[UN]FINISHED Atlas of Athens’ Incomplete Buildings – A Story of Hidden Antimonuments

With this work in the form of a book, Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot present the phenomenon of a particular pending architecture mutely present all over Athens. The concrete skeletons of polykatoikia – multi-story apartment buildings – are emblematic of the development of modern Greece throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

The book deals with the politics of urban space by treating the unfinished buildings as study objects and tracing their individual histories. Through the words of current owners and by means of photographs, archival documents and found artefacts, a different chronicle of the development of modern Arthens is taking shape.

Essays by Brooke Holmes, Platon Issaias and Elpida Karaba critically touch upon the phenomenon from different perspectives. Moving in scale from a tactile portrait of one specific concrete structure to a complete building index, the Atlas introduces a method for extracting forgotten memories and hidden structures, suggesting an alternative reading of the city.

Since 2012, Lalou and Aymo-Boot have worked together on the project [UN]FINISHED, a continuous archival research project on the unfinished concrete buildings of Athens, engaging the spectator in a process of viewing parts of the void in the history of the city, architecturally, socially, and politically. The project has been presented at Contemporary Art ReMap 4 (Athens), UNIDEE/Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella), The Symptom Project (Amfissa), as well as Universita Iuav di Venezia, ETH Zurich, and Princeton University, among others. In 2020 they established cross section archive in Athens.

Language
English / Greek