Brutalism in Corfu

By: | Post date: June 10, 2023 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Greece

It’s not all 17th century battlements and 18th century multi-storeys and 19th century neoclassicism. There’s also the signal contribution of the 20th century to architecture.

To begin: Local open air gym, complete with protest banner about how the city has been asking the government for funding for a closed roof gymnasium for the past 40 years.
I liked the juxtaposition of the basketball hoops and the crumbling stately Old Town building in the background.
May be an image of one or more people, street and road
St Athanasius Square, the tourist placard says, was a battlement or something like that, which I guess explains why it wasn’t built up until the 20th century.
And smack in the middle of Old Corfu town, the results are as much an eyesore as you might expect of 20th century Greece.
On this side of the square, the lesser eyesore, the municipal theater. Standard brutalist structure trying to echo something nicer, and failing. (Corfu Town already has a real colonnade, in the Liston.)
Eyesore points added for the municipal theater being so titled in English only. You’re the municipal theatre, not a souvenir shop. Have some self-respect.
The greater eyesore on St Athanasius Square, the offices of the regional government. Brutalism not even pretending to look nice.
In the corner, a sculpture of the top of Athens Polytechnic, no doubt alluding to the 1973 anti-dictatorship uprising there, in the sunken into the ground style so popular recently in public sculpture.
(I’ve seen several instances in Melbourne, it is presumably some kind of postmodern Ozymandias chic.)
No amount of soundly democratic Ozymandias chic is salvaging this building.

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