A 1950s corner building in Athens' Patissia district has received a striking contemporary addition that reimagines urban living through layered design. The architecture studio Arid has renovated and extended a two-story structure from 1951, adding three new floors to create an 850-square-meter hybrid space for residential, co-living, and co-working uses. The project, named Veil, demonstrates how historic urban fabric can be thoughtfully updated while respecting neighborhood character and spatial logic. The intervention carefully responds to Karamanlaki Street's unique morphology, where traditional setbacks create prassies, or semi-open front gardens that serve as transitional spaces between public and private realms.

The design team used these transitional spaces as a guiding principle for the new volume, which strategically pulls back to carve out terraces and voids. This approach preserves openness and visual continuity along the street, allowing the taller building to maintain a sense of lightness and contextual comfort. The architects integrated contemporary elements with the building's original features, which include marble surfaces, wooden floors, and traditional timber window frames. Above the historic base, the new addition features perforated aluminum panels that wrap the facade like a translucent screen, softening the building's mass and blurring the boundaries between structure and surface, concealment and exposure.

A sophisticated double-skin facade system improves both ventilation and privacy for occupants while creating dynamic light effects throughout the day. Movable louvers and rotating panels regulate daylight, producing constantly shifting transparencies that give the building a kinetic quality. As the sun moves across the sky, the appearance of Veil transforms dramatically, making the upper floors seem to hover as an almost immaterial presence above the older base. The perforated aluminum panels filter and reflect light in ever-changing patterns, ensuring that no two moments look exactly the same. This architectural gesture creates a dialogue between the building's solid mass and ephemeral qualities.

The project fundamentally rethinks the social model of the Athenian polykatoikia, the city's characteristic apartment building typology. Beyond private residential units, Veil incorporates dedicated coworking spaces, a shared coliving apartment, and a communal roof garden that offers panoramic views of the surrounding urban landscape. These shared amenities extend the traditional concept of collective urban living for contemporary work and lifestyle patterns. The design remains rooted in Athens' long tradition of dense, mixed-use residential life while addressing modern needs for flexibility, community, and collaboration. The building serves as a model for how cities can densify thoughtfully without sacrificing quality of life or neighborhood character.

Photographers Giorgos Sfakianakis and Giorgos Kordakis documented the project, capturing how the building sits comfortably within Patissia's dense residential fabric. Their images reveal the careful balance between old and new, solid and void, private and communal. The Veil project demonstrates that architectural innovation doesn't require erasing history but can instead create layered compositions that honor the past while embracing the future. As Athens continues to evolve, such interventions offer a sustainable path forward that preserves cultural heritage while meeting contemporary demands for adaptable urban spaces.