal food as you know it today.« Philipp

»That is a hairdresser. It is 40 square meters big. The salon will be built possibly…I drew it so that people who don´t have as much money can also get their hair done the way they like it.« Nina

»That is a building, but I have forgotten how its called.« Marcel

»If you renovate it, one can make bull fights in there. Bull fights with real bulls.« Lars

»This is a museum, that is 100m long and 50m high. There should be exhibited artistic models. Those are models, that don´t represent anything, but are models, that function.« Katharina

»Here in the swimming pool you can swim and eat and drink at the kiss. In the second half is a trampoline, you can spring there and pick apples from the trees.« Kathi

What should become of the Acropolis of Athens? With this simple question, Louis-Philippe Scoufaras and Elisa Calosi challenged pupils of the Maria Montessori primary school in Hausen/Stuttgart, searching for possible and impossible new functions for this historical area.

It was July 10, 8am, when Louis-Philippe Scoufaras, a Berlin-based French-Canadian artist with a Greek passport and Elisa Calosi, an Italian culture manager based between Bulgaria and Germany, went back to school with a specific question: What should become of the Acropolis of Athens?
Along with Lena Weinmann, a teacher at the Maria Montessori Primary School in Hausen/ Stuttgart and a class of 27 children from the 3rd and 4th grade, they reflected upon what a city is made of, and what architecture is. They watched and discussed images of buildings from Stuttgart and other cities around the world until the moment they started rethinking the function of the Acropolis and realizing their own proposals and projects for a future renovation.
What would the next generation of architects and inhabitants of Athens wish to have there? And how would they like this historical area to once again become a functional building and part of their daily life?

With all these question in mind, Louis-Philippe Scoufaras intends to realize a monumental project in Athens. He intends to get the children of all the primary schools of the city to draw a proposal for the future Acropolis. This project aims to question public space and its function, and once realized will be presented in different forms in an exhibition as well as in the form of an online archive with all of the collected drawings.

The workshop at the Montessori School was the first test of this project, and a big thanks goes to all the people who made it possible: Anthea, Aurora, Charlotte, Charlotte, Christian, Diego, Emilia, Eva-Maria, Enis, Marcel, Hanna, Cécilia, Lucca, Alex, Finn, Kai, Katharina, Kati, Lars, Marcel, Mishal, Nicola, Nina, Philipp, Shifa, Torben, Lena Weinmann and Angelika Müller-Zastrau, director of the Maria Montessori Primary School in Hausen/Stuttgart.