#urbanity

[waidwund]

A40 – essen, germany // 08-2024  

© 2024 waidwund–photo  

[thedarkacademiagraduate]

[mybelamoon]

[evnglsan]

[hermitthrush]

This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid.  It is not so.  This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew.  It was a new thin.  Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was.  Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth.  Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning.  The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls.  I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1960) | Part Three.  On the advance of civilization over nature.

[selenofiliaaa]

mi vida, fragmento fotográfico y una monocromía fría en búsqueda de calidez

[elladastinkardiamou]

Athens’ Architectural Heritage Is Slowly Slipping Away but These Heroes Are Saving It

Bereft of state help, a group of architects, archeologists, and ordinary citizens are banding together to save Athens’ historic buildings—and succeeding.

One day in 2006, Irini Gratsia was walking through Athens and wondering why nothing was being done to save the city’s historic pre-War buildings. Although Greece has stringent archeological laws to protect antiquities, the city’s modern architectural heritage–which began in 1834 with the establishment of Athens as the capital of a newly independent Greece–has largely been ignored.

Popular images of Athens tend to depict it as a city of ancient ruins and modern apartment blocks with little in between, but take a walk round any neighborhood and you’ll find something of architectural interest—try central Panepistimiou Street, an urban museum and perhaps the most remarkable ensemble of modern architecture anywhere in Greece.

There are of course the Neoclassical buildings that defined the fledgling years of the Greek state, the earliest of these designed by architects spirited in from Germany and Denmark in order to re-imagine a post-Ottoman Greece based on a romanticized impression of ancient Athens. The movement reached its apotheosis with Theophil and Christian Hansen’s ‘Athenian Trilogy’ at the center of Panepistimiou Street, a lurid expression of romanticized philhellenism in architectural form. As Greek architects began learning the trade they developed a more subdued Greek Neoclassicism, as seen by the adjacent Serpieri Mansion (1881) by Anastasios Theophilas and the yellow Rallis House (1835) by Stamatis Kleanthis opposite, surreally reflected in the glass tower block behind. There’s also the Attica Department Store, a Neoclassical-Art Deco fusion and the largest building in Athens at the time of its completion in 1938, the Neobyzantine Athens Eye Hospital (1855), the Neorenaissance Numismatic Museum (1880), the Catholic Basilica of St. Dionysius the Areopagite (1865) with its ‘why not?’ fusion of Neo Byzantine, Neoclassical and Neo Renaissance, the New York-esque towers of the Art Deco Rex Cinema (1937) and the Stripped Classicism of the Bank of Greece (1938).