Inconclusive Modernity and the Athenian <em>Polykatoikìa</em>

A review of Ioanna Theocharopoulou’s Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens, third edition with a foreword by Kenneth Frampton. Athens: Onassis Foundation, 2022, 208 pp. ISBN 978-618-85928-3-4. Theocharopoulou’s Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens offers an eclectic social history of the Athenian multi-storey apartment building, aka the polykatoikìa, a popular housing type that has become a trademark of the Greek city at large. Her study critically revisits Greece’s urban past by enlisting a wide range of interpretative perspectives sourced from various academic fields, seeking to provide a more nuanced account of how its capital city grew exponentially from the répétition différente of the polykatoikìa.