Mykonos Chora

A proposal for Mykonos’ Old Town Promenade takes aesthetic and tectonic cues from its storied context

This proposed redevelopment of Mykonos’ Old Town (Chora) promenade functionally revitalizes the thoroughfare while correcting a series of existing bottlenecks, pointing to hidden landmarks, and addressing areas lacking shade and other amenities. The intervention then seeks to capitalize on the latent potential for views, cultural demonstration, and unification of experience by creating a new sequence of moments for pedestrians to pause and discover the beauty of the island. 

These programmatic strategies guide tourists toward historic and natural attractions by utilizing formal and material qualities that have pervaded the Chora streets for millennia: the paving is encoded with a graphic treatment that indicates proximity to specific buildings and progress on the sequenced experience, and a series of integrated rest areas provide more overt wayfinding with fixed promenade maps. The paving approach repeats continuous graphic and material treatments of Mykonos streets and whitewashed architecture, as does the aggregative formal approach of the entire intervention. This totalizing effect of texture, material, and formal languages cohere an otherwise extensive set of discrete urban features into a new whole. Our modus operandi for dealing with a site of such cultural significance involves a subtle approach with minimal demolition, one that produces an architecture which clearly demonstrates the qualities and history of the space yet veils itself to appear as an equal part of that history.