Greek Fire - architecture awards - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, April, 2001

The Hellenic Institute of Architecture's first national awards demonstrated a powerful range of talent, little known to the rest of the world, and even (up to now) often neglected in Greece. The international jury [1] chose from three categories: private houses, buildings privately owned but often open to the public, and buildings funded by the state or other public institutions. Quite clearly, private houses were the strongest sector, Greece has a client group which is prepared to spend money on modern buildings for their own use in a creative way, and a group of architects able to provide imaginative responses to site and programme as ingenious as contemporaries in the US or Australia.

The jury decided that the house on Aegina by George Makris and Yota Kalavrytinou deserved the award. But it was a very close-run affair. Other strong contenders included the house on Mykonos by Michalis Manidakis, a fine and sensitive example of how to create an oasis of calm in bleak and windswept landscape. At the other end of the economic scale was Lena Mantziou-Venetsanou's little holiday tower house in the mountains at Dorida, built with local labour and materials (and the efforts of the architect's family). The Aegina house was chosen because in topographical, material and human terms, it was exceptionally well thought out. Everything you could touch had meaning and tactile satisfaction; every view and every space was carefully considered in relation to both site and use.

In the privately funded larger buildings category, a small office and showroom building on a rather obscure corner of central Athens designed by Demetrios Issaias and Tassis Papaioannou was chosen as prize winner, because of its modesty and its replicability. Its veiled, layered facades were environmentally appropriate for the climate, and provided a scale that could make a gentle city of great variety and flexibility (unlike most commercial buildings in Athens, or indeed in any other city). It was well but sparely made in appropriate materials, and planned with precision for its tricky site.

The third category, of publicly funded buildings, was won by Morpho Papanikolaou, Irena Sakellaridou and Anastassios Kotsiopoulos for the new extension to the central library at the Aristotle University of Salonica. It was a most ingenious building, mostly underground, because the campus masterplan required a park on top. A chasm with an almost Aaltoesque undulating brick wall provided entrance to the new element, which could otherwise be approached down a drum in the lawn on top. Internally, though the building was largely buried, it is full of daylight, and when the jury visited, it plainly had the makings of an excellent, calm place for study and research.

But its construction left a great deal to be desired. In Greece, as elsewhere in the EC, there is a very strong move to make the procurement of public buildings cheaper by removing architects from the job as quickly as possible. Hence there is little or no supervision of the construction process, and the quality of the result is usually much marred: at the Aristotle University library, this is only too clear internally, where details essentially well designed by the architects in the first place have been badly botched in execution.

The phenomenon was even more pronounced in the new EC office for professional development in Salonica, by Dimitris Katzourakis, Gregory Tsamperis and Georgia Abatzoglou. It is the first official European Community building in Greece. The brave architects had to face a 100 per cent unprogrammed enlargement of the brief, prohibition of users speaking to the design team, and without supervision of the works. It was an unhappy outcome of multiple messy bureaucratic marriages.

Partly as a result of disappointing present-day public buildings, the jury decided to make a special award to the Byzantine Museum in Salonica, built in the early '90s by the late Kyriakos Krokos, as a fine example of what a good public building should be, with impressive handling of space, light and construction. It was, of course, procured by the state before present contractual methods came into force.

The winning buildings and the runners up are on show at the National Research Centre, Athens. Many will be shown in separate issues of the AR in the coming months. P.D.

I Professors Nikos Kalogeras (National Technical School, Athens), Savas Condatalos (School of Fine Arts, Athens), Wilfried Wang (Harvard and Berlin) and Editor of the AR, Peter Davey.