Being-in-the-boundary. The project of the envelope in the constellation of Suzana Antonakakis

Abstract

The Greek architect Suzana Antonakakis (1935-2020) founded the well-known Atelier 66 in Athens in the mid-1960s together with Dimitris Antonakakis. Their joint work includes housing and public buildings, but also interesting tourist and recreational housing projects. This paper aims to highlight the architectural thought process of Suzana Antonakakis on the basis of her texts and her solo work. Special attention is given to the project of the envelope: to the design of the boundary as a generator of both physical and oneiric inhabitation. In leisure architecture, the design of the boundary becomes even more expressive as it offers a multitude of dialogues with the idyllic landscape. In this sense, her work in tourist fields establishes relations with other shared approaches such as those proposed by Candilis, Konstantinidis or Díaz Llanos and Saavedra. They all also share a need to transfer arguments from popular architecture along the lines of Pikionis, Sert, Bonet, Heilbronner, Manuel de la Peña and Luis Cabrera. The contemporaneity of Suzana's ideological constellation is based on the hybrid nature of her approaches. On the one hand, it reflects the modernity of the Greek architectural scene of the mid-twentieth century, but at the same time it reacts to a structural organicity, always from a deep-rooted social commitment and a concern to seek in every architectural action a true local tradition, or what Riceur called the ethical and mythical core of humanity. The goals of this research are to approach the architectural thought of Suzana Antonakakis, claiming the cultural process as a guideline for the project, as well as to look at the design of the envelope of these tourist projects from the concept of the boundary as a mechanism in response to environmental, social and poetic needs.