The garden city of Filothei and the architect Ioannis Kremezis

Abstract

In Greece the history of garden suburbs begins in the 1920s with the establishment of an organized Athens suburbia. In 1924 the National Bank of Greece set up a building society with the aim of finding suitable plots of land on which to build homes for its staff and acquiring the necessary funds to buy them. Their search located 50 plots in the small community of Nea Alexandria, situated between Psychiko and Kalogreza which, long before the founding of the Greek state, had belonged to Rigoula Benizelou, an Athenian noblewoman, who subsequently became Saint Philothei. In 1928 this area was renamed National Bank of Greece Staff Settlement. The bank’s chief engineer, N. Zoumboulides, created a new town plan for the area, on the basis of which Greek architects were invited to come up with drawings for types of housing which would express the Modern Greek spirit in a contemporary artistic context. In 1931, out of all the submissions received, it was a drawing by Ioannis Kremezis that was approved. Kremezis (1907-1988) had only just graduated from the School of Architecture of the National Technical University. This drawing was to prove the beginning of his collaboration with the Technical Department of the National Bank, of which he later became the director. The foundation stone for the development, later (1936) christened Filothei, was laid on 6 February 1933 and construction work began immediately thereafter. Ioannis Kremezis was appointed to supervise the construction. In his architectural archive, which was given to the Benaki Museum’s Archives of Modern Greek Architecture by his children, we find plans for housing, public buildings, open spaces, a cathedral, market-place, school, cinema, coffee shop (kafeneion), open-air theatre, and athletics grounds. Some of these were actually built, some were modified, while others remained on the drawing board. Some of the housing which was built was later demolished or abandoned and fell into disrepair. Moreover the nature of the garden suburb of Filothei itself changed over the years and it has subsequently recreated itself as one of the most expensive Athenian suburbs. Nevertheless the I. Kremezis Archive offers valuable evidence of one of only two Greek examples of urban development in the inter-war years (the other being Corinth).