XL RESORTS

We live in a country that, during the twentieth century, witnessed a major expansion of tourism. We invited it in as much as we could—beginning by showcasing our history, highlighting the natural beauty of the Greek summer, and building public hotels: the renowned Xenia resorts. All of this, of course, now feels like a kind of prelude. The Xenia hotels, after all, were left to their fate by equally public initiative. This may be due to the fact that tourism underwent an explosive acceleration, on every quantitative scale, which demanded an equally large-scale building infrastructure. In places like Halkidiki and Rhodes, the Athenian Riviera and Crete, Corfu and the Peloponnese, major hotel developments “docked” next to the charm of the landscape like massive ships in tiny harbors. Their architecture entered into a dialogue both with the spirit of the place and with the expectations of visitors from around the world—bridging what once seemed unbridgeable. I’m reminded of Le Corbusier, fascinated by the majestic ocean liners that crossed the seas and gazed at distant lands. Their architecture was iconic—even featured on the cover of his most important book, and in the lecture he delivered in Athens in 1933, right in front of our National Technical University. It was an architecture that met the needs of its function and scale, and for that very reason, it was liberated from the scale and vernacular of any place. The art of the large hotel is an architectural artform that responds to the logic of the machine—as Le Corbusier described it: a machine for enjoying your holidays in a magical place. A demanding brief and a challenging task for architects: to balance necessity, service, and pleasure in skillful proportion. We’ve grown accustomed to viewing these large “ships” with suspicion, often doubting the architectural quality they offer, while attributing to mass tourism a certain decline in value—confirmed by our own desire for a kind of ‘remote’ authenticity. And yet, these grand vessels rely on their architecture—an architecture that, like a machine, responds to the desires and needs of their social and business mission. They are part of the landscape of modern Greece and reflect the explosive growth of tourism—with both positive and negative consequences, depending on the lens through which one views our complex era. In this contemporary reality, it is time to reconsider the large hotels of the past fifty years—those that followed the old Xenia “sailing ships”—as architecture of large scale, high standards, and equally high demands.

Panagiotis Tournikiotis

On Sunday, November 24, 2019, at 4:00 PM, a lecture/discussion took place as part of the Hotel Megatrends Talks:

XL RESORTS

Speaker/Moderator:
Panagiotis Tournikiotis – Architect, Secretary of H.I.A.

Participants:

Yannis Aesopos – Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Patras
Dionisis Sotovikis – Architect, Workshop-S Architectural Office, Board Member of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (HIA)
Vangelis Stylianidis – Architect, 3SK Architects, Board Member of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (HIA)

SPONSORS:
IDEAL STANDARD
ΕΘΝΟΚΑΤ
ELVIAL
STONETECH
VAGENAS

MATERIALS & SERVICES SPONSORS:
BRIGHT
LATTAS
EXPOPIECE
ALFA WOOD