Pavle Mijuca | Reframing Athens: The Zenetos Itinerary

This project examines the urban landscape of Athens, focusing on spatial phenomena and urban planning challenges such as gentrification, touristification, and urban sprawl. Amid rapid expansion and infrastructural demands, the city’s growth often unfolds at the expense of local communities and fragile green spaces. Engaging with these dynamics, the work reconsiders contemporary Athens through the visionary yet underappreciated lens of architect and urbanist Takis Zenetos. Despite limited acceptance during his lifetime, Zenetos remains a seminal figure whose radical interventions confronted the absence of coherent urban planning, the proliferation of monumental architecture, environmental neglect, and reductive, short-term urban solutions. His legacy persists in a fragmentary architectural presence—partially realized, partially erased.

Through spatial research, the project traces both the built and unbuilt work of Takis Zenetos, positioning his practice within the contemporary Athenian context. It seeks not only to revisit his architectural and urban legacy but to speculate, critically and imaginatively, on how Zenetos might have responded to the present-day pressures reshaping Athens: rampant touristification, generic one-size-fits-all developments, and deepening gentrification. By engaging directly with the physical and ideological traces of his work, the project proposes a kind of temporal collaboration, using Zenetos’ radical, systems-oriented thinking as a lens through which to interrogate today’s urban transformations. Rather than treating Zenetos as a historical figure frozen in time, the project foregrounds him as a conceptual counterpart: one whose visionary, ecologically attuned, and socially responsive ideas offer an alternative to the reductive models dominating urban development today. This approach involves not only an architectural reading but a socio-spatial recontextualization: imagining how Zenetos’ critique of fragmented planning, speculative real estate, and aestheticized monumentalism might be extended to the commercial Airbnbification of neighborhoods, the erasure of local specificities, and the commodification of the urban experience for global consumption.

In parallel, the project draws connections to the work of Croatian-Yugoslav architect Rikard Marasović, similarly marginalized by institutional discourse. Their shared concern with architectural typology and environmental integration, exemplified in projects such as the Children’s Health Resort in Krvavica and the Agios Dimitrios School, serves as a comparative framework through which to explore the broader Mediterranean condition. By bridging historical paradigms and current realities, the project ultimately delves into how architecture can operate beyond nostalgia or spectacle, offering instead a mode of resistance to the homogenizing forces shaping cities today.