HomeboyMediaNews

The image of the Brabant Library project in the Netherlands designed by MVRDV in 2000 can be seen at “The Hungry Box” an exhibition of the utopian works designed by the celebrated Dutch architecture group, is currently being hosted at the Benaki Museum on Pireos Street, Athens.

When it comes to the Dutch radicals MVRDV, turning conventional architecture on its head takes on a whole new literal sense. Like a perimeter housing block tipped on its end, all with a giant hole in the middle as a courtyard, the famous Mirador, MVRDV’s architectural tour de force built in 2005 in Madrid, is one of the works featured at the Pireos Street Annex of the Benaki Museum in Athens.

The exhibition “The Hungry Box”, a display of 10 MVRDV projects designed between 1997 and 2007, highlights the characteristically Dutch theme that dominates the work of the experimental Rotterdam-based architecture group: density. Their unconventional, if not utopian, projects aim to maximize density by seemingly swallowing endless interiors.

It’s no surprise that the buildings of MVRDV are often described as “hungry boxes”, stuffed with large chunks of complex data that translate into boxy shapes that can accommodate shifting interior possibilities. At the frontline of a more ecologically conscious generation, MVRDV seek to create a more fluid relationship between indoors and outdoors, inhabitants and nature. For that purpose, light and the surrounding landscape are incorporated in the design.

Children of the golden age of Dutch architecture that peaked in the mid-1990s, Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries set up MVRDV, the name is an acronym of the founders, in Rotterdam after a career with OMA, the studio of Dutch master Rem Koolhaas.

MVRDV have a utopian quality even though critics would be tempted to slam some of their plans as Le Corbusier-inspired modernist dystopias. Their urban vision is best reflected in their KM3/3D city project. Presented in the late 1990s, KM3/3D is a proposal for a global urban grid with cities sitting in 5-kilometer-sided cubes, each 100 kilometers apart, leaving the natural surroundings untouched.

Visitors to the Benaki exhibition, which is organized by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), can examine a series of colored scale models of MVRDV projects, including the Villa VPRO in Hilversum, the Dutch Pavilion for the World Expo 2000 in Hanover and the Brabant Library in Eindhoven.

Items too form a box-shaped room and visitors can take a tour of the exhibition making their way through large curtains covered with images of the building interiors intended to give an in-looking-out feel. But the trick does not always work.

MVRDV is not just about the style. It’s about the future of architecture at large, hence the manifesto-mongering with polemical exhibitions, films, software and books, against more conservative architectural trends like the new urbanism movement across the Atlantic.

“New urbanism in the US is highly politicized and very successful, and there’s the retro architecture in Europe which is like an oil spill going over the European landscape,” Maas said in a recent interview with icon, the architecture and design magazine. “We have to compete with quite heavy opponents.” High ambitions from the flat Netherlands.

The Exhibition “The Hungry Box – The Endless Interiors of MVRDV” runs through July 25.

Archival material depicting the former Sarajevo Parliament before reconstruction work began.

  Political content has been a steady element in the conceptual art of Vangelis Vlahos.

His work currently being shown at The Breeder Venue continues the artist’s search into the relationship between architecture and public projects, with the design of political strategies and geopolitics. The work “1992” is the outcome of the artist’s research into Greek foreign policy in the Balkans, specifically in the region of the former Yugoslavia.

Funding by the Greek government for the renovation of Sarajevo’s former Parliament building, which was all but destroyed during the Bosnian war, provides the occasion for the artist’s exploration into Greece’s role in the Balkans. Conceived of and presented as an objective documentation of facts, the work includes archival material the artist has collected from the press, state archives or on the Internet.

Monthly progress reports on the reconstruction projects, newspaper clippings analyzing Greece’s role in the Balkans and all sorts of state documents are put together in the fashion of an investigative report. Displayed on a large, square table that brings to mind the large maps in the drawing of geopolitical strategies, the archives are bound in dossiers and presented together with two architectural models: One shows what the building looked like before the war and the other shows its redesigned, renovated version.

Vlahos reveals the symbolic function of buildings and discloses the inextricable, but often hidden, link between form and content. In another work, also presented at The Breeder, Vlahos has used the same concept and methodology to trace the political subtext behind the new National Bank building in Thessaloniki. The building’s construction is seen against the expanding Greek public sector investment projects in the Balkans.

Vlahos has probed the intricate, political content that underlies public architecture in many of his previous works, as for example, in the case of US Embassy in Athens or the Athens Tower. His work now being shown at The Breeder was also presented in last year’s Sao Paolo Biennale. Minimal and tight in meaning, his work hones our awareness of architecture, and by extension culture, as an instrument for the implementation of political strategies.

“1992” at The Breeder, 6 Evmorfopoulou Street, Athens, tel 210 3317527, through April 5.

At 8 p.m. on next Thursday, “The Refugee Apartments Today” will be the subject of a discussion with Dimitris Filippidis, emeritus professor at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Maro Kardamitsi-Adam, author and NTUA professor, and Vika Gizeli, adviser to the Pedagogy Institute.

The discussion is being held in connection with the exhibition, “The Land of Attica Receives the Refugees of 1922,” at the Greek Parliament Foundation. 

Built in the Bauhaus style in 1936 to house the refugees who were living in camps, the refugee apartments on Alexandras Avenue are now in danger of being demolished. The refugees who lived there have titles to the property which have been passed on to the descendants. The residents refuse to leave a lively neighborhood in the center of Athens that has seen war, occupation, the December uprising of 1944, and is a repository of historical memory. The buildings have survived, but they have been left to rot.

An historic ruling by the Council of State has prohibited the destruction of these exceptional examples of Bauhaus design, as the Culture Ministry had requested when PASOK was in power, “with the exception of three at the side.” The Council of State ruled that they should be preserved, for their “collective historical memory and their architectural value.”

Many developers still want them demolished to make way for a park above ground, a car park below and commercial use. Neither the Public Works Ministry in the New Democracy government nor the City of Athens has shown the necessary awareness. In the hope that Athens Mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis will protect those sentinels of the past, which are built on such prime real estate, we will attend the event.

“The Land of Attica Receives the Refugees of 1922” at the Greek Parliament Foundation, 1 Mitropoleos Street, Syntagma, Athens.

Exhibition on the work of distinguished architect Nikos Valsamakis at the Benaki Museum on Pireos Annex

  View from a residence in Sounion designed by Nikos Valsamakis in the mid-1970s.

Modern Athens may not be a place with beautiful architecture but it is the city of an architectural landmark in the history of Western civilization, the Parthenon. At times, this alone can make living here seem like a rare privilege. The Parthenon along with the celebrated Attic sky and the radiant light are at the heart of the Greek soul. The Parthenon encapsulates the importance of harmonious proportions, as in “the golden mean”, over excess and ostentation, while Greece’s radiant light expresses extroversion, which, in terms of daily living, means that the out-of-doors is a vital part of Greek life.

A sense of harmonious proportions, the lack of excess as well as a concern for open spaces that do not draw hard lines between indoor and outdoor space are the fundamental aspects in the work of the distinguished Greek architect Nikos Valsamakis (born 1924). This, coupled with an idiom that draws from the core of 20th century modern architecture, in the catalog’s essay Dimitris Philippides makes many analogies between the work of Valsamakis and Mies van der Rohe, describes the architect’s distinctive style.

This style is fully presented in a retrospective exhibition on the work of Valsamakis currently being held at the Pireos Street Annex of the Benaki Museum. The exhibition, which is organized by the museum’s Neohellenic Architecture Archives (NAA) and is designed by Valsamakis himself, takes the viewer on a chronological photographic journey through the architect’s work, beginning with a 1953 apartment building on Semitelou Street, considered innovative design at the time, through to today. It also pays tribute to one of Greece’s leading and repeatedly awarded architects.

A steady trait in the buildings that Valsamakis has designed is in how the interior and outdoor spaces are unified through large windows that allow for uninterrupted views and for the light to enter. In the private homes, many of them on Greek islands, that Valsamakis has designed, this aspect of his work is particularly prominent. The semi-open spaces of a private residence in Sounion that was designed in 1974 or a private residence in Anavyssos from 1961 are just two examples. Constructed on the edge of the rock, this latter building is also impressive for its elegant minimalism and sense of light structure.

Openness, as effected through large, uninterrupted spaces and the purity of modern architectural design, finds one of its best and most well-known examples in the architect’s own permanent residence, which Valsamakis designed in 1961. His house was illustrated in “One Hundred Houses for One Hundred European Architects for the 20th Century” along with the homes of architectural icons Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Otto Wagner, and Valsamakis designed every part of it. The residence is considered to have pioneered in Greece the concept of “total design” in which the architect is in charge of every detail.

The Amalia Hotel in Delphi, also from the early 1960s, is another example of the pure, geometric spaces and lack of excess that defines Valsamakis’s work.

When designing a building, Valsamakis also takes into account the specific site, its constructed or natural environment. He adapts the fundamental precepts of his architectural style to suit the different surroundings. Another example is Alpha Bank’s administrative building on Athens’s Stadiou Street in which Valsamakis makes a subtle reference to the surrounding neoclassical buildings. In the spirit of “total architecture,” Valsamakis has also designed the furniture, lighting and the lanterns hanging in the atrium.

As with the rest of the buildings, natural light streams into large, unified spaces that have been designed with an appreciation of moderate and harmonious proportions. One of the impressions that the exhibition puts across is that the buildings that Valsamakis has designed are a pleasure to live in. They are made with a respect for privacy and an attention to ample space and comfort but also an appreciation for Greece’s light and nature.

At the Benaki Museum, 138 Pireos Street, Athens, tel 210 3453111. To February 18.