Letter from Athens - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, June, 2001 by Elias Constantopoulos

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.