Completed in 1995, the hall was conceived as one of the biggest and most modern indoor arenas in Europe, and the Greek Ministry of Sports has called it the largest indoor sporting arena of its kind in the world. Its signature is that soaring A-frame roof, suspended from four enormous pillars and engineered so that natural light floods the interior through the day. Inside, the seating flexes to the event: around 17,600 for gymnastics, and as many as 19,443 for basketball, with sections set aside for media and VIPs. It is a building designed less to enclose a crowd than to lift a roof over one, open and luminous where many arenas feel like sealed boxes.

When Athens hosted the Olympic Games in 2004, the hall was reborn for the occasion. A major renovation wrapped up on 30 June, and the arena reopened on 10 August, days before the opening ceremony. Inside, gymnasts tumbled and vaulted through the artistic gymnastics and trampoline events, and the building also staged the finals of the Olympic basketball tournament. For a few weeks the daylight roof looked down on athletes at the peak of their lives, the whole world watching a city that had invented the Games welcome them home.

Basketball is the building's beating heart. It is the home court of Panathinaikos, one of Greece's most decorated clubs, and the primary home of the senior national team. In May 2007 it hosted the EuroLeague Final Four, and the hometown crowd watched Panathinaikos lift the continent's biggest club trophy on their own floor. Eleven years later the arena staged another European final, this time the Basketball Champions League Final Four of 2018, where AEK Athens beat AS Monaco 100 to 94 for the club's first title in the competition, exactly fifty years after AEK had won the very first European trophy for any Greek team. The hall has hosted the world championship, an Olympic qualifying tournament, and is slated to welcome the EuroLeague's showpiece again. In 2023 Panathinaikos secured the right to use the arena for the next 49 years.

The roof has not only sheltered athletes. In May 2006, after Greece's victory the year before, the hall hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, with 15,000 seats filled for both the semifinal and the grand final. Across the years the floor that holds basketball courts has also held concert stages, and the roster of performers reads like a survey of modern music: Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode, Beyonce, Bjork, Roger Waters, Florence and the Machine, alongside Greek stars like Helena Paparizou, Sakis Rouvas, and Anna Vissi. A few hours of work turns a sports arena into a concert hall, then back again, the daylight roof presiding over both.