Angelos Floros

Published: Floros A., "Private House in Eleftheroupoli", DOMES Greek Architecture Yearbook, 4/12, Volume A, 2012, pp. 24-25

Exhibited: Biennale of Architecture, Hellenic Institute of Architecture, 2012

Exhibited: DOMES 2012 — Panorama of Greek Architecture

Selected by Bernard Tschumi, DOMES 2012. Blind review.

A house in Eleftheroupoli, in the prefecture of Kavala, standing in farmland at the foot of the hills that close a basin. The plot is four thousand square metres; the house is a hundred and forty.

It is built in three parts: an observatory, the living space, and a workshop.

What governs the site is the view of the plain, and the building answers it with a single gesture. The observatory's large balcony is the most important element of the house, and it occupies the second floor alone — there is nothing else at that level. It continues the tradition of the semi-outdoor room that runs through Greek and Mediterranean architecture, raised here to the height where the whole basin becomes visible.

The living rooms — sitting room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms — are on the ground floor, and their principal openings face the same direction.

The workshop stands apart, a separate volume on the hill, before the entrance to the house and higher than the living space, with its own view. Its geometry repeats the observatory's: a parallelepiped whose upper rear corner is cut away.

So the house has two elevated places from which to look, and one place in which to live between them.

"Most brutally provocative yet sober: #148"— Bernard Tschumi's note