This project focuses on individual houses or small apartment buildings in Patras, a rural city of Greece. The residences selected were simply old, found in diverse places, even in the center of the city, and have managed to coexist with more modern –and larger– constructions on their own terms.

It’s a palette of ingenious creations, stoically built over time, that in various ways communicate their references, the evaluation of the options, the accepted standards of a rich and well-kept house. Each result is as unique as an individual psychoanalysis. Everyone emphasizes his definition of the quality of life through the means of communication they have mastered. For some it’s keeping a clean façade, for others the symbolic reminders of a beauty from the past or the pompous demonstration of the superiority of the present. As result, concepts such as privacy and publicity are intertwined and demonstrate that there can be no normality in the shaping of living conditions, or at least what is considered normal, usual or expected is completely ad hocand subjective.

text by Sofia Ioannidi, architect