The Aluminum Curtain: Bauxite and Housing as Strategic Mediators between the Mediterranean and the ‘United States of Europe’

As the Cold War loomed and debates on European unity took shape, Greece stood at a crossroads. This paper focuses on a moment when US-forged ‘strategic dependencies’ transformed rural Greece into a cog in the capitalist machine. The country’s natural wealth, particularly its rich bauxite reserves, fueled Western Europe’s recovery, but shipping it out of the country stifled Greece’s own industrial ambitions. This moment marked a redefinition of architecture as both a tool and a symbol of constrained growth — a pattern that persisted globally throughout the so-called developing era. Far from being a deliberate engine of growth, housing reconstruction emerged as an ad hoc mechanism to address the era’s conflicts and sustain economic activity because early housing schemes were framed as tools for import substitution and investment. Corrugated aluminum sheets — previously used in the construction of military barracks and thus considered a wartime relic — were now used for the first time for domestic roofing. Recommended by US housing specialists, their use epitomized the constrained agency of housing reconstruction in post-WWII Greece. In this case, architectural materiality also stands for the stark disparity, recently raised in seminal studies about the ‘Age of Aluminum’, between resource-extracting peripheries and the consumption-driven cores of modernity.