Tall & Urban News

When Athens’s coastal highway, a raised six-lane artery, was constructed, it cut off access to the sea and left a lot of barren terrain.

Now, however, much of that terrain has become a building site, one that promises to transform the adjacent run-down apartment blocks into desirable properties ripe for renovation and fronting a seaside park designed by the architect Renzo Piano.

Financed entirely by the Region of Attica and expected to be completed in 2022, the $240 million Faliro Bay Restoration Project, as it is called, will reshape a section of Athens’s coastline just five miles (eight kilometers) from the city center.

Yet the construction underway here is just a harbinger of even more ambitious projects to follow along the city’s waterfront, the largest of which is to be the long-delayed redevelopment of the old airport in the area of Hellinikon. Together, these promise to fundamentally redefine the city’s relationship with the sea.

In Faliro, the regeneration project will sweep in adjacent facilities created for the 2004 Olympic Games: the 2,500-seat Faliro Olympic Beach Volleyball Center and a nearby row of auxiliary buildings with a total floor area of about 120,000 square feet (11,100 square meters).

These have sat mostly unused for 15 years. The stadium will become a performance venue, and there will be cafes, bars, restaurants and shops.

“People will now have contact with the sea; they will be able to walk by it and smell it. There is nothing greater than that,” said Christos Kapatais, who was overseeing the project as vice regional governor of Attica until local elections in June 2019 brought a change of administration. “We are trying to recover what can be recovered, and what can be recovered is truly great.”

At its eastern end, the park will connect to the manicured grounds of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, which has become a cherished Athenian landmark since it opened in 2016. That was always the idea; the foundation funded the development of the original master plan with a donation of €4 million (US$4.4 million) hoping to revitalize the area.

For more on this story, go to The New York Times.