Dimitris Antonakakis

"Dimitris Pikionis: Elaboration and Improvisation"

[From Dimitris Pikionis, Architect 1887-1968 'A Sentimental Topography', Architectural Association, London.]


It is my belief that in the recent past Greek architecture has been greatly impoverished and has not contributed in the least to the cultural evolution of our country. This situation is the fault of not only the architects and their critics, but also of the public, which cannot even differentiate between architects, civil engineers, and contractors. While architects criticize the indifference of the public towards the constructions that shape the city, architecture still tends to be seen as the exclusive preserve of specialists; a technical matter. Only a few voices have attempted to open up the debate in an effort to reveal the importance of architecture in everyday life.

One such voice belonged to Dimitris Pikionis, whom I met in the fifties. By then, he was a mature man with a lifetime's accumulated knowledge derived not only from his philosophical and historical studies and his exposure to the pioneers of contemporary art, but also from the adverse experiences brought about by political events - the persecution of his friends and students, the nightmarish distortion of the post-war Greek ideal, and the emergence of a society where values were limited to power and profit.

Pikionis waged a secret war against these things. Speaking allegorically, he drew our attention to virtue, which he defined with the help of verses from Solomos, Sikelianos and Plasmas' --although his words were lost on much of his audience. To many Pikionis represented the stereotypical Greek intellectual; a poor teacher in a worn-out overcoat, an old man chasing rainbows behaving in an old-fashioned way, talking through his teeth and letting the words mingle with the coffee stains and cigarette butts on the table, all the while keeping his eyes down to avoid the astounded looks on the faces of his students.

Winter. Early evening.
I am alone on the patio of the architectural faculty. The high door of the Neo-Classical building opens. A grey overcoat and a grey hat appear. It is Pikionis, stooping, with a cigarette butt between his lips. He turns up the collar of his overcoat and looks at the ground absent-mindedly. He walks forward, alone. The rays of the sun penetrate the transparent gates, reaching the marble parapet that we had been measuring, re-measuring and plotting the day before. Suddenly he stops as if something appears strange to him and turns back towards the door to look at the illuminated parapet. Then he approaches and rests his hand on it. He touches it in the same way as a blind man tries to identify a beloved person. He is absorbed and distant. He makes sure. He turns up his grey collar once more and walks away, trying to light his cigarette butt.

In the fifties, students were given critical texts, which linked Greek cultural activity to international events: they covered poetry, prose, painting, theatre, but not architecture. The Greek architects of the inter-war period - Valentis, Despotopoulos, Karandinos, Mitsakis, Panagiotakos, Papadakis - did not figure in any of the publications which reached the country at the time. It seemed as if modern architecture existed only in the West and in the few foreign magazines available to us.

Pikionis was then the only teacher of architecture whose buildings could not be tagged by convenient labels. Everybody talked about him, whether they agreed with him or not. Few of his students really followed in his footsteps, yet this did not seem to bother him. He was devoted to building and designing.

I met him one day as he was coming out of a bookshop. 'Come and see', he said, and he guided me back to the archaeological section. He opened a book on the Acropolis of Athens, and went through it until he came to a photograph of the sacred rock. '
'Look at the sky... What clouds. The Acropolis, the Parthenon, everything changes; yet everything has the same weight.

Pikionis taught us that organizing space means much more than placing a series of interesting pictures along a path, or achieving a 'structural' combination of functions. Rather, it implies putting everyday activities into an order, which reflects the importance we attach to ourselves and others, to individual and collective life. By this reasoning, our private space, or the one we propose to others, becomes a measure of our attitude towards life. If our environment shows inconsistency, frivolity or a lack of judgement, it is because these elements are to be found somewhere within us. Therefore, to elaborate an architecturally coherent space, we have to refer to a mystical life that begins in the depths of our consciousness and reveals itself as it relates to our surroundings.

When I first met Pikionis he was building a house for Potamianos in Philothei. He was at the site almost every day, collaborating with the workmen - explaining, inquiring, sketching and deciding. Construction was for him the logic by which the characteristics of the materials were revealed. He maintained that quality of space could be achieved even with inexpensive materials, as long as they were combined in delicate and innovative ways. His concern for detail went far beyond decoration. It was for him a way of restoring a harmony between space and materials, of reviving our childhood instincts of learning through seeing, touching and smelling. It is well known that an unusual organization of space is more readily accepted if it employs familiar materials. Because materials are essential components of life, they have the power to re-establish man's relationship of immediacy with his environment. Pikionis made use of a wide range of materials, both natural and artificial, traditional and modern. He approached all with the attitude of a craftsman. He always explained what he wanted to do and not how, allowing his collaborators to take the initiative and contribute meaningfully to the project while still retaining overall control. In this way, he laid the groundwork for the development of a new way of thinking, for the renewal of a constructional logic that had been worn out by everyday life.

The fifties saw the wholesale demolition and rebuilding of Athens. During this period, the city's architectural vocabulary seemed reduced to simplistic clichés. In this context, Pikionis' contribution appeared to be not merely another way of thinking but a revolution against the indifference towards what was being built and why. He condemned all the things that were destroying the Athenians' relationship with their surroundings and called for a rhythm and care which were alien to those times. Unable to counter his arguments with logic, his opponents resorted to tactics of misinterpretation and malice. Therefore, instead of being used as a basis for further thought and action, Pikionis' vocabulary was slandered or copied in a frivolous manner.

'Synthesis', Paul Valéry said, 'is an artificial invention which attempts to give order to a primitive chaos of feelings and natural evolution. It involves intentional and contemplative actions that discipline the impulsiveness of a natural production according to a particular conception.(2) These words also ring true for Pikionis. With unusual perseverance, he would initiate each day a fresh ceremony of inquiry at the construction site, rejecting one solution after the other, as if caught in a process of catharsis, reorganizing and reordering his material until he approved of the final form.

'Yesterday evening' he told me, 'I tried to place five objects on the table: a vase, a glass, an ashtray, a box of cigarettes and a matchbox ... It was not at all easy. It lacked geometry, frame. There was an absence of order. Then I tried to implement the "Doxiades" laying-out method(3) and the subdivision of distances according to the analogies of the Golden Section. The result was much more solid, the picture much more precise, the reference more visible.'

Pikionis used to say: 'One must work ceaselessly and prepare oneself for that instant when the lightning flashes in the dark, so one can see.' He told his students to keep their eyes and ears open and their minds and spirits free. However, this readiness had to be accompanied by a clarification of the principles of synthesis, so that
any improvised decisions would not mar the holistic nature of the composition. Thus, each set of original decisions ran into the next one to form a continuous, albeit 'arbitrary', emotional geometry bound up with the interpretation of the landscape.

At the Acropolis, the size of the construction made it impossible for him to supervise everything - where mistakes occurred, they had to be rectified on the spot. In doing this, he would search for the principles by which he could incorporate the mistake into a system of exceptions, thus activating the predetermined geometry. During this struggle, it seemed as if he was not merely thinking, but functioning with his hands and his body as a whole, so that the work was the outcome not only of logical correlations but also of a totality of bodily impulses. He would improvise by moving objects forwards then back, up then down, until he was certain of the result. Only then would he take up an axe to hit the wood, or a chisel to sculpture the stone. Aware of his weaknesses, he tested them against the problem, and in this way strengthened both himself and the project.

While still a student, I was fortunate enough to spend some time working on the Acropolis project during the summer of 1956 and the following winter. I actually saw very little of Pikionis. He was absorbed by the work at Loumbardiaris and could not be persuaded to come up to the Acropolis where we worked. 'I trust you', he used to say. 'Trust leads to responsibility.'

His work to the Acropolis was indeed an act of confidence: confidence in those who would spend time in that place; confidence in the old folk who rested on the low stone walls or carefully walked down from one flight of steps to another; confidence in the children who hopped from one flat stone to another, taking care not to tread on the cracks - he watched them mesmerized, recognizing in their dancing movement an interpretation of his own original decision.

Morning at the Acropolis. At breakfast we sat in the small coffee shop at Loumbardiaris. On the shelf above the fireplace was a glass with red roses.
'Yesterday', he said, 'Tsarouhis(4) passed by and pointed them out to me...
See how their presence transforms the light.'
He had taken hold of some biscuits and was chewing them absent-mindedly. A street-cleaner, passing by, saw him and shouted: 'Hey, old man, do you live on biscuits now?
He laughed wholeheartedly.

The quality of an artist depends upon the quantity of past he bears within him,' Jean Gris once said.(5) This seems opposite for Pikionis, who constantly assembled and copied ancient texts, creating a collage of memories which allowed him to become absorbed in the depths of history. For the pathway under the Acropolis, he collected the marble and clay shards left over from the shameless demolition of nineteenth-century Athens and composed them into a giant collage both of past and present, an open dialogue with the monuments, the landscape and time.

I met him in front of a kiosk. It was the third day of the trial of the opposition. Dictatorship. He was looking at the newspaper headlines. He held my hand. I felt he was moved - as I was too. I remember his words:
'They left nothing standing... where is this country heading?... Oh what shame:
He lifted his head, stood up straight and looked at me. I still remember his eyes, huge behind his magnifying eyeglasses. Then he looked down again. I bent over to listen.
'We must endure; he mumbled and, for quite a long time, he pressed my hand with a strength unbelievable for an old man... I think we said no more.
Then his small slender figure vanished in the crowd. I never saw him again...

There, under the Acropolis, in the days after the civil war when intolerance prevailed, these references to the past were a way of talking about the future - a reminder of who we were and where we came from. The collage derived from the ruins became a mirror inviting us to look at ourselves and at what previous generations had left us. It was also a protest, a touching attempt to get through to a city that had been demolished with unbelievable cynicism and barbarity by its own citizens.
Pikionis sought the elusive 'Greekness' that resides in the materials, plants, techniques and ideas of the land. But he found himself alone in his efforts. There was no critical comment, and an uninformed public saw only the surface of things.

Take a walk to Loumbardiaris today. Has his work been understood
by succeeding generations? Or by the State? Or by tourists? We profit from his contribution but at the same time we destroy it, vulgarise it. Every day, as his work becomes more distorted, we gradually extinguish the traces of his unprecedented presence.

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NOTES

1. - Greek poets: Solomos (1798-1857); Palamas (1859-1942); Sikelianos (1884-1951).

2. - Paul Valéry, Situation de Baudelaire, Monaco 1924.

3. - See issues 4, 5 and 6 of the Third Eye.

4. - A contemporary Greek painter.

5. - Roger Garaudi, D'un réalisme sans rivage, Paris 1963.