Kassandrou Street Apartment Buildings

What I can see

Greeks are fed up with apartment buildings and often think that they all look the same, even if morphologically have nothing in common or were built in more than 4 decades apart. On Kassandrou Street we will see few apartment buildings from the 1950s and even fewer from previous decades. Most are from the 1960s and 1970s, the period of explosive construction. Although architecturally they are not considered masterpieces, it is very useful to observe the typology of most buildings of this era. There is a gentle volume plasticity and symmetry in openings, balconies, canvases, in vertical and horizontal axes, even in the application of colours. Although blocks of flats, as developed in the second half of the 20st century, have been a massive form of housing that focused on functional quantity rather than aesthetic quality, these apartment buildings seem not to have strayed too far from the basic principles of modernism. Nowadays, many students and immigrant families live in them and the ground floors house small stores, such as mini markets, bakeries and small restaurants.

What I can't see

In the past, they also used to house working-class families, students and small businesses like grocery stores. In the 1980s, however, Kassandrou was a very commercial street.

Info

• Address: Kassandrou Street

Bibliography