If you grew up in the 80s, you will remember that apartment buildings like the one designed by Alexandros Topazis in one of the most beautiful areas of Filothea were the epitome of good taste and the characteristics of a new era in the short history of the Athenian apartment building. recognizable today by the exposed reinforced concrete on the facades, spacious balconies and the strict architectural vocabulary of the Greek version of postmodernism. I remember seeing them in other parts of Athens, less privileged but more open to the public. In these solid shells, sweetened by the dim shadows of their inner life, was the promise of well-being and a future.

One of the three apartments in the apartment building designed in the early 1970s by Topazis, in the immediate vicinity of the stream that crosses Philothei, was renovated in previous months, and what is interesting is that the intervention was signed by the next generation of architects, Ioli. Zavicanou and Vangelis Zuglos (MONOGON architectural bureau).

The main question I want to ask them is how do you get involved in a branded residence when your colleague who designed it is one of the most important and respected names in the field. “The biggest challenge for an architect who is asked to work in any existing shell is to succeed in creating a new space that will meet the needs of the new user. We don’t think that signing a contract with an architect of this or any other generation makes a big difference in this regard. From there, we tried our best to preserve and highlight those elements of the building that had a special architectural value for us, such as, for example, high side openings reaching to the roof slab, very beautiful wooden shading systems and metal railings. his looks.”

“We did our best to preserve and highlight those elements of the building that were of particular architectural value to us,” say I. Zavikanu and V. Zuglos.

New floor plan

On the other hand, intervention in the interior space was universal. “We wanted to change the design in a simple and straightforward way to somehow avoid spaces that would not be used, and corners or points that we thought would lose their functionality over time.” Thus, they created a completely new floor plan, the main task of which was to allow the interior, heavily burdened with corridors and rooms, to “breathe” as much as possible. “We created new sleeping areas, utility rooms and revised the ratio between the living room and dining room. We were worried, however, about how to get natural light into as much of the house as possible, as neither the north/northeast orientation of the living quarters nor the rather low ceiling height outside helped us with this. in this respect. direction.” So they created an elongated walkway connecting the two balconies, allowing southwest light from the rear to effortlessly filter in while still creating a sense of movement as the light shifts from east to west during the day. “Great depth The exterior design of Alexandros Topazis allowed us to design, with the help of Ellie Pangalos and her team, a small garden at the back of the house with almost no hard surfaces, which comes into direct contact with the bedrooms and includes, in addition to appropriate plantings, even a small sand hole intended for games.”

The wave of re-evaluation of the Greek apartment building that we have been experiencing in recent years cannot ignore the natural wear and tear of this own residential hybrid. Apartment buildings have a “lifespan” too, right? Ioli Zavicanu and Vangelis Zuglos are in complete agreement. “We like to say that apartment buildings, like any residential building, are living organisms. But the materials are aging, and with them the buildings of the post-war period. However, it was they and the Athenian apartment building as a model of housing that, perhaps, most of all shaped the image of the city in which we live and which we know. And accordingly, like other European capitals, Athens also enters the modern era with buildings and structures bequeathed to it by previous generations. The bet every time we are asked to redesign in the shell is whether we can provide a new user with a living space that can be inhabited based on the very diverse needs of today rather than the needs of a bygone era. And what could be more interesting than recreating new modern housing models in characteristic examples of architectural writing that shaped another era?