Tucked into a tight street corner just off Kaisariani’s Skopeftirio Park, a playful new building catches the eye. UNITS Parkside is a student residence designed by Office 4 with interiors by Archi4m. Its bright colours and bold graphics immediately signal a place where student life has been deliberately drafted. Inside are four fully equipped room typologies, alongside shared lounges, a gym and laundry facilities.
The project brings under one roof activities that Athens’ students have traditionally pursued across the city. The Greek capital has major universities scattered across its urban fabric, yet there was never a clear, bounded university district. Historically, most students resided within the everyday residential fabric, particularly in neighbourhoods such as Zografou, Ilisia, Kaisariani and Kypseli, becoming naturally integrated into the Athenian lifestyle. Their “campus” was dedicated cafés used for studying, “the hot” canteens and bars, public squares and ordinary apartments found within the average residential polykatoikia. Student life kind of “happened”, spontaneously, informally and irregularly through movement across the city, energetically transforming districts into temporary campuses.
Although university residences have long formed part of student life in Athens, their limited capacity meant that most students have continued to find accommodation within the city’s wider residential fabric. The arrival of projects such as UNITS signals a subtle shift, where private rooms, communal spaces and everyday facilities are gathered within a single, purpose-designed environment. This new “branded community” that comes with a very convenient collection of amenities suddenly brings students – and their particular spatial needs – into sharper architectural focus.
However, does concentrating these activities create a self-contained campus within the building, or can the residence provide a point of entry into the wider city? For students unfamiliar with Athens, it may offer an immediate place of arrival: a base from which friendships can form, and the city can gradually be explored. Yet its relationship with Athens ultimately depends on its porosity and the connections this “campus” creates – both socially as well as architecturally. UNITS features colour and graphics that give the building an outward-facing identity, announcing its presence within the neighbourhood rather than allowing it to disappear into the surrounding residential fabric. Inside, that visual language continues through the shared spaces, creating a sense of continuity and collective identity as residents move between private and communal life. Architecture cannot manufacture community, but it can shape the conditions in which it might emerge, creating a sequence of thresholds from room to corridor, from lounge to entrance and, eventually, from the building to the street.
Perhaps “the building as campus” and “the city as campus” need not be opposing models. The measure of Athens’s new student residences may not be how completely they reproduce a campus within their walls, but how successfully they offer students a place to belong as well as a point of departure into the city beyond.
