A Hope for Athens

This study concerns the city of Athens and a series of projects, which from the end of World War II onwards, have contributed as an alternative to the existing chaos, to the re-design and development of the central urban areas, ensuring the continuity with the historic city and more precisely the continuity of the present city of Athens with the ancient city and its architecture. Nowadays, the historic city is identifiable only by its surviving, scattered monuments which, alienated and isolated from their context ended up being “increasingly unrecognizable as places belonging to the same city”. The monuments have lost their social functions and the contemporary city has rapidly lost in just a few decades, the human scale of its urban spaces. In most cases, the monuments were left in the middle of a square with the sole role of a decorative element, as if they had been forgotten by another era, as if they were statues, fountains or even ornamental plants. However, during all these years there have been some ideas and projects, whose aim has been to resume the relationship with the ancient city, to question what has been achieved, and in the meantime, study a comprehensive plan for the development of the city. I therefore propose here an analysis of this family of projects, which share the same aims and the same modus operandi. These projects, which have largely remained on paper, have urged the necessity for a relation with the past of the city because of the specific collective character of architecture and have proposed to re-open a dialogue with the ancient city and to restore to the city [...] a topography more consistent with its history [...] and to redesign the existing degraded urban fabric of Athens, a city that has escaped all control, to the point of becoming an unrecognizable urban continuum. Continuity here is to be perceived as a possible form of the present through a critical reading of the past; a renewed critical proposal of the ancient city in the form of a dialogue of its design and its surviving monuments with the city of today. These four “Athenians” architects and their projects, which constitute in a certain sense a response to the monophony of architecture of the moment, could be an opportunity for the future of the city.