In the center of Kefalari, in the Municipality of Kifissia in Athens, there is an old 1955 hotel consisting of a basement, a ground floor and three floors. It was asked to be rebuilt, upgraded, strengthened, but also to change use, which required complete architectural, static and mechanical redesign.

The building for its new function, as an office building, was desirable to have a completely different architectural style. The architect Stelios Oikonomidis made the architectural redesign and gave him a modern, transparent and open form with glass panes.

The new architectural requirements have led to the maintenance of only the peripheral columns of the existing load-bearing structure. A reinforced concrete structure is built, with cores and new thin, slender and very durable composite columns. In addition, the slabs are strengthened by gaining extra thickness to allow removal of the internal columns and the configuration of free office spaces.

The building owes its increased earthquake resistance, to the new cores that are founded on the basement walls. The cores have a complex multi-folded shape while serving the safe vertical movement of people by accommodating staircases and lifts with the appropriate standards of safe escape in the event of an earthquake or fire.

At the same time, the building acquires an external, escape steel staircase, which is incorporated into the new exterior steel addition of the building. In addition, the building acquires a new steel pergola on the roof and new balconies from steel profiles.

One more particularity of the structure was that the shape of the buildings’ plain view was skew rather than rectangular in order to fit the shape of the plot.

The construction of the building has not yet been implemented.