One hundred and fifty years of uninterrupted work at a high level for an educational institution dealing with music, theater and dance. And one of the leading examples of Greek modernism: atriums, galleries and marble staircases make up his favorite design. The Athens Conservatory, the oldest and one of the most important performing arts institutions in the country, has quietly nurtured generations of artists without always getting the recognition it deserves. Since 1976, the Athens Conservatory has been housed in an iconic but unfinished building designed by the great architect Ioannis Despotopoulos.

This misspelling of post-political Greece is coming to an end in a few weeks, starting today, with the completion of the modernization and finishing of the building complex, which will add space for artistic creation and production in an area of ​​5,300 sq.m. completed. These include the Ioannis Despotopoulos amphitheater, which will be able to accommodate almost all possible cultural, educational and conference centers, the 600 sqm Arts Foyer, also suitable for multiple use, and the New Stage, an experimental multifunctional space that has adopted the logic of a “box in a box”. “.

However, a tender has yet to be held for the design of the adjacent territory of the Conservatory, without which the project will remain … half. Abandoned for decades, the Conservatory Garden is a potential urban paradise. Its new era has already been scrutinized by the research bureau Timios Papagiannis & Partners thanks to a donation from Alfa Bank, while the Municipality of Athens has been in the process of incorporating this new project into the appropriate financial instruments for several months. Let’s hope that the Greek bureaucracy will no longer perform its miracle and deprive the Athenian Conservatory of the most important impulse of its great history.