The color in the urban landscape
Vissarionos Street towards Homerou Street. New color in Athens. (NIKOS VATOPOULOS)
Its great white landscape Athens, a gray-white sea of houses… From above, few things disturb the carpets of buildings, few monuments stand out, few towers or bell towers. It is the reasons of Athens that give the sculptural relief, but inside the city, at the height of the streets, opposite the buildings, the city has a pulse. And color, sometimes μεγάλη A big discussion is the color in Athens, as old as the city, with aesthetic, philosophical, architectural dimensions.
The passerby in the city receives the signals of the city and between the carefree facades of most buildings he stops when he is surprised by an unexpected view. From Bissarion, as I was descending Sinai, the view to Omirou Street has an interwar trilogy immersed in color. It was a spectacle rather unusual for the conservative colored Athens. The corner building, Homer and Bissarion, has acquired an interesting green color that blends nicely with the oches and yellows of the adjacent modernist apartment buildings of the interwar period, creating a source of urban heat. The color is misunderstood. Either it spreads agarba and refers to compositions foreign to the place or it is abused ephemeral trends, such as the gray of the lead that puts even the white mansions of the ’50s. The discussion about color takes place in a regime of essential indifference and ignorance, when authentically colored trinkets in neoclassical ruins, in front of which Tsarouchis would stand, are ignored and dissolved.
There are still authentic terracottas and authentic indigo in houses in Athens. But the city remains sterile in color. It is necessary for the natural landscape to “warm up” first from the terraces, to make the roofs Athenian, to remind of a Mediterranean city, to be a sweet, fascinating view. The corner of Bissarion and Homer made me think. The green in the plaster reminded me more of Central Europe, but it is a whole generation of buildings from the Athenian Interwar period that should be painted this way, with earthy colors and not with the ocher and blue friezes of neoclassicism. An inexhaustible but crucial issue…