Terrain Anamorphosis: Erosion as a Design Tool for Regenerating Athens' Kifisos River

Most river regeneration projects try to undo damage. Terrain Anamorphosis works with it. Along the Kifisos River in Athens, a stream long buried beneath highways, rigid embankments and industrial leftovers, the proposal treats erosion as a deliberate instrument. Controlled water passages are allowed to cut into the ground and shape a new territory. The project does not promise a return to some untouched riverbank. It accepts the infrastructure as part of the landscape and lets water rework it.

The project was developed by Zoi Niki Eleftheriadi and Antonia Gerogianni, and they chose a difficult stretch of the river. The site lies between a closed steam-electric power station and a heavy avenue that bridges over the suppressed waterway. Here, decades of engineering have turned the river into a technical corridor rather than an ecosystem. The designers read this collision of industrial ruin and buried hydrology as an opportunity for urban regeneration, not only an environmental problem to solve.

A Striated Ground Pressed Against the Power Station

The plan sets out the main argument in one drawing. A striated, quarry-like ground fills most of the sheet. Two circular tanks and three long rectangular buildings of the power station sit at its right edge. The texture of the ground reads as something cut and worn, closer to an excavation than a park layout. The wider site plan shows the context: a curving road, a dark channel marking the river, and city blocks pressed up against the industrial cluster. Infrastructure clearly dominates the site, and the carved terrain is the designers' answer to it.

The striations are not decoration. The project replaces rigid containment with controlled water passages that carve new ground conditions, and these lines read as their traces. The terrain is organised by hydrological logic rather than a street grid. That choice shapes the rest of the scheme.

Layered Topographies Cut by Water

The axonometric pencil drawings show what the plan only implies: the ground has thickness. Excavated layers step down from the surrounding blocks along a diagonal road, with the cylindrical tanks rising among them. The close-up is the most persuasive image in the set. It shows stepped, cracked rock strata and vertical cut faces drawn in dense hatching. The hand-drawn quality fits the idea, since it renders the ground as built up over time rather than designed in one gesture.

The incisions work on two levels. Physically, they produce terraces, submerged plazas and water basins. Metaphorically, they expose buried histories, both the river's and the city's. The designers frame the result as a hybrid territory between infrastructure and ecology. These drawings make that claim believable, because the strata look neither natural nor engineered. They sit somewhere in between.

The Power Station as a Porous Ruin

The render brings the ruin to eye level. A concrete hall with exposed steel roof trusses stands behind rutted stone ground, with puddles collecting in the low points and two figures standing under an overcast sky. The proposal keeps the power station rather than demolishing it, and this view explains why. The heavy walls and skeletal frame contrast sharply with the soft, eroded ground in front. The roof grid acts as a filter, letting light and shadow fall across the carved courtyards and basins below.

The image is restrained, and that helps it. There is no crowd of programme and no glossy surface, only wet ground, concrete and steel. The designers describe the station as an infrastructural monument within a renewed ecology rather than a symbol of decay, and the render supports that reading. The cylindrical volumes elsewhere on the site are recast in the same way, as spatial markers within a rewilded landscape.

Fragments Instead of a Promenade

The physical model shows stacked rust-brown layers rising into a ridge, with window-punched walls at the left. It shows the project's sectional thinking clearly: the terrain is treated as volume rather than surface. The rust tone links the ground to the industrial fabric. The stacking expresses the idea of a river experienced as depth, through subterranean excavations that expose geological layers, rather than as a line on a map.

This volumetric approach supports the project's most pointed critique of conventional riverfront redevelopment. Instead of a continuous promenade or commercial strip, the site breaks into spatial islands: eroded terraces, submerged plazas, elevated walkways and water basins. Pedestrian bridges cross the carved voids on the diagonal. The ground shifts between wet and dry states through the seasons. Public programmes are spread irregularly, so the place reads as a set of urban pieces rather than a single monumental gesture.

Why This Project Matters

Cities like Athens face the same problem again and again: rivers turned into channels, and channels hidden under roads. The usual response is either full restoration, which is often impractical, or a landscaped edge that leaves the underlying condition unchanged. Terrain Anamorphosis offers a third option. It accepts the infrastructure, keeps the industrial relic, and gives water back a role as an active shaping force. That is a more honest position than nostalgia, and arguably a more resilient one.

The project also argues for its ideas through its drawings. The dense pencil strata, the quiet render of the ruined hall and the layered physical model all present the river as something to excavate and inhabit in section. Eleftheriadi and Gerogianni show that regeneration does not have to mean smoothing a site over. It can mean cutting into the ground, revealing what lies beneath, and letting time and water continue the work.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Zoi Niki Eleftheriadi, Antonia Gerogianni

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Terrain Anamorphosis by Zoi Niki Eleftheriadi, Antonia Gerogianni.