A bestseller in 1945, this book has been out of print for over thirty years Like Wescott’s extraordinary novella The Pilgrim Hawk (which Susan Sontag described in The New Yorker as belonging “among the treasures of 20th-century American literature”), Apartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages an intense and unsettling drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion—an account of political oppression and spiritual struggle that is also a parable about the costs of closeted identity.
ATHENS APARTMENT explores daily life in a modern European capital. It touches on family, culture and history from a unique perspective and challenges some unexamined myths and traditions.
A “dissident of the gender-sex binary system” reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism. Uranus, the frozen giant, is the coldest planet in the solar system as well as a deity in Greek mythology. It is also the inspiration for uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrich in 1864 to define the “third sex” and the rights of those who “love differently.” Following Ulrich, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he might live beyond existing power, gender and racial strictures invented by modernity. “My trans condition is a new form of uranism,” he writes. “I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist confined inside the limits of technoscientific capitalism.” This book recounts Preciado's transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., but it is not only an account of gender transitioning. Preciado also considers political, cultural, and sexual transition, reflecting on issues that range from the rise of neo-fascism in Europe to the technological appropriation of the uterus, from the harassment of trans children to the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come. An Apartment on Uranus is a bold, transgressive, and necessary book.
Sprawling beneath the acropolis, modern Athens is commonly viewed in negative terms: congested, ugly and monotonous. A Mediterranean version of "informal" urbanism prevalent throughout the so-called developing world, 'Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens' reassesses the explosive growth of post-war Athens through its most distinctive building type, the polykatoikia, a small-scale multi-storey apartment block (from poly meaning "multiple" and oikos meaning "house"). Theocharopoulou re-evaluates the polykatoikia as a low-tech, easily constructible innovation that stimulated the post-war urban economy, triggering the city's social mid-twentieth century transformation, enabling the migrants who poured into Athens to become urban citizens, aspiring to a modern life. The interiors of the polykatoikia apartments reflect a desire for modernity as marketed to housewives through film and magazines. Regular builders became unlikely allies in designing these polykatoikia interiors, enabling inhabitants to exert agency over their daily lives - and the shape of the post-war city. Theocharopoulou's reading draws on popular media as well as urban and regional planning theory, cultural studies and anthropology to examine the evolution of this phenomenon and, in light of Greece's recent financial crisis, considers the role polykatoikia might play in building an equitable and sustainable twenty-first-century city. 154 colour and b/w images
Throughout the twentieth century, the ancient city of Athens underwent a massive transformation into simple sets of apartment blocks, or polykatoikia. Today, these multifamily residential units define the city's landscape from center to periphery and house a majority of Greece's population. Yet specific circumstances and cultural patterns set Athens's transformation apart from the arrival of architectural modernity in other countries, and what has emerged in Athens is a distinctly Greek variety of modern urban development. The Public-Private House examines Athens's urban character and the apparently unlimited adaptability of polykatoikia. In the first part of the book, a photoessay offers an overall impression of Athens and its signature housing structure. The second part of the book investigates historic developments, the genuinely democratic process of urban planning in the city, and comparisons with Le Corbusier's Dom-ino system, as well as exogenous factors, such as crucial social aspects and the impact of Athens's strict building code. The concluding third part provides an illustrated analysis of Athens's most notable examples of polykatoikia and of current developments in Greece contributing to the building type's decline.
This open access book explores the formation and socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in Europe. Are these estates clustered or scattered? Which social groups originally had access to residential space in housing estates? What is the size, scale and geography of housing estates, their architectural and built environment composition, services and neighbourhood amenities, and metropolitan connectivity? How do housing estates contribute to the urban mosaic of neighborhoods by ethnic and socio-economic status? What types of policies and planning initiatives have been implemented in order to prevent the social downgrading of housing estates? The collection of chapters in this book addresses these questions from a new perspective previously unexplored in scholarly literature. The social aspects of housing estates are thoroughly investigated (including socio-demographic and economic characteristics of current and past inhabitants; ethnicity and segregation patterns; population dynamics; etc.), and the physical composition of housing estates is described in significant detail (including building materials; building form; architectural and landscape design; built environment characteristics; etc.). This book is timely because the recent global economic crisis and Europe’s immigration crisis demand a thorough investigation of the role large housing estates play in poverty and ethnic concentration. Through case studies of housing estates in 14 European centers, the book also identifies policy measures that have been used to address challenges in housing estates throughout Europe.
- Seventy-six pioneering 20th-century apartment buildings in Athens - Explores a distinct type of urban housing - With up-to-date photographs, redrawn floor plans, and brief explanatory texts Contemporary Athens is characterized by a building type that transformed the Greek capital into a modern metropolis within a few decades in the 20th century: the polykatoikia, a small-scale urban apartment block. For almost forty years the unchallenged residential ideal for all social classes, the polykatoikia by the end of the century had become synonymous with the rushed mass production of the postwar period and inhospitable living conditions in the inner city. The question now is: what potential does this omnipresent building type have? And how can it be developed further? This book sets out to trace the architectural origins of this typology. For the first time, it provides a comprehensive examination of the architectural concepts developed by Greek architects for the polykatoikia. Seventy-six innovative apartment buildings dating from 1930 to 1975 are presented with up-to-date photographs, redrawn floor plans, and brief explanatory texts. The selection reveals an astonishing range of concepts, including designs by Dimitris Pikionis, Aris Konstantinidis, Constantine Doxiadis, and George Candilis. In chronological order, the publication depicts the emergence of this architectural type, from the 1930s polykatoikias of the Modern Movement and the early postwar experiments to the iconic polykatoikias of the 1960s. Additional texts explore the evolution of the key architectural features of the polykatoikias and reflect on architects' ongoing struggles over this housing model.
