Army Share Fund Building

Panepistimiou, Stadiou, Voukourestiou and Amerikis Sts, 1927-38

Architects
Leonidas Bonis (1896-1963)
Vassilios Kassandras (1904-1973)



The Army Share Fund building (ASF), a work by the distinguished architects Leonidas Bonis and Vassilios Kassandras, both graduates of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, is one of the landmarks of interwar Athenian architecture. It is also one of the few buildings in the heart of the Greek capital to cover an entire city block.
The final design and supervision of the building was assigned to the two architects after they had won first prize in an open nationwide competition in 1926-27 that was adjudicated abroad. The final solution designed by Bonis and Kassandras was a creative adaptation of innovative French models to the conditions of interwar Athens. The building was erected between 1928 and 1938 in three phases, which correspond to its three main sections: (a) that which overlooks Stadiou St and includes shops on the ground floor and offices on the upper ones; (b) the middle section that extends from Voukourestiou to Amerikis street and houses the Pallas movie theatre (with 1300 stalls, an amphitheatrical balcony of 700 seats and boxes), the basement Maxim’s hall (initially a dance hall, it became a cinema in 1949 and from 1971 on was the "Aliki" theatre) with offices on its upper floors and (c) the last section facing Panepistimiou St with the historic coffee and sweet shops Zonars and Floca, as well as other shops on the ground floor and offices on the upper floors.
The building initially had a two-storey ground floor and four upper floors. Another, inset floor was added later. The floor plans were organised around the central open space of the inner Spyros Milios courtyard that had exits onto Stadiou, Voukourestio and Amerikis.
The façades were treated in the spirit of modern classicism with Art Déco features. The characteristic feature is the robust simplicity, unity in diversity and a trend toward stylistic abstraction in the more recent sections of the building compared to the earlier ones. The ground floor is adorned by projecting marquees and the last floor is partially set in, thus reducing the impression of the overall volume. The corner at Stadiou and Voukourestiou has been given a special curved form.
Three venues in the A.S.F. building – the Pallas movie theatre (1930-32), the Maxim’s/ "Aliki Theatre" and the Zonars and Floca confectioners shops – were among the most famous meeting places between1 1930-70, with many rare architectural echoes of that period. The compositional clarity, comfort, aristocratic luxury, bold but tasteful polychromy and inspired handling of the Art Déco decorative code lent these venues a Paris atmosphere. But the fate of these heritage buildings is uncertain since the A.S.F. building is now involved in a gaudy "modernisation", which is being carried out by a contracting company using the anti-architectural design-construction process.

TRANSPORTATION