ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the historical background and the conditions in which architec-
tural activities focused on the city of Athens were envisaged and implemented in the
form of a four-year project, running from 2000 to 2004. These events, only two of
which will be presented here, aimed at testing architecture’s capacity to ‘function’ in a
critical mode, where critical meant both ‘interrogative’ and ‘in crisis’, and indicated a
state in which architecture acknowledged its full entanglement with contemporary
social, cultural, economic and political conditions. Architecture’s critical task, in the
case of the Athens activist experiment, stretched beyond the confines of the discip-
line: to acknowledge its historical background, to understand emerging conditions, and
to point out the potential of localities and act upon cultural stereotypes. This was, in
fact, an activist plan whose framework was shaped by a critical context, that is, by a
context in crisis.
