In a city famous for ruins that everyone wants to preserve, the Athens Towers are a rare thing: a modern building that Athenians argued about, criticized, and eventually came to love. Rising from the Ampelokipi district, the taller of the two reaches 103 metres across 28 floors - and for more than fifty years, no building in Greece has stood higher. It went up during a military dictatorship, in a brief window when the usual rules about how tall a building could be simply did not apply.
For most of the twentieth century, Athens kept itself low. Until 1968, no building in the city was allowed to rise above 35 metres, and the tallest thing around was the 14-storey Athens Hilton, finished in 1963. Then came law 395/68, passed under the junta, which lifted the height cap and let builders arrange structures freely within their plots for the sake of light and air. Into that opening stepped the Athens Tower. Construction began in 1968 and finished in 1971, carried out by Alivertis-Dimopoulos, one of the largest construction firms of the era. When it topped out, it was the second-tallest building in all of Southeast Europe - a glass spike in a low-slung Mediterranean capital.
The tower's designers, Ioannis Vikelas and Ioannis Kympritis, were not chasing originality. They were chasing Manhattan. The minimalist, futuristic profile openly imitates buildings like Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York: a clean rectangular shaft sheathed in glass curtain walls held in aluminium frames. White marble columns and vertical strips of brown anodized aluminium draw the eye upward, exaggerating the height. Vikelas, who also designed the main building of the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art, gave Athens its first taste of the corporate glass box. The look caught on. The glass curtain wall, exotic here in 1971, soon became the default skin for big commercial buildings across the city.
What makes the Athens Tower interesting is hidden inside its walls and beneath its feet. It was built using composite construction - steel columns paired with reinforced-concrete slabs - the first building in the Balkans to use the technique. Because local builders had little experience with large steel frames, the engineers leaned more heavily on the concrete than they otherwise might have. Below ground, the structure rests on a pioneering plastic foundation that behaves something like a shock absorber, developed by Aristarchos Oikonomou, a statics and dynamics professor at the University of Patras who calculated the building's structural loads. It was a genuinely experimental piece of engineering, dressed up as an ordinary office block.
Today the Athens Tower houses shops and offices - tenants have included Interamerican Insurance and Alpha Bank - and antennas added in the 1990s bristle from its roof, pushing the overall height beyond the structural 103 metres. Without those masts the building itself stands at 103 metres, still the tallest structure in Greece by architectural height. But that long reign is ending. The Riviera Tower, under construction along the Athens coast, is designed to reach roughly 200 metres, which will nearly double the old record and finally retire the Ampelokipi landmark from the top spot. After half a century, the building Athenians once mocked is about to become something gentler: a piece of their history.
Athens Towers stands at 37.9846 degrees N, 23.7609 degrees E, in the Ampelokipi district northeast of central Athens, just off Mesogeion Avenue. At 103 metres with rooftop antennas, the glass shaft is a clear daytime landmark against the lower city around it; look for it between the Athens Hilton and the green ridge of Mount Hymettus to the east. Nearest airport is Athens International (LGAV), about 25 km to the east-southeast. Best viewed at lower altitudes in clear Mediterranean light.