Andreas Kourkoulas studied architecture and took his doctorate at UCL in London. In 1987 he co-founded Kokkinou-Kourkoulas Architects in Athens with his partner Maria Kokkinou, and for the next three decades ran a practice and a teaching career in parallel. He is professor emeritus of architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, and has lectured and taught widely abroad — the Architectural Association and the Bartlett in London, EPFL and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Georgia Tech among them. He now also serves as vice-chairman of the board of the National Archaeological Museum.

“The outside walls closed, monolithic. The atrium open to the sky.”

Kourkoulas's writing treats architecture as a stable framework for everyday public and private life — as much about choreography and movement as about form and material. The Benaki Museum on Pireos 138, the practice's most-published project, opened in 2004, reads accordingly: the visitor's path, through ramps and around the central atrium, is given as much weight as the rooms themselves. Exhibition halls run along the perimeter, the courtyard pulls the building open to the sky, and the boundary between museum and city stays deliberately quiet. Two decades on, it is still the cleanest post-industrial conversion in Athens.

Beyond the museum, Kokkinou-Kourkoulas has worked across houses, shops, restaurants, hotels and large office complexes, with two nominations for the EU's Mies van der Rohe Award and the first LEED Gold certification awarded to an office building in Greece. Since Maria Kokkinou's death in 2022, the practice continues under Kourkoulas's direction.