Overview

Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens reassesses the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type, the polykatoika, and its different connotations through the decades: from a monotonous and ugly element of the city to the role it might play in the urban sustainability. Sprawling beneath the Acropolis, modern Athens is commonly viewed in negative terms: congested, ugly and monotonous. Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens questions this stereotype, reassessing the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type: the polykatoika (a small-scale multistory apartment block). Theocharopoulou re-evaluates the polykatoika as a low-tech, easily constructible innovation that stimulated the postwar urban economy, triggering the city's social mid-twentieth-century transformation. The interiors of the polykatoika apartments reflect a desire for modernity as marketed to housewives through film and magazines. Regular builders became unlikely allies in designing these polykatoika interiors, enabling inhabitants to exert agency over their daily lives and the shape of the postwar city. This revised edition of Theocharopoulou's study draws on popular media as well as urban and regional planning theory, cultural studies and anthropology to examine the evolution of this phenomenon. Written in the light of Greece's recent financial crisis, the book's updated Postscript considers the role polykatoika might play in building an equitable and sustainable twenty-first-century city.

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9786188592834

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Ioanna Theocharopoulou is an architect and architectural historian whose research focuses on cities and the histories, theories, and evolving concepts of post-carbon architecture and society. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals as well as book chapters, and she has collaborated on curating and chairing several academic conferences, including ""Ecogram: The Question of Sustainability at Columbia University"" (2008-11), and ""Cities and Citizenship"" (2014) with the Goethe-Institut and New York University. She is the author of Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens (Artifice, 2017). Theocharopoulou is currently preparing a new edition of the book with the support of the Onassis Foundation and Cultural Center in Athens. She has taught at the Cooper-Hewitt Master's Program for Design and Curatorial Studies, at Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and at Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York City. Theocharopoulou studied at the Architectural Association in London and holds a master's degree in advanced architectural design and a Ph.D in architecture from Columbia University.

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