An insight into modern European architecture
Houses representing their owners is the idea behind the new architectural edition «One Hundred Houses For One Hundred European Architects of the Twentieth Century,» by Taschen editions, which is now available in English in the Greek book market and costs 30 euros. The edition consists of 100 private residences designed by an equal number of European architects for private use and provides the safest insight into the essence of every creator’s architectural thought. The book (whose general editor is Italian architecture researcher Gennaro Postiglione), with its striking illustrations, was based on a European network of archives and organizations; in Greece, that role was undertaken by the Benaki Museum’s Archives of Modern Greek Architecture which, over the past few years, have developed into a search engine for Greece in the 19th and 20th centuries through their consistent work. In the anthology, Greece is represented by architect Nikos Valsamakis, who lives in the house he designed in Filothei in the early 1960s. Valsamakis’s house is a clean-cut example of architectural modernism. It was built at a time when modern villas claimed the brightness of a new way of living, with their united indoor spaces and the interior blending with the exterior. Using the advantage of Greece’s climate, the local flora and light, Valsamakis succeeded in bringing out the Greek contribution to high-quality international modernism, in his own house and in other houses he designed at the time. Without this necessarily indicating a particular honor, Valsamakis’s house was chosen as the edition’s book cover. Out of the hundred houses designed by such great architects as Gropius and Aalto, Valsamakis’s represents a common heritage.
