Southeastern Eur

Η ΑΡΧΙΤΕΚΤΟΝΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΝΕΟΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΟΥ ΘΕΑΤΡΟΥ / THEATRE ARCHITECTURE IN MODERN GREECE: 1720-1940.

Sponsored by the J. F. Kostopoulos Foundation, Athens, 1994, 2 volumes, 23X30, 692 pages, illustrated (780 black and white figs.), ISBN 960-220-704-3, paperback, text in Greek with summary and list of illustrations in English.
One of the dominant features of theatre architecture in Greece throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries has been its open-air tradition. This tradition offered improvised but effective solutions to the housing problem of the country’s performing arts. Moreover open-air theatres were appropriate for Mediterranean Greece, whose extended summer season, restricted means and traditional behavior patterns have always favored inexpensive open-air recreation.
On the contrary, winter theatres of the above-mentioned period have been patronized by the country’s economic, political and intellectual élite as a means of Westernizing the Greek performing arts. However, the ineffectiveness and fast decline of most of these playhouses reveal that Greek socio-economic and cultural circumstances did not favor the fruitful naturalization of European building types and styles.
The emergence, interaction and evolution of these two building types (i.e. open-air and winter theatres) from the eve of the Greek Revolution to 1940 is the subject of this book. The author’s intention was to approach Neo-Hellenic theatre architecture comprehensively in order to demonstrate not only what it really produced during this period but also why it did so.
The scope of this comprehensive and comparative approach is to interpret Neo-Hellenic theatre space of the 19th and 20th centuries in the broadest context of the civilization of its time as well as the more specific context of local tradition and circumstances.