An architectural palimpsest: (Re)writing crisis-ridden Athens

Abstract

This article focuses on the Bank of Greece headquarters building in Athens, which has been a site of recurring political expression in contemporary crisis. It is based on a corpus of graffiti writings from the particular building gathered over the span of five years (2010–15), a rather politically dense period. Mapping the constant appearance, removal and reappearance of the writings through a series of architectural drawings, the aim of this article is to explore visual means of understanding graffiti as a palimpsestic phenomenon. The article is structured after the scale of the drawings – from the city scale, to the building and finally the surface – introducing an architectural method of reading and writing graffiti.