When residents of Artemidos Street in the downtown district of Psyrri saw a construction site being set up in a site with two listed buildings on the corner with Ermou Street, they discovered that authorities had allowed contractors to add two floors to the first and three to the second.
Normally, listed buildings do not have a plot ratio since their classification from either the Ministry of Environment or Culture forbids any such alterations. However, exemptions from the law can happen if both ministries sign such decisions. In the last year, the responsible Deputy Environment Minister Nikos Tagaras has signed 12 such decisions.
Generally speaking, most architects are not completely against height additions to listed buildings, but they believe that it is not the best option for saving an important building. “This intervention has a reciprocal logic: I keep only the facade, to preserve the memory or the image, and integrate it into an entirely new and taller building, which I will exploit on much better terms. The result depends on the individual case,” says Konstantinos Tsiambaos, associate professor at the NTUA School of Architecture.
“Listed buildings, in addition to expressing the historical development of a city, which is why we evaluate them as important, have a human scale. I think that this scale is canceled by adding floors,” says Sofia Lazarou, architect at the office Thymio Papayannis + Associates.
“The new building has neither the character nor the substance of the original. It is a peculiar hybrid, created with the aim of maximizing the financial interest of its owner. The big question, then, is why this is happening. In the 1950s and 1960s, we massively demolished the previous phases of our cities in order to house the entire population that ended up in them. Today, what does the gradual destruction of the few remaining listed buildings serve? Certainly not the supply of housing,” she adds.
