Tower House in Urban Athens

The tower is a house for the architects family and their studio. Situated in the dense city centre of Athens, this eight-storey tower is conceived as an urban retreat in contemporary metropolis. The setting back of its interior volumes from the busy street and the stretching of translucent sail-fabric panels at the front help to carve a lasting quietude from the transient urban life. From the street, the tower maintains an modest, almost non-existent presence which is so much desired by its inhabitants.

These sail-fabric panels provide privacy and reduce light penetration of the strong southern sun. To avoid confronting the chaotic balconies right across the narrow street, the stainless steel foliage behind these panels, being also a consolation for the treeless street, offer an idyllic view for the inhabitants from inside. Each of these panels could be open and close to control the amount of natural light admission according to weather and season. Between these outer panels and inner windows, the open metal grille floors create a deep gorge which enables the upward draft of hot air during summer months to vent immediately without heating up the windows. This gorge also lends a poetic detachment and isolation between the tower and the city, between the private realm of domestic life and the public domain of collective activities on the street.The metallic exterior shell outside protects the warm wooden interior volumes.

It is this material contrast that articulates the intimacy of this house. Horizontally, the space on each floor is much determined by the boundary walls, it is however the vertical dimension that gives the spatial character of these interior volumes. For instances, the almost out-door like airy living room, the loft dining space, the house-within-a-house children quarter, the tall entrance hall chamber, the step-terraces of the library and the studio, which also offer a hint of what is happening outside on the street through a discreet horizontal slit... Inside, the natural maple wood finishing with the same maple furniture and objects render a monochromatic domestic landscape. The spatial volumes of the tower, the gentle forms of the furniture and the subtle contours of the objects are very much soften and merged as one by the calm and diffused natural light.