Passports for Gold | Athens, Greece | Unit 21 | 2019

Click to see Design Realisation

The proposal is for a homeless shelter in Athens built using the money from the Greek golden passport system which gives a Greek passport to foreign nationals that invest at least €2 million in property in Greece. This will use superfluous money from people that have enough money to buy a new nationality to help some of the most deprived in the communit

Click images to zoom–>

To highlight the perversity of the exchange of money for nationality, a menu of predesigned elements are created. The passport applicant chooses elements similarly to shopping from a catalogue. The elements are guaranteed to cost €6000 each, regardless of the date of purchase or material and labour cost fluctuations. This price guarantee is achieved by adding indul- gence to the base piece. Indulgence is the manifestation of the ‘spare’ money required to reach €6000. Indulgence takes the form of bespoke additions to the base piece. The shelter is an assemblage of these elements and is determined by the passport applicants and the date of purchase of the elements

The indulgence of each building element is used to encode information from the golden passport the applicant will receive such as date and place of birth onto the building fabric. The shelter changes over time as passport applicants remove or sell elements from the building. The elements are designed to be used as collectible furniture when removed from the building, where the bespoke indulgence adds value

The shelter includes community spaces such as public outdoor space and basic amenities such as a soup kitchen, health centre and library.