CITYLINK — LARGE-SCALE EXPERIENTIAL ENVIRONMENT
CityLink was conceived as a city-scale experiential installation in central Athens, transforming a listed commercial arcade into a temporary public interior shaped by narrative, atmosphere and spatial choreography. Developed for one of the city’s most prominent retail and cultural blocks, the project reimagined the building as an immersive seasonal environment rather than a conventional decorative scheme.
Commissioned to bring warmth and emotional presence to an imposing arcade, the intervention worked with the architecture’s height, rhythm and perspective rather than against them. A vertical landscape was choreographed to draw the gaze upward, transforming scale into atmosphere and reorienting the visitor’s experience of the space.
The exterior was activated through bold typographic prompts and a continuous illuminated garland, turning the building façade into a communicative surface within the city. Drawing from the warm, boxed neon language of the neighbouring theatres, the installation embedded itself within the existing urban character while asserting a contemporary graphic and experiential presence.
Inside the arcade, suspended archetypal figures — handcrafted by National Theatre sculptors — descended through layers of fibre-optic rainfall. The spatial composition formed a slow vertical procession above visitors, creating an immersive environment that balanced wonder with architectural order. Recognisable archetypes drawn from shared cultural memory were used not illustratively, but as narrative anchors within a broader experiential system.
CityLink became a seasonal urban landscape rather than a decorative event: a large-scale experiential installation shaped to engage emotion, memory and collective presence within the public interior of the city.
Client
PICAR S.A. — Piraeus Bank Group
Experiential environment · spatial & production direction
Yula Vourli
Production & technical partners
Vasilis Katavelakos — Art Rebel
Photography
Vangelis Paterakis
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Scope
Experiential concept · Public-realm spatial design · Exterior & interior installations · Live environmental programming · Production direction · Regulatory coordination · On-site delivery
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Athens
The building was treated as a communicative surface within the city.
“The intention was to lift the gaze and with it, the perception of the space.”
