The research on the “green” architecture will provide us with very important results only if it offers new models of living outside the biological sphere of the city life into private, controlled apartments.

What are we going to build as a replacement of the apartment buildings?

Panos Dragonas

http://www.heliarch.gr/BIENNALE/ENOTITA4/dragonas_xristopoulou/dragxrist.htm

The Athenian buildings played a significant role in the formation of the Greek cities. Some very interesting steps are being made during the last 15 years to develop the architecture of those buildings. To a great extend this is owed to the appearance of young architects, who have been studying the specifics of the Greek cities. Many of the buildings are examples of one mature Greek modernism. But the apartment buildings as such are buildings, which are made up in order to satisfy the construction needs from after the Second World War. Right now the requirements for an apartment are different than 60 years ago – Greek cities are suffocating from the lack of open spaces. In some of the more developed neighborhoods in the Athens center and in the expensive suburbs there are more modern solutions, which respond to the new social, functional requirements of the environment.

The city and the “house”

Dimitris Tzakalakis 

If the city is the most modern invention of modernism, then we can ask ourselves – why everybody wants to live among nature? Part of the answer to that question is hidden in the condition of the city apartments. The cities lived through the first big changes during the industrial revolution and whether to live in the city was an important question for the modern movement in the beginning of the 20^th century. They looked after the ones in poverty and wished to increase their quality of life. All of a sudden the cities start growing with an unseen speed. The problem in Greece is that the cities do not have an expansion plan. No one looked for the opinion of an architect and the contractors acted as they pleased.