This article focuses on the Bank of Greece headquarters building in Athens, which has been a site of recurring political expression in contemporary crisis. It is based on a corpus of graffiti writings from the particular building gathered over the span of five years (2010–15), a rather politically dense period. Mapping the constant appearance, removal and reappearance of the writings through a series of architectural drawings, the aim of this article is to explore visual means of understanding graffiti as a palimpsestic phenomenon. The article is structured after the scale of the drawings – from the city scale, to the building and finally the surface – introducing an architectural method of reading and writing graffiti.

Buildings come from drawings, but what happens when buildings are turned into drawing surfaces for unsolicited graffiti writings? Moreover, what happens when the drawings come together in a curated and designed book object? The chapter addresses this line of inquiry through a critical reflection upon An Atlas of Athenian Inscriptions: A Book of Drawings of Writings and Writings on Drawings. It explores the physical and conceptual space of drawings and book objects by archiving the writings produced in three plus one specific situations in Athens, coming from different key places and eras of the city's contemporary political history. The Atlas resituates images, thus is capable for creating innovative relationships, deciphering particular correlations and producing new meanings, while allowing us to make sense of, navigate in, and reconstruct the graffiti landscape through characteristic surface environments. The aim of this project is to introduce ‘atlasing’ as a design method while ensuring that graffiti in Athens are not exploited and erased from memory once erased from buildings by institutions and individuals that seek to undermine their critical potential. It attempts to shift the focus from the esthetic dynamism of graffiti—its most commonly misused characteristic—to the politics of site-specificity and preservation.

This article focuses on the Athens Polytechnic, an emblematic site that has been the epicentre of historical ruptures during which it has been extensively graffitied. It is based on a corpus consisting of graffiti writings on this particular building during three key crises moments in Greece's modern history. It critically examines an architectural drawing of graffiti writings on the edifice and reflects on the methods followed to produce this drawing of writings. The article develops in four parts each of which gradually unfolds the relationship between crisis and representation. Crises and representations are seen as opportunities for criticality and, by extension, sites of critique. By studying key moments of crises of representation in the public domain, as these are expressed in graffiti writing, the Polytechnic becomes the site of writing that registers the various responses to the overwhelming forces of crises. As a representation of these crises, the site of drawing is turned into a montage table—an ‘atlas’ in Warburg's terms—where these crises are resituated, or rather recomposed, thus forging relations and producing new nexuses of meaning. Ultimately, the article aims to show how representations and/of crises have the capacity to operate as sites of knowledge production whilst introducing an architectural design research method to study urban phenomena.

Graffiti have become integral parts of our urban landscapes in the past decades. Yet, they are increasingly treated as mere aesthetic objects or fleeting images. Moving away from the plural form, the subjects and the aesthetics of graffiti—with the latter being its most seductive and commonly abused characteristic—this chapter shifts the focus to their unique, material and situated character. This happens through a close study of three extensively graffitied sites in Athens city centre, the writings of which are being recorded. The way these sites are (re)presented is crucial in understanding each situation. The chapter is based on a series of drawings documenting the writings—and, by extension, the places—in multiple scales. Α series of associated terms emerging from the design explorations are being set up as potential frameworks of criticality that any subsequent researcher could apply in any situation. The aim is to introduce an urban design method of studying graffiti that brings together image and text, materiality and temporality, and consensus and dissensus. This chapter demonstrates how graffiti has the potential to reveal the multi-temporal dimension and multi-authored nature of urban environments whilst acting as a critical spatial practice.