Acropolis 13, Athens

The Acropolis 13 apartment is part of the wider historic area stretching out at the foot of the Athens Acropolis and its morphology bears the basic characteristics of a typical urban residence of the interwar years. The spirit of the building’s original architectural character, manifest in both the facade and floor plan and in the various details of the construction, is still present in the interventions carried out in the course of the renovation in areas of the house such as the library, the living room and the dining room. Different materials have combined to create a composition wherein the individuality of each is allowed to come forth, and proportion has been approached in a playful manner, yet form is simple and clear and everything is governed by a strict geometry, which ultimately serves to preserve the house’s interwar identity at the same time that it responds to the contemporary needs of the family that inhabits it. Forms are soft and plastic, and as a result what would otherwise constitute static and fixed elements of the house’s interior (e.g. the furniture) now seems to morph organically into spatial extensions of the house’s existing architectural shell.
The bookcase is a blend of different materials and textures – thin metal sheets, pleated and perforated surfaces, wood – that come together to form an organic sculptural whole. Assimilated into the flow of the bookcase’s basic grid are two complementary parts of a metal circle which help tie the bookcase’s two sides together into a unified piece. The choice of materials used in the living room – honed or unpolished marble, an elongated slab of concrete resting on a thin white metal frame – adds to the overall dialogue of textures and comes to enrich the palimpsest of stories at the core of this interwar apartment. The seeming simplicity of conventional functional surfaces (a TV stand, shelves, a side table) belies a visual composition wherein the materials themselves evoke a theatrical atmosphere of spatial sophistication. The need to receive selected books and objects without creating the impression of visual clutter in the dining room where space was already limited and which needed to breathe, resulted in a structure that is essentially an extension of the existing wall. This new structure incorporates built-in sculptural openings and a subtle yet animated dialogue of textures that is in sync with the intrinsic elegance of materials used in the kitchen.