Christos Papoulias (1953 – 2024)

A few words about a remarkable architect.

I met Christos Papoulias many years ago through the group “Teuchos,” together with Giorgos Tzirtzilakis, Giorgos Simaioforidis, and Takis Koumbis. The last time I met him was during the filming of the ERT series ‘From Thorn to Rose,’ which focused on adaptive reuse in his own project, “Thiseion – A Theater for the Arts,” on Tournavitou Street in Athens.

Christos was a founding member of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture and actively participated in its early events from 1994.

In 1998, in his text as a member of the jury for the second Biennale of Young Greek Architects organized by the HIA (edited by P. Dragonas), Papoulias already pointed out the critical problem plaguing contemporary Greek architecture:
“The state, institutions, and our society still do not show signs of sensitivity; architectural education and, by extension, good architecture are not priorities for Greek society.”

A creator with critical thinking and compositional skill, he is counted among the architects in the major exhibition “Architecture of the 20th Century: Greece,” held in 1999 at the German Architecture Museum DAM in Frankfurt. His first residence, ‘Pegasos,’ located at the foothills of Helicon in Livadia, is included among 113 works selected by the HIA as representative of contemporary Greek architecture. Although representative of a characteristic trend of the period, this residence no longer satisfied Christos Papoulias at the time of publication, as he was already moving toward other directions.

Following are single-family houses such as those in Hydra, Tinos, etc., and notably as a culmination of his career, the unique, non-competition proposal for an ‘Erichthoneion’ Museum of the Acropolis and the ‘Urban Rooms’ in Ljubljana, next to works by the great J. Plecnik. These two distinct proposals represent significant contributions to architectural thought and have been discussed and honored with critical texts by personalities such as K. Frampton in the book “Hyperplaces.”

It is a weakness of ours, but perhaps also a hope, to return to the texts and works of Christos Papoulias, whose loss again draws our interest to study and draw something from his sensitivity and the tangible expression of a mature architectural discourse.

‘Sempre Iniziare’: let this short note in his memory end with the words for an ‘eternally new beginning,’ as titled in the “Notes on the Architecture of Christos Papoulias” by our mutual friend Yehuda Safran.

Elias Constantopoulos

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Photographs:  © Spyros Staveris