Artificiel: an Everyday Material Symbol

Every return from Berlin to Kypseli, a dense post-war neighbourhood in central Athens, makes me see the area with fresh eyes.

My first walk is always an attempt to notice what has changed, what remains the same, and to observe how the neighbourhood continues to evolve through its everyday life.

There is a lot to observe, but I am almost always drawn to details related to a subject that has occupied me since my studies: the Athenian apartment building.

The apartment block is something deeply Athenian and familiar to most of us. It is where we were born, grew up, and where many of us still live.

I do not look at the apartment building in aesthetic terms. Instead, I am interested in how social and cultural aspects of Athens are inscribed in it. My observation focuses mainly on its façades — what one encounters in public space while walking through the city.

Within this logic, one of the elements I observe is a material closely associated with the apartment building: artificial stone (artificiel).

Paradoxically, it is not discussed as much as one might expect — perhaps because it feels so self-evident in Athens that it becomes invisible.

And yet, precisely for this reason, through my experience of Berlin — where there is no comparable everyday material-symbol — artificiel becomes even more visible to me.

What I see in artificiel can be described through four aspects.

First, its surface and the way it interacts with light and shadow.

This relationship between light and shadow follows a long Mediterranean tradition. Just as in the whitewashed houses of the islands and the countryside, where walls are never perfectly smooth but acquire texture through repeated layers of limewash and gradual erosion, creating a constant play with light, artificiel transfers this logic into the urban environment — and does so on a massive scale.

Second, I recall a comment made by a friend and artist from the United States, whom I guided through Kypseli in 2015 as part of his research.

When I was explaining the work of the pelekanoi — the craftsmen who shaped the material by hand — he told me, with the sensitivity that often comes from artistic practice, that this process gave him the impression that every centimetre of the façade had been handed over to the city by the human hand.

In this way, the typically five-storey apartment building is brought closer to the human scale — and, by extension, closer to all of us.

Third, within today’s discussions about the environment, sustainability, and the climate crisis, artificiel appears unexpectedly contemporary.

It was a solution developed at a time when such terms did not even exist, yet it reflected older societies’ relationships with place, economy, and environment. Artificiel requires no paint or constant maintenance — only occasional cleaning.

Finally, its neutral colour combines naturally with the other materials of the period — marble, wooden shutters, white window frames, metal railings.

Together, they form a recognisable material and chromatic composition that repeats quietly across the city, giving Kypseli and Athens one of their most distinctive architectural signatures.

Perhaps this is why artificiel deserves to be seen not only as a simple building material.

But as a silent symbol of the city — through which its post-war face is inscribed and revealed.