The mice ate the door library,
The conversion of a school door into a library in Athens

This project concerns the conversion of a school door into a library and vegetation space.

In order to seek interventions to enhance the dynamics of the school towards a culture of knowledge and culture exchange with the neighborhood, as a group of architects we tried to create a new space in the school.

A space on the border of the school’s interior and exterior, on the border of the neighborhood and the schoolyard: A library that will be addressed to both students and children in the neighborhood.

We redesigned the back gates of the school, turning them into a library and vegetation capsules.

The front door was thus turned into a spatial toy in which plants and books, on the school doorstep, invite children from both sides to explore.

Part of the planning process of this intervention was the conduct of children’s workshops which were organized and carried out by the same group of architects in collaboration with the teachers and the association of parents and guardians of the school community.

The students incorporated the impending change-intervention in the entrance of their school in a fantasy story of their own, and thus they determined its configuration morphologically and functionally, by participating in its architectural design.

This action was implemented in the framework of the “This is Athens-Polis” program of the Municipality of Athens.