The Wrong Question on Philopappou Hill

In my previous post I wrote about my experience on Filopappou Hill and the significance of Pikionis's work today — for Athens, its residents, and for tourism.

Another part of the project that stayed with me was the so-called "refreshment pavilion," right behind the Loumbardiaris church. It has been standing here for years, ruined and abandoned — and recently it came back into the public conversation around its possible future use.

I approached the visit through a specific lens, connected to my current collaboration with the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany.

There, "preservation" doesn't only mean restoring and maintaining the Bauhaus buildings in the city. It means above all communicating the history of the school and its connection to the present — through educational formats aimed at the general public.

In other words, the Foundation doesn't talk about architecture only in terms of aesthetics. It asks how architecture relates to society, the city, and public space. How a work with significant architectural heritage can remain socially alive and relevant to the challenges of today.

That's the lens I brought to Filopappou — thinking about the different layers of meaning the project carries, beyond the architecture-landscape relationship I mentioned last time.

Many of its materials came from demolished Athenian buildings — an early circular economy logic, recycling before either term existed. The pavilion offers shade and coolness next to nature, something that matters during summer heatwaves — urban resilience, also long before anyone called it that.

And above all, the project disconnects public space from consumer logic. It puts forward human encounter, reflection, lived experience — a different way of being in the city.

At the pavilion, I watched a group of tourists sitting and talking under the broken pergola. The space, even in ruins, was dictating its own use. It was still functioning — inviting visitors to stop, talk, reflect, with the Acropolis right in front of them.

Pikionis himself meant something close to that with the word "refreshment pavilion": a place where you stop for a moment, take it in, and then move on.

The recent debate about its future has mostly circled around a kind of negotiation: a chain café, a different operator, some other commercial model. But the real question, to my mind, isn't what kind of café we want there.

Alongside the very real question of economic viability, we could ask what kind of place we imagine for the pavilion — as part of the whole project, not as an isolated stop — and how that fits into the broader context of Athens today.

That conversation, not just about restoration but about the pavilion's active social and educational life, hasn't really happened yet.

Which is why I keep thinking about the potential of Pikionis's Filopappou project — and how little of it we've actually used.

Not in the sense of commercial exploitation. But in how we could share the value of this work with every visitor — the knowledge and experience of perhaps the most significant monument of our recent architectural heritage. And a different way of thinking about what architecture, city, and public space can mean today. One that doesn't passively adapt to its audience, but shapes the way we experience space itself.