The decommissioning of the original Athens International Airport presented a generational opportunity to transform obsolete infrastructure into a resilient and performative landscape. The park concept was driven by the idea of inverting the existing site conditions of mostly hardscape to mostly restored ecosystems, and adding the amenities of a grand municipal park currently absent in Athens.
Athens can be a hot, high-density, city, with little shade. The park will create an climate and biodiversity oasis, serving as a climate refuge where all are welcome, providing spaces for solace and civic celebration. Connected with tram, bike, and pedestrian pathways, sporting amenities, and a 1-km long public beach, this park will be critical for the city’s future wellness and heat resilience.
This park began the planning and analysis phase from a carbon perspective, including extensive research into local ecosystems' carbon sequestration ability, carbon carrying capacity, and LCAs for local materials and manufacturing capacity. The park is designed to be nex zero operational carbon and embodied carbon neutral in 35 years due to the project sequestration of restored ecosystems.
The Ellinikon Park is heroic in scale and ambition, which translates into a responsibility to reinforce the Greek relationship with landscape and reignite this ethos in a 21st-century context—centering ecological restoration, climate responsiveness, carbon-positive design, and equitable access for all Athenians.
Beyond re-establishing an emotional connection to the native Greek landscape, the park will rekindle the city’s relationship with one of its most revered mid-century architectural marvels. As one of only three airports in the world designed by Eero Saarinen, the adaptively-reused terminal building is the centerpiece of a grand event space that terraces towards the Mediterranean Sea, emphasizing its dignity and importance as the singular most important building that connected Greece to the modern world and maximized on design quality for carbon investment through strategic adaptive reuse.
Through all aspects of the design from urban forestry, salt marsh restoration, destination fountains, material reuse, green infrastructure, food and energy production, and the creation of outdoor event venues, the park offers a lesson for how design decisions can consistently work to reduce carbon and still serve and support a resilient urban population. Most importantly, it is a highly visible civic platform that embodies a commitment by the Greek people to provide a progressive model for a public landscape that symbiotically benefits people and the planet.
George Seferis once noted that the only common definition of a Greek was a common affinity for language and landscape. Historically, Athenians worked in the city and returned to family farms on weekends and holidays, this is changing, with a growing majority of Athenians having no ancestral village to return to. A foundational goal for the park was to reinstate that relationship, enhance access and appreciation of natural processes, landscape-based narratives, and urban agriculture.
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The decommissioning of the Athens airport provided an opportunity to transform the site into a climate-adaptive park prioritizing carbon-first design.
Sasaki
Using both Pathfinder and the Carbon Conscience app (developed by the landscape architect), design decisions were prioritized based on carbon impact.
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A design language of material reuse embraces the site’s layered history and resulted in 100% of all existing hardscape materials repurposed on site.
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Rigorous research on imports, exports, and local fabrication in Greece informed design decisions related to the carbon impact of selected materials.
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Concrete from the existing runways is reused playfully to tell the story of the site’s past, reduce embodied carbon, and honor what was once unseen.
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To achieve net-zero operational carbon, energy modeling for all lighting, fountains, and infrastructure informed the sizing of an on-site solar farm.
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A restoration ecology approach maximizes the co-benefits of carbon sequestration in living biomass and soil carbon and renews regional biodiversity.
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Over 3.3 million locally sourced plants were selected for their habitat value, ecosystem services, and adaptability to the site’s alkaline soils.
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Youth programs, adventure playgrounds, and interpretive trails create educational opportunities that instill ecological values in the next generation.
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As Greece’s first green infrastructure project, the park introduces rain gardens, bioswales, flow-through wetlands, and restored creek corridors.
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Maximizing comfort through shade, strategic materials, water features, and cooling stations is critical with summer temperatures exceeding 40°C/104°F.
Sasaki
The Ellinikon is heroic in scale and ambition, reinforcing the Greek relationship with its landscape and reigniting this ethos in a 21st-century context.
Sasaki
The Ellinikon Park is connected to the shore of the Saronic Gulf, with a 1 kilometer long public beach which serves as the largest public beach in Athens.
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At The Ellinikon Coastal Front, a grand promenade of local cobblestone guides visitors along the various coves of the beaches with event spaces, coastal gardens, athletic programs and playgrounds stepping off the promenade.
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Quieter spaces along the coastal front provide places for rest and relaxation, including preserving in place existing mature trees, a historic chapel, and reintroducing native coastal species including a demonstration salt marsh.
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Large areas of the former airport tarmac are reimagined with gardens and reintroduced Mediterranean upland forest, with key hardscapes salvaged or refinished in the former runways.
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The former 2004 Olympic Canoe/Kayak facility is reshaped and repurposed as a small lake for winter stormwater storage and can serve as a supplemental irrigation reservoir in extreme droughts, as well as provide a recreation amenity.
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The park includes interpretive play, such as the Olympic playground, where iconography of the sponsoring deities of the Olympics - Athena and Apollo - inspire a suite of custom play experiences.
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The Ellinikon Park integrated heat emergency refuge strategies throughout the park, including maximizing shade with broad leaf canopies by primary paths, cooling misting stations and features, high SRI pavements, and taking advantage of summer prevailing
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An important part of the intergeneration stewardship strategy is providing Children’s Gardens, where urban agriculture brings the heritage of Greek agriculture into the city and makes these programs available to urban residents.
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In the children’s gardens traditional Greek agricultural products are celebrated, such as viticulture and apiculture, but also contemporary permaculture best practices.
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In addition, key introduced contemporary Greek agricultural exports are showcased, from Kiwi vines to gourds, celebrating the modern Greek agricultural economy.
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When taken as a whole, The Ellinikon Park represents what a park can be for contemporary cities in the 21st century regarding climate responsibility and providing green space as critical infrastructure for the community.
Elliniko
Grecia
Lamda Development S.A.
Public Park and Waterfront
04/2026
2630000 m2
Confidential
Sasaki
Michael Grove, Anna Cawrse, Joshua Brooks, Chris Hardy, Shuai Hao, Lanmuzhi Yang, Andrew Sell, Sydney Bittinger, Jingran Yu, Shannon Rafferty, Lucca Townsend, Jason Ng, Cy Zhang, Yuxiao Liao，Caitlin O’Hara, Aubrie Rhines, Kuan Gao, Fangli Zhang, Zixuan Tai
TBD (contractor not yet selected)
Doxiadis+, Local Landscape Architect; Langan Engineering and Environmental Services, Inc., International Civil Engineering; Atelier Ten, Sustainability Consulting & Lighting Design; LDK Consultants, Local Civil Engineering, MEP Engineering, Waste Management, Fire and Life Safety, Cost Estimation; Kalliergos O.T.M., Structural Engineering; AREA, Architecture; ETM Associates, Operations; Pentagram, Signage and Environmental Graphics; Fluidity, Fountain Design; Dr. Dimopoulos, University of Patras, Consulting Ecologist; Dr. Kosmas, Agricultural University of Athens, Consulting Soil Scientist; Hill International, Project Management Consultant
Sasaki
Curriculum
At Sasaki, we believe defining the future of place must be a collective, contextual, and values-driven exercise. We all have a stake in this work.
For seventy years, Sasaki has brought together the best of architecture, interior design, planning and urban design, space planning, landscape architecture, and civil engineering to shape the places in which we live. Out of our Boston, Denver, and Shanghai offices we are defining the contours of place and redefining what’s possible along the way. Today, we are a diverse practice of over 300 professionals who share a singular passion for creating authentic, equitable, and inspiring places.
