I am writing these lines in 2021, exactly forty years after the first coupling of the words ‘critical’ and ‘regionalism’ appeared on a printed page to discuss the work of Greek architects Suzana and Dimitris Antonakakis in Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s article ‘The Grid and the Pathway’ of 1981.1 Introduced by them then, the architectural theory of critical regionalism was recapitulated by Kenneth Frampton in 1983.2 It originally aimed to offer an alternative way out of the crisis of ‘international style’ modern architecture that begged to differ from the postmodern architecture of the 1980s then being propagated as the main solution to the problem. As the large-scale projects of reconstruction that followed the Second World War were changing the face of entire European cities by the 1960s, the sense that these modernist buildings produced an anonymous built environment intensified. Local communities increasingly perceived them as alienating generic technological ‘boxes’ that neglected their specific cultural identities or needs.