The Edit #002: Athens Dosen’t Give A Fuck.
Athens has a funny relationship with beauty.
It has plenty of it. An unreasonable amount, actually. Ancient ruins casually sitting between apartment blocks. Marble everywhere. Little neighbourhood squares. Orange trees. Old men drinking coffee for four hours. Buildings that look incredible at exactly 5:37 in the afternoon when the sun hits them properly.
And then there are the air conditioners.
Fucking everywhere.
Bolted onto balconies. Hanging above shopfronts. Wedged between windows. Balanced over beautiful stone. Sitting underneath marble. Attached to buildings that somebody, at some point, presumably spent a considerable amount of time designing.
Then someone came along with an LG unit and said, yeah, that will do.
I can’t stop looking at them.
More specifically, I can’t stop photographing them.
I walk around Athens, and suddenly I’m standing across the street pointing my phone at somebody’s balcony like an absolute creep.
Nothing is happening. Nobody interesting is standing there. There isn’t even a cat. I’m photographing their air conditioner. And I love it. I also hate it.
That’s becoming my relationship with Athens in general.
It’s one of the most visually contradictory cities I’ve ever spent time in. Athens can be beautiful and completely fucked at exactly the same time. Sometimes on the same building.
A perfectly proportioned facade. Beautiful stone. Great afternoon light.
Air conditioner. Cable. Another cable. Pipe. Satellite dish. Awning. Another air conditioner. Plastic chair. Somebody’s underwear. Done. There seems to be absolutely no attempt to hide any of it. And that’s the bit that fascinates me.
Who decides where these things go?
Does someone actually stand on the pavement and look up at the building before installing one? Does anyone say, “Maybe not there?” Apparently not. The philosophy seems closer to: Does it fit? Yes. Can we drill into that? Probably. Good.
And part of me desperately wants regulation.
Some architectural intervention. A beautifully designed system where air conditioning units are concealed behind screens, integrated into balconies or placed somewhere that doesn’t make a building look like it’s slowly being consumed by household appliances.
Athens deserves better. Then I think about it for another five minutes and realise I don’t want anyone to touch them. Because the second you clean all this shit up, Athens starts becoming somewhere else.
And I’m not sure I want that either.
A CONCRETE OASIS.
Athens isn’t a conventionally beautiful city. That’s part of its charm. From above, it’s this enormous concrete organism spilling outward until mountains eventually tell it to stop. Down at street level, every neighbourhood has its own personality.
Kolonaki behaves differently from Exarchia. Pangrati doesn’t feel like Kypseli. Psyrri changes completely depending on what time you’re walking through it.
The architecture changes. The people change. The shops change. The graffiti changes. Even the fucking air conditioners seem to change. There is history everywhere, but Athens doesn’t seem particularly interested in presenting itself as a museum. It lives on top of its history. Around it. Through it. Sometimes it drills a hole into it and runs an electrical cable across the front. There is something incredibly honest about that.
Athens is a working city. People are hot. People buy air conditioners. They need somewhere to put the compressor. End of architectural discussion. Maybe that’s why I’m fascinated by these things. They’re completely functional objects that have accidentally become part of the city’s visual language.
Nobody designed this aesthetic. Nobody sat in a studio and created a mood board called ATHENS EXTERIOR AIR CONDITIONING SYSTEM 1987–2026. It just happened. One unit at a time. One balcony at a time. One questionable installation decision at a time.
Until the air conditioner eventually became as much a part of the Athenian facade as the striped awning, the aluminium railing, the roller shutter, and the little blue street sign on the corner.
And once you start noticing them, you’re fucked.
You see them everywhere.
UGLY. SEXY. WHATEVER.
There’s a particular kind of ugliness that becomes beautiful when enough time passes. Athens is full of it. Sun-bleached awnings. Cracked render. Old signage. Security shutters. Water heaters. TV antennas. Exposed pipes. Balconies overflowing with plants. Balconies containing absolutely nothing. Balconies containing seventeen objects that appear to have been placed there sometime around 1994 and never reconsidered.
And, of course, air conditioners.
Maybe what I actually love is the complete absence of visual anxiety. Athens doesn’t appear particularly concerned about whether everything matches. It doesn’t seem interested in presenting a perfectly curated version of itself. Things accumulate. People modify buildings. Businesses disappear. Signs remain. Paint fades. New things get bolted onto old things. Then the sun hits the whole mess, and suddenly it looks fucking incredible.
That’s Athens.
Ugly and sexy. Often within about twenty centimetres of each other. There is something refreshing about a city that doesn’t constantly ask for approval. Sydney would probably hide the compressor behind an architecturally approved aluminium screen. Tokyo would somehow integrate it into the building until you barely noticed it.
Athens? Athens bolts the bastard directly onto the wall. Next question. And maybe that’s why I keep pulling out my phone. I’m not really photographing air conditioners anymore. I’m collecting evidence. Evidence of a city that refuses to behave visually. The strange solutions. The bad decisions. The accidental compositions. The cables going nowhere. The things attached to other things that were definitely never designed to have things attached to them. The beautiful bits. The ugly bits. The weird fucking shit that nobody else seems particularly interested in.
I want all of it.
I want to walk every neighbourhood and find the structures that don’t make sense. The renovations that went slightly wrong. The balconies that somehow became storage rooms. The forgotten signs. The improvised repairs. The architectural scars. The things that make you stop and think: Who the fuck decided to do that?
Because increasingly, that’s the Athens I’m interested in photographing. Not the Acropolis. We know the Acropolis is beautiful. I’m interested in the LG compressor hanging crookedly off the apartment block three streets away.
That’s my Athens.
The concrete oasis. The city of marble, mythology, cables, balconies and badly positioned air conditioning units. Would I clean it up? Probably. Would I regulate it? Maybe. Would I immediately complain that Athens had lost something if somebody actually did? Absolutely.
So leave the fucking air conditioners where they are.
I haven’t finished photographing them yet.
Somewhere between the marble, the concrete and the afternoon light, Athens decided the air conditioner could go wherever the fuck it wanted. I should hate it. Instead, I keep taking pictures.