Sunday, August 26, 2007

Holidays in Hell

As Greece is burning and I'm looking out to a nuclear sunset, I stumbled upon this book promoting tourism in Greece in 1974. The dream was of metabolist light resorts, modernist sea-scapes and fun nights spent at the hotel disco. Everybody was ugly in the 70's but that didn't seem to stop them from having too much fun. Now that metabolism is no longer an architectural movement but the reason your diet doesn't work, we spend our vacations next to concrete supermarket Parthenons (why not?) and we keep searching for the ideal abandoned beach that nobody else knows about (they do, they're all there). The promise of architecture on the islands did become a traditionalistic (sic) compromise lost somewhere between a huge misunderstanding and the greedy vernacular.On the plane today I saw the 60's Mon Parnass resort, surrounded by the burnt forest of Parnitha, which should probably go in to the Tourist book of hell from this summer of non-stop forest fires

4 comments:

David Hargrove said...

I am watching this news with a combination of horror and anger. Where are the water-dropping airplanes?

Anonymous said...

kala ta les.... i prefer the 70's i think

Andreas Angelidakis said...

hey hargrove :) the planes were flying just above the house all day long... but with so many fires and such winds there was no stopping the flammers. kostika yes the 70's look great from a distance, but today they only work if they're forgotten. (I'm not even sure what that means, anyway)

Stratos Bacalis said...

Holidays from hell... indeed...summer of hell...this summer must be the worst ever...