Letter from Athens.

Athens is in turmoil as the deadlines for the 2004 Olympic Games approach. Massive public projects are to be built, but the government has been indifferent to architecture built since Classical times. Yet there is a new breeze of hope.

Something could be moving in Athens after a long period of stagnation. Architectural production of high quality has over the years been the main, if not the sole prerogative of the private, residential sector. Now a number of great public projects are in the offing, albeit with questionable futures, chiefly because of the way architecture is generally treated (read: ignored) in Greece. Postwar years have only a handful of interesting public buildings to show, most of them constructed in the '60s and '70s: the Fix Brewery Plant by T. Zenetos (which has been badly cut up and partly demolished over recent years, and is waiting to be resurructed and baptised as the first Museum of Modern Art in Athens), the American Embassy by Gropius, the old Athens Airport by Saarinen, the National Gallery by D. Fatouros & P. Mylonas, the Conservatoire by J. Despotopoulos, and more recently the ambivalent Music Hall by a host of architects, the Law Courts by I. Rizos and perhaps the best of them all, the Passenger Terminal in P iraeus by Y. Liapis & E. Skroumbelos, the Open Air Theatre on Lycabettus by T. Zenetos and the Public Power Corporation Building by C. Crantonellis. A short list with few exceptional buildings for the capital city of Greece indeed.

The projects which are today either in the design or the construction stage in Athens (due most of them in 2004) include public buildings as well as large-scale urban interventions, such as the Unification of the Archeological Sites and the redesign of central public squares, the new Acropolis museum and the Museum of Modern Art, new Olympic Games facilities, the new Metro line and the International Airport. Does this mean that we will see anything approaching the Olympic and urban projects of Barcelona, or the 'Grands Projets' of Paris, or the urban regeneration of London and Berlin? Optimists will nod their heads affirmatively, pessimists (and there are many of them, based justifiably on negative past experience) will think it all bleak. To move towards an improved quality of life in future Athens, it is certainly time to take stock, to accept what is or can be positive and what is not.

Projects for the 2004 Olympics, such as the Olympic village and the sports stadiums, will present Athens with a new face by the 'golden' year 2004 - but the point is under what vision for the city? Will Athens have improved in terms of use and appearance, or not? Results of the Olympic Village competition have not been made public as promised. Some of the sports facilities for the Games may be located in the environmentally protected Phaliron area and some in the old airport. Their use after the Olympics should be seriously considered, though design proposals refer to temporary structures that will be removed afterwards. We are also currently witnessing the re-enactment of the battle of Marathon, this time though, not between Persians and Greeks but between the Greeks ourselves (they say that history can only be repeated as a farce). On one side there are ecologists, archaeologists et al, who consider that construction of rowing facilities in Marathon will cause environmental havoc and that they will infring e upon the historic battle site. On the other side are the ministry and its advisors, who consider the development aesthetically beneficial to the whole district.

The Unification of the Archeological Sites is planned throughout the centre of Athens, conceived as a landscaped pedestrian area, combining cultural sightseeing with leisure walks. Next to that, after recent competitions, the major squares of Athens are up for a facelift - notably the three central ones in Synragma, Omonia and Monastiraki.

The long-awaited Acropolis Museum, that is to house the Parthenon marbles, has entered a new phase, i.e. a fourth international competition, with many notable Greek architects as well as non-Greek luminaries among them, such as Arata Isozaki, Daniel Libeskind, and Ahrends Burton & Koralek. Let us hope that this will not be a fruitless effort like the previous ones (as the art museum by I. M. Pei seems to have got stuck). However, the site chosen for it is rather restricted in scope, is very close to the glorious rock, and threatens to bring even more traffic to the already badly congested centre of Athens.

Lack of identity

This is a time when the present Greek government is enjoying a moment of success. Two long awaited and very important public works have been presented to the public, the new underground Metro line and the new international airport in Spata.

Both much-needed amenities are now to every Athenian's surprise in operation. The airport was actually inaugurated on 28 March, to the sounds of Beethoven's music, on the date that the government had announced, a rather rare keeping to schedule in Greek public projects. But there are shortcomings which leave the citizens of Athens with a bitter sense of incompleteness.

One of the most important steps in improving everyday life in the Greek capital has been the completion of the first phase of the extension to the Athens underground system. The metro line is, of course, still only a small part of a much larger network, already planned but not yet implemented. There are two main disadvantages of this situation: a) there is no ring system to join stations which are geographically in proximity to each other, meaning that to move to an area nearby one has to travel all the way into the centre and then back out again and b) there is no metro line leading into the new airport, thus making its access a main problem.

This is named 'Eleftherios Venizelos' (after the great Greek Statesman of the first half of the twentieth century) and quickly nicknamed 'El Venizelos' (as in El Paso!) by Athenians, following the road sign notations that are to be found everywhere in the city. The old airport was vacated just one month ago. The new airport shines with granite and seems like a welcome modernization after the old disintegrating facilities at Ellinikon. However, once first impressions have faded (and they fade soon enough) one is left perplexed about the functional shortcomings of the airport, both at the arrivals and departures ends (long distances to travel, congested and not well serviced points for baggage retrieval, etc).

But even if functional and access problems are resolved in time, on another level the onlooker is more deeply dissatisfied with the result of these two large-scale works. That dissatisfaction has mainly to do with their lack of character, with a missing sense of architectural identity. Both are engineering constructions in the 'driest' sense of the word.

The metro stations are 'beautified' by 'art' on the walls, by some of the best contemporary Greek artists, such as Moralis, Gryssa, Tsoklis, Antonakos, etc., but this does not overcome the fact that there has been no overall architectural design of any importance. The airport too, full of shiny materials and shops, is a box without any architectural concept. Unfortunately a similar degree of concern, as that regarding art, or engineering, has not been given to the discipline which would bring all these disparate elements together -- namely architecture.

Once again, the promised land has been built in the absence of the architect, whose presence should instead have been necessary in dealing with the planning and, certainly, the formal decisions.

This is an especially sore point as one simultaneously witnesses those new airports and metro lines around the world which are given the public architectural character they deserve.

Perhaps, if one is to remain an optimist amid this turmoil, the recent occasion for the first ever presence of the President of the Republic in an architectural event, the Architectural Awards by the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (AR April 2001), may be a sign of things changing. So let us hope that this may be the beginning of a more rewarding era for Greek public architecture, at the turn of the Millennium.

july

Houses have always offered fertile opportunities for architectural experiment, and the AR's July issue will look at a wide range of houses from all over the world. Radically different sites, climates, construction technologies and social habits ensure that there is great and though-provoking diversity in the selection.

For instance, SCDA Architects abstract from tropical models and use traditional climate control techniques to help maintain comfortable conditions in their Singapore houses. Michalis Manidakis brilliantly explored the potential of digging into his site to protect users from the almost constant winds of Mykonos in Greece, while Lena Mantziou-Venetsanou makes a tower house out of local materials at Doria in the mountains of the same country. Equally responsive to site is Rick Joy's Tyler Residence in the high deserts of Arizona, near the Mexican border, where it nestles among mesquite trees and wild grasses.

In Kimito, and island in the Finnish archipelago, Olavi Koponen has inserted a holiday house in the middle of a farm with great sensitivity and respect for nature: timber was local and drawn to the site by horses. Equally responsive to context is Peter Blundell Jones's house in the issue come from Germany, Australia and Spain.

Of course, we shall have our regular features like Delight, Interior Design, and the Browser. Order 12 wide-ranging and thought-provoking issues by using the subscription form. Or use our website, guaranteed secure for money transactions: www.arplus.com