ABSTRACT
Greek society and particularly its creative strata, like artists and architects, have been faced with the challenge of articulating a national architectural style to answer the perfection and mystical appeal described in the above quote. This is a quest pertinent and difficult enough for the usual architectural applications, but particularly acute in the effort to incorporate ancient classical masterpieces into an appropriate modern context, something that demands new auspicious combinations of opposites, past and present. On the one hand there is enormous awe and respect for the past. On the other, it has proved difficult to pin down what is ‘Greek’ in architecture, considering the very long history of the country and the very rich morphological deposit it has produced. Another difficulty has been the desire to conform to foreign aesthetic expectations in admiration of a ‘common human heritage’. This has resulted in the implicit demand for modern Greek society to repeat the ‘miracle’ by producing ‘eternal’ architecture, with the shortcomings outlined earlier.
