Curriculum Vitae


Pikionis was born in Piraeus in 1887.

His first love was painting - he was a personal friend of de Chirico whom he met in Athens - and after studying engineering at the polytechnic of Athens, he went to Münich to study painting and sculpture. In 1909 he moved to Paris where he became interested in architecture, returning to Greece in 1912.

A contemporary of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Asplund and Lewerentz. Pikionis initially embraced the Modern Movement, finding in its organic simplicity an echo of his own reinterpretation of the Greek Neo-classical spirit. If the more perceptive minds among us accepted Modernism at that time, it was for the following reasons: it promised to become the embodiment of organic truth; it was austere, and fundamentally simple; it was governed by a geometry that conveyed a universal design capable of symbolising our age. By the mid 30s, however, after he had built the Lycabettus School according to Modernist principles and found it deeply unsatisfying, Pikionis had begun to move away from Modernism, through his reinterpretation of the Macedonian vernacular and his belief that the universal spirit had to be coupled to the spirit of nationhood. The experimental School of Thessaloniki, the villa in Ano Philothei, the Xenia Hotel in Delphi and the Aixoni Housing project, all display this tendency to draw upon Greek architectural and cultural models. As Kenneth Frampton writes, The architect arrived at a dematerialised mode of expression that was at once Greek and anti-Greek in the sense that it was of the place, integrated into the mythos, the landscape, the climate and the way of life; anti-Greek in that much of its inspiration lay elsewhere, remote in space and time.

The landscaping of the area around the Acropolis - a vast project undertaken in the last years of the architect's life - was perhaps the most significant of his works and amply demonstrates Pikionis sympathy with Greek landscape and tradition. It is the almost ecological insistence on the interdependency of culture and nature, which gives Pikionis' work a critical edge that is as relevant today as it was thirty years ago. For it repudiates our habitual fixation on the freestanding technical and/or aesthetic object, not to mention our destructive, Promethean attitude towards nature that once was beneficial but now is assuming the ominous dimensions of a tragic legacy. While Pikionis realised very little in his sixty years of practice, and while he never had to deal with commissions of the socio-technological complexity that characterises so much of our contemporary building, he nevertheless strove for a symbiotic, ontological architecture, where the identity of the subject and of the society would be redeemed through mutual reverence... While he was all too aware of the growing harshness that was enveloping his beloved Greece on every side, he nonetheless evoked a vision of a Mediterranean civilisation that was "other", A Baudelairean sense of luxus shimmering in the light after the fall of technology.