Conversion of a well known 1950s landmark, originally designed by Constantinos Doxiadis, one of the leading figures of modern Greek architecture. Located in the foothills of Mount Lycabettus, the site was also the headquarters of Doxiadis and home to Athen’s technological institute and first computer.

The project by Divercity: as if modernism could benefit from today’s materials…

The key idea is to keep the volume of the original building unchanged: the modular grid, which is based on the program of the office building and recalls its original function. The grid is updated to include three different materials, distinguishing between the different levels of privacy rising from the diverse programme of a housing complex.

Private areas are covered in opaque panels of concrete. Translucent concrete is used for the intermediate spaces – the ever moving shadows behind these panels become a Chinese shadow play in the center of Athens,  created by the inhabitation of the space.

Glass is used extensively to make the most of the views of the Acropolis on one side and of Mount Lycabettus on the other.

One Athens will be a luxury housing complex consisting of 4 multi-storey buildings containing 26 lofts, apartments, duplexes, penthouses, and townhouses.

The ground floor is dedicated to common amenities, including a gym and spa, swimming pool and children’s play area. An exhibition space dedicated to Constantinos Doxiadis’ work and the history of the building welcomes the public into the marble-clad atrium. Some of the original features of the building are retained to preserve this iconic landmark, including the fountain that marked the ancient source of the Iridanos river.

The clash between the roughness and truthfulness of modernism with contemporary luxury is bridged through use contemporary finishes.

The apartments are make the most out of some key existing features such as the exposed ceiling and concrete framework. These are combined with new elements, such as the herringbone wood floor and the minimal window frames, which reference the architectural style of housing complexes during the modern movement of the 50’s and 60’s.

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Photos by Nikos Daniilidis, George Fakaros and Vangelis Paterakis

Located in the historic district of Makryianni, the Museum stands roughly 300m (1000ft) southeast of the Parthenon, of which the top-floor Parthenon Gallery offers a panoramic view. The Museum is entered from the Dionysios Areopagitou pedestrian street, which links it to the Acropolis and other archeological sites in Athens.

The Acropolis Museum tells the story of the Athenian Acropolis and its surroundings by uniting collections formerly dispersed in multiple institutions, including the small Acropolis Museum built in the 19th century.

Designed as a succession of concrete slabs and with the utmost simplicity, the Museum is deliberately non-monumental: with the greatest possible clarity, the design translates programmatic requirements into architecture.

The Museum is conceived as a base, a middle zone and a top, taking its form from the archeological excavation below and from the orientation of the top floor toward the Parthenon.

• The base hovers over the excavation on more than 100 slender concrete pillars. This level contains the lobby, temporary exhibition spaces, museum store, and support facilities.
• The middle (which is trapezoidal in plan) is a double-height space, accommodating the galleries from the Archaic to the late Roman period; a mezzanine features a bar and restaurant with a public terrace looking out toward the Acropolis.
• The top is the rectangular, glass-enclosed, skylit Parthenon Gallery. It is rotated 23 degrees relative to the rest of the building so as to orient it faciong directly the Parthenon. Here the building’s concrete core, which penetrates through all levels, becomes the surface on which the marble sculptures of the Parthenon Frieze are mounted. The core also allows natural light to pass down to the Caryatids and to the levels below.

The collection consists primarily of works of sculpture, a large part of which are architectural pieces that originally decorated the monuments of the Acropolis, so the building that exhibits them is a museum of ambient natural light. The use of various types of glass allows light to flood into the top-floor Parthenon Gallery, to filter through skylights into the archaic galleries, and to penetrate the core of the building,down to the archeological excavation below the building.

Certainly it’s not Venice… or Rome for that matter. But these visualizations of Athens in unlikely, imagined or downright wrong  conditions surely reinterpret the work of the Italian masters.

Greek architects Point Supreme show they are able to blend a strong theoretical and provocative work with beautiful eye-catching images and inspired architectural design.

This gallery of images by Point Supreme was not meant as a coherent collection: most are stand-alone design proposals or provocative studies. However, they all show imagined versions of Athens, which is recognizable from its topography, iconic monuments, building typologies: either the Acropolis, the ever-present Polykatoikia ( i.e. apartment building in Greek) or the unmistakable mix of hills and waterfront are always there to remind us we are in Athens.

Within this context, anything could happen. For instance a vast green corridor might materialize over the built environment, connecting the beach with the Acropolis. The city is an endless hyper-dense urban tissue made entirely of superposed slabs with façace-long balconies. In a way it is a representation of the most visceral elements that make up the Greek capital, with its prominent typologies, its monuments, its natural elements and its needs.

For that matter, a ferry-boat may navigate the city streets or Athens could be the cityscape seen from a painted forest inhabited by lions and all kinds of predators and birds… But what if it were a collage of its two most iconic monuments (the Arcopolis and Mount Lycabetus) and a cycladic town, like Mykonos?

Finally, Mount Fuji might erupt in downtown Athens. It could happen!

Conventional architectural drawings or even sketches would make for great theoretical work, but these lifelike images are there to make us believe what we see, creating the chance for daydreaming and for provocative thinking.

Similarly, in the past, Italian painters Canaletto and Piranesi worked on imagining different versions of their cities, Venice and Rome. Infact, their works show a Venice that never existed – nor will it exist – and the same goes for Rome.

Canaletto’s painting, entitled “Capriccio Palladiano”, depicts three buildings by Italian Architect Palladio as if they were composed in an actual cityscape. They are not. The bridge is an unbuilt project of Palladio and the buildings either side are actually in Vicenza. An imaginary Venice is built on top of the real one, which is only recognizable because of its most topographic elements: the canal and the gondolas.

Capriccio Palladiano – Canaletto

Giovanni Battista Piranesi produced a series of etched images depicting ancient Rome. Detailed archaeological surveys formed the basis of Piranesi’s work, which he blended with Giovanni Battista Nolli’s map of Rome as it was in their time (XVI century).

The “Campo Marzio” series depicts the ancient urban artefacts of the city. This reduction of the urban form to fragments of a historic layer can been seen as a proposal in which the new city would be rebuilt around these form-giving elements, as an analogical reconstruction. The representation of the city in the Ichnographia Campo Martii is quasi scientific, while largely imagined, and can be seen as the latent memory of the city form.

Most importantly, Piranesi was able to draw a map and views of Rome that were credible, though they never existed: his work was the basis for Rome’s intention to unfreeze its historical center and welcome architectural change.

Aldo Rossi – Italian architect and theoretician – differentiates his understanding of urban artefacts from the general built fabric of the city, as the fragments with a distinct individuality and rich historical value which are survive its development and contribute to its unique form. The individuality of the city’s artefacts, constitutes its own individual character and form.

“I would define the concept of type as something that is permanent and complex, a logical principle that is prior to form and that constitutes it.”

Aldo Rossi, “The Architecture of the City” – 1966, p. 40.

Aldo Rossi “città analoga” \ Luigi Serlio perspective – collage

“When you look at the urban form of Athens, you may think about words like informal, spontaneous, unplanned. In fact, the city of Athens is the result of very specific but unspoken political projects.”

Elias Zenghelis

The urban form and its transformations have always been so related to politics. We see how the Kleanthis-Schaubert plan for the new state capital defined the grid orientations in modern Athens, how prime minister Karamanlis’ policies on infrastructure reshaped the city, and how property laws led to the ubiquitous archetype Polykatoikia.

a proposal to capitalize on the programmatic identity of the existing main route from the center of Athens to the sea… and to reorganize it through the confrontation of public transport and new ceremonial rituals of daily life.

Illustration by © Point Supreme