D. Gounari Street Apartment Buildings

What I can see

This street can be likened to a palette of style and colours of the building category that defined Greek urban planning from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, the called Polykatikia (block of flats- apartment building). Around the Galerius Palace Complex, we see some of the oldest apartment buildings on the street. They are typologically simple, with obvious influences of interwar modernism in several of them, despite the fact that they were mainly built in the following decades. They also have symmetry, rhythmicity in their openings and balconies and plasticity in their volumes, with colour playing a key role in their highlighting. The rest were constructed in the following decades (1960s and 1970s). They are morphologically less strict and more emphasis is given to the functionality of the spaces and the best utilization of the balconies for this purpose.

What I can't see

The apartment buildings of Dimitriou Gounari Street are a set of buildings that symbolize the city’s transition from the era of luxurious mansions to the modern era of intense urbanization. With the “explosion” of the Polykatikia (apartment building), the Hebrard urban plan was practically abandoned. After the Second World War, the apartment buildings of Athens and Thessaloniki were considered “jewels” of modernization and Europeanization of Greece and the Balkan Peninsula. At the same time, everything oriental or traditional in the city was gradually erased. The new city seemed to tear down the old one, disrupted the street width-building height ratio and in the press of the time, there was great concern about the decline in architectural quality.

Info

• Address: D. Gounari St.

Bibliography