Project by Angela Che Jin Lee @checharlan
This project begins with the mulberry tree as an existing urban resource in Athens, reframed as a resilient ecological and infrastructural agent rather than a passive element. From this tree, two intertwined domestic practices emerge: silk production through silkworm cultivation and spoon sweet making from mulberry fruit, establishing a localized system of material and food production rooted in harvesting and care.
The proposal redefines community as a network of interdependent human and non-human actors, whose routines overlap through cycles of cultivation, processing, and maintenance. Extending an existing park, the building integrates the mulberry canopy into everyday domestic life, transforming municipal maintenance into shared productive labor.
Through a reinterpretation of the polykatoikia, the facade becomes a thick, inhabitable infrastructure organized as a series of bays. It supports living, making, and ecological processes simultaneously, incorporating vertical pulley systems for material transfer and silk elements such as hammocks that reappear as domestic furnishings, forming a vertical ecosystem that merges architecture, landscape, and production.
