Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens reassesses the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type, the polykatoikía, 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 polykatoikía (a small-scale multistory apartment block). Theocharopoulou re-evaluates the polykatoikía 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 polykatoikía apartments reflect a desire for modernity as marketed to housewives through film and magazines. Regular builders became unlikely allies in designing these polykatoikía 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 polykatoikía might play in building an equitable and sustainable twenty-first-century city.

A comprehensive and detailed overview of the active regeneration, rehabilitation and revitalisation of architectural heritage. The combined processes of globalisation, urbanisation, environmental change, population growth and rapid technological development have resulted in an increasingly complex, dynamic and interrelated world, in which concerns about the meaning of cultural heritage and identity continue to grow. As the need for culturally and environmentally sustainable design grows, the challenge for professionals involved in the management of inherited built environments is to respond to this ever-changing context in a critical, dynamic and creative way. Our knowledge and understanding of the principles, approaches and methods to sustainably adapt existing buildings and places is rapidly expanding. Architectural Regeneration contributes to this knowledge-base through a holistic approach that links policy with practice and establishes a theoretical framework within which to understand architectural regeneration. It includes extensive case studies of the regeneration, rehabilitation and revitalisation of architectural heritage from around the world. Different scales and contexts of architectural regeneration are discussed, including urban, suburban, rural and temporary. At a time when regeneration policy has shifted to the recognition that ‘heritage matters’ and that the historic environment and creative industries are a vital driver of regeneration, an increasing workload of architectural practices concerns the refurbishment, adaptive re-use or extension of existing buildings. As a result, this book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students of architecture, historic conservation, urban and environmental design, sustainability, and urban regeneration, as well as for practitioners and decision makers working in those fields.

Activism at Home offers a unique study of architects' own dwellings; homes purposely designed to express social, political, economic, and cultural critiques. Through thirty case studies by architectural scholars, this book highlights different forms of activism at home from the early twentieth century to today. The architect- led experiments in activist living discussed in this book include the dwellings of Ralph Erskine, Paulo Mendes Da Rocha, Charles Moore, Flora Ruchat-Roncati, Kiyoshi Seike, and many others. Offering candid appraisals of alternative living solutions that formulate a response to rising real estate prices, economic inequality, social alienation, and mounting environmental and cultural challenges, Activism at Home is more than a historical study; it is an appeal to architects to use the discipline's tools to their full potential, and a plea to scholars to continue bringing architecture's activist practices into focus--whether at home or elsewhere.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

A survey of the religious beliefs of ancient Greece covers sacrifices, libations, purification, gods, heroes, the priesthood, oracles, festivals, and the afterlife.

The relationship between public and private spheres is one of the key concerns of the modern society. This book investigates this relationship, especially as manifested in the urban space with its social and psychological significance. Through theoretical and historical examination, it explores how and why the space of human socities is subdivided into public and private sections. It starts with the private, interior space of the mind and moves step by step, through the body, home, neighborhood and the city, outwards to the most public, impersonal spaces, exploring the nature of each realm and their complex, interdependent realtionships. A stimulating and thought provoking book for any architect, architectural historian, urban planner or designer.

The 18th-century rediscovery of the three archaic Greek-Doric temples in Paestum in southern Italy turned existing ideas on classical architecture upside down. The porous limestone temples with rough, heavy columns were entirely unlike the classical architecture travelers to the site were familiar with. Paestum, exceptional in the completeness of its ruins, came to fascinate architects, artists, writers, and tourists alike, who documented the site in drawings and texts. In Rediscovering Architecture, Sigrid de Jong analyzes extensive original source material, including letters, diaries, drawings, paintings, engravings, and published texts, which are attractively reproduced here. The book offers new insights on the explorations of the site, the diverse reactions to it, and their dramatic and enduring effect on architectural thought, as they influenced intellectual debates in England, France, and Italy during the long 18th century. This unique study of the experience of architecture reconstructs Paestum's key role in the discourse on classical architecture and its historiography, primitivism, the sublime and the picturesque, and the growing importance of science and history in architectural thought. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art