Project by Ioulita Athanasopoulou

The island is envisioned as a final moment of joy and reflection within the natural world a gentle farewell as humans prepare to withdraw from this desert landscape. In contrast to its proposed use as a helicopter port, the project introduces structures that quietly interrupt the possibility of this function. They evoke a fleeting sense of human presence and leisure one last inhabitation yet they are not intended to last. From the outset, the proposal embraces a poetic and deliberate dismantling. Each built element is designed to dissolve gracefully into the sea or the island’s ground becoming part of a renewed ecological cycle. These ephemeral structures do not resist the passage of time; they welcome it, forming a quiet choreography that allows nature to return and reclaim the site. Temple of the Human Exodus is a design project that reimagines the uninhabited desert island of Kivotos, near Hydra, as a spatial and symbolic response to the conditions of the Anthropocene. In stark contrast to the saturated summer tourism of Hydra where every accessible cove is densely occupied Kivotos remains untouched, overlooked, and unvisited. This quiet exclusion becomes the stage for a reversed ritual: not one of arrival, but of conscious retreat. Rather than constructing a sanctuary for worship, the Temple proposes a site for thoughtful abandonment a space where vacationing humans briefly inhabit the island, not to possess it, but to acknowledge their eventual withdrawal from it. It is a reflective act, not celebratory but necessary, shaped by ecological fatigue, planetary limits, and the recognition of impending transformation. This intervention resists conventional building practices. Instead, it proposes a redefinition of presence and absence, introducing enigmatic, object-like forms designed to guide ritual gestures and mark the land as a threshold between past agency and future silence. Kivotos, in this vision, becomes a paradoxical refuge a post-human monument where architecture carries the trace of departure more than the promise of arrival. A set of large, jellyfish-like structures anchor the project. Some float gently on the sea, while others rest across the arid terrain. Ambiguous in scale and purpose, these quiet volumes evoke a new iconography silent witnesses to the human era, rendered in abstract form. Alongside them, a modest sitting area and primitive bathing site suggest the fossilized remains of first and final gestures moments of inhabitation suspended in time. Small groups of visitors may access the island briefly. They can swim among the floating structures, ascend the grounded ones to observe the archipelago, or gather in the shaded room designed for collective stillness. The bath offers a solitary counterpart a space for immersion in both water and thought. Each of these gestures reorients leisure toward reflection, and architecture toward ephemerality. The temple’s hidden logic lies in its material lifecycle. All structures are designed to return to the environment. Floating elements will slowly dissolve into the sea; land-based forms will erode into the dry terrain, enriching its latent life. Wooden seating and bathing vessels are constructed to self-decompose over time. Architecture, here, becomes a vanishing act a vessel for contemplation whose ultimate expression is its graceful disappearance.