Fountain
Theater

In August 2024, wildfires swept through northeastern Attica, the region around Athens. In the settlement of Varnavas they destroyed, among much else, a small container building at the open-air theater of the Old Fountain (Palia Vrysi): dressing room, storage and meeting place of the local theater group. The crafts collective Boulouki is now preparing its replacement, a community building of earth and other natural materials.

Boulouki also brought this brief to ETH Zürich, where it spent 2025–26 as a visiting studio at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (LUS). In the spring of 2026, its second semester there, the students were set the same task as the collective: a building of about 50 square meters for the theater group, made of earth, timber and other natural materials, and built together with the people who will use it — residents, craftspeople and volunteers. The brief, in other words, asked for construction that regenerates: materials that come from the land and can return to it, a way of building that gathers a community around it, and a first step of renewal in a landscape itself slowly recovering from the fire. Nine teams took it on, each working from a specific material system.

At the center of each project stands a 1:1 mock-up: a full-scale fragment of the building — a wall, a corner, a roof edge — built by the team during the semester. The mock-ups served less as a final representation than as a tool for thinking: a way to test materials by hand, to make a construction system visible, and to find out what it means to build with it.