layered lightweight volumes by arid extend 1950s building in patissia, athens

veil: a layered intervention in patissia’s urban fabric

Arid reworks and extends a two-story corner building from 1951 in the Patissia district of Athens into a hybrid residential, co-living, and co-working building. The project, dubbed Veil, renovates the original fabric and adds three new floors above it, resulting in an 850-square-meter building that engages directly with its neighborhood’s spatial logic.

The intervention is shaped by Karamanlaki Street’s characteristic morphology, where setbacks generate ‘prassies,’ semi-open front gardens. These transitional spaces become a guiding principle for the new volume, which pulls back, carving out terraces and voids that preserve openness and visual continuity along the street. This restraint allows the building to sit comfortably within its context, maintaining lightness despite its increased height.

The architects integrate contemporary elements into the existing structure, with its marble surfaces, wooden floors, and timber window frames. The added volume above introduces perforated aluminum panels that wrap the facade, softening the mass and blurring its edges, creating a layered composition where structure and surface, concealment and exposure become one.

all images by Giorgos Sfakianakis, Giorgos Kordakis

arid reworks the polykatoikia as a shared living model

The Athens-based team at Arid improves ventilation and privacy with a double-skin facade system that allows light to filter and reflect in constantly changing ways. Movable louvers and rotating panels regulate daylight, producing shifting transparencies and a kinetic quality. As the sun moves, the appearance of Veil changes, transforming the upper floors into an almost immaterial presence hovering above the older base.

Programmatically, the project rethinks the social model of the Athenian polykatoikia. Alongside a range of residential units, the building incorporates coworking spaces, a shared coliving apartment, and a communal roof garden. These shared areas extend the idea of collective urban living, updating it for contemporary patterns of work and habitation while remaining rooted in Athens’ long tradition of dense, mixed-use residential life.

the renovated 1950s corner building in Patissia

the project embedded within patissia’s dense residential fabric

perforated aluminum panels filter light across the facade

operable metal screens allow controlled openness

maintaining privacy for residential units

stacked balconies and recessed floors emphasize outdoor living

the new volume reads as a soft, filtered presence

the retained concrete base contrasts with the contemporary metal-clad extension

facade details highlight the material texture and rhythmic repetition of the perforated panels

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axonometric | all drawings courtesy of Arid

Filadelfeos facade

Karamanlaki facade

ground floor plan

third floor plan

fourth floor plan

project info:

name: Veil

architect: Arid | @arid_architects

location: Patissia, Athens, Greece

area: 850 square meters

design team: Mathilda Beraha, Dimitris Sotiropoulos, Giannis Schinas

contractor: Calen

mechanical engineer: HMeng

structural engineers: Andreas Alexandropoulos, Dimitris Antonopoulos

facade: Rometal

lighting design: Anastasia Philipopoulou

landscape design: Scape

photographers: Giorgos Sfakianakis | @g_sfakianakis, Giorgos Kordakis | @yiorgoskordakis