Z. LORENTZATOS

The Architect Dimitris Pikionis

[DIMITRIS PIKIONIS 1887 - 1968, Bastas-Plessas Publications; Athens 1994.]


I shall attempt to say, very briefly, why this country is a poorer place without Pikionis.
Today, when the wheel of Greece - to put it metaphorically - has lost almost all its spokes or spindles and has retreated to the centre, to the hub of the wheel, the difficulties of self-knowledge and the development, on that self-knowledge, of a new culture have multiplied to such an extent that it is not only the chimaera that slips through our hands (that, after all, is its purpose) - so, too, does the realisation of any such prospect. This cannot be a very good sign, though it is not necessarily a cause for despair.

Those who have attempted not only to obtain this self-knowledge but also to proceed to produce works that we can use, as signposts along the road to the new culture should be seen as our fathers. We should know that they keep upright the tree upon which we rest for support, and which has never yet fallen. Who knows: perhaps in a time of great drought, when we will have no expectations from any sources and when the branches or leaves of the tree will be tattered and deserving only of our pity, those roots - which we thought shrivelled - will manage to drag up from the bowels of the earth the few drops of water which will save the tree from withering and death. One of those fathers, or one of those roots, will be Pikionis in the case of this country.

When the huge tidal wave of 1922 cast all the Greeks of the east with their wives and children - as shipwrecked mariners on the rocks of Greece, Pikionis raised the burden, not only mentally but also physically, since it was from among the refugees that - almost symbolically, one might say - he chose his life's companion. Exactly a hundred years earlier, in 1822, a smaller but no less tragic wave of refugees had washed his forefathers up from the ruin of Chios in Syra. The merchants and sailors of Chios transformed the Syra of the 19th century into the leading Greek port, and later the Greek state, in recognition o f what the Chiots had done there, allowed them to settle in Piraeus, where Dimitris Pikionis was born in 1887.

Pikionis writes: "Someone has said, quite correctly, that the future of the Greek nation will depend on how responsibly it occupies its position between East and West. I would add that it also depends on whether we can properly combine contradictory currents into a new form ". And he concludes, typically, "But it will be enough to say here that I am a man of the East" (Autobiographical Notes). With the Asia Minor disaster, Greece retreated to the hub of the wheel. This retreat brought with it a boon: contrition and contemplation. It was there that Pikionis experienced the difficulties of self-knowledge, and to the extent to which he managed to overcome some of them he was able to produce a certain number of works.
Pikionis knew as well as the rest of us that we have to live in a machine-dominated world and that there are both real and artificial needs: he did not have his head in the clouds. Despite what many people imagine, he did not lack a firm grounding. He immediately distinguished between real and artificial needs. His buildings are testimony to that. The works, which Pikionis put together, house or receive eternal man, but in his modern technological guise. But they betray none of the things that modern man has really gained in his attempt to make his life easier in the material sense. The works of Pikionis incorporate all the real conquests of modern man; he discards none of the things that could relieve us practically or quantitavely. The difference was that Pikionis, like the true builder that he was, loved the world --matter and material-- so as to guide or complete it and end with the spirit and matters spiritual. He knew that the bread was sacred, but he takes good care to tell us that that "man shall not live by bread alone", leading us mortals to a total --rather than a partial or fragmentary-- reality.

This was the difference between him and most modern architects, and between him and the rest of us. This was what distinguished him from those who believe that the world has only one aspect, the quantitative and material aspect that, which can be judged, measured and recorded in statistics, that which can be seen by the physical eye. Ultimately, he encountered the spirit by studying matter. And his strength or gift ennobled all the materials on which he laid his hand.

For Pikionis, the world revealed hidden things. And as he had learned from Solomos, the eye of his soul was constantly alert, as he himself put it, "to the revelation of the world of the mind concealed in nature"(The Dishonour of Gaea).

In order to perceive the world of the mind in the world and the materials of the world, which he so loved, Pikionis had to employ 'the inner eye' a term that crops up frequently in his writings. He took the phrase from a poem by Sikelianos --the lessons of Solomos recorded in abbreviated form-- and added to it intellectual hearing, touch, taste, and smell"(ibid).

Pikionis needed those senses to be spiritual, so that he would lose nothing of their incalculable, immeasurable or invisible side --in other words, those aspects of them which conveyed the spiritual or were qualitative. Once when he was brought a tray of food in hospital, he turned his head away and said to his family, "The food isn't symmetrical". He saw everywhere in the world that which we do not see: he saw the spirit shaping the world He saw qualities as we see before us "an ironclad bulldozer or a harbour quay", and as we are capable of stumbling only over corporeal or solid matter, so he stumbled over the incorporeal, the spirit of matter, that which for most people does not exist.

For example, we may smile when we read in the Gospels that the spirit in human form (Christ) walked on the water but did not sink. Pikionis smiles at our smile.

He could understand nothing in the world other than in terms of the mental power that holds the cosmos together; otherwise, the relationship did not function. And if this relationship, this exchange or correspondence between the Creator and creation, were interrupted for a moment, or if he imagined its non existence, as many of us do, the whole world would disappear for him, or it would sink forthwith into incoherence and chaos, into complete and global paranoia.

This is how he understood the venerable art of architecture, too. The real builder 'imitates' God when he builds: he breathes life into the clay. Without that bond all buildings are shallow, no matter how deep their foundations or how high their walls. Pikionis emphasised the divinely instructed relationship of the builder, or this spiritual exchange, and he often repeated the line from the song of degrees in the Psalrns "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it".

What would the meaning of such a statement have been for early man? This saying conveys a danger: to erect a building is to confine within it a sacred power. Outside insecurity rules, and space is at the mercy of powers of all kinds. To build, then, is a dangerous act and the structure needs to be erected in a suitable place, in a suitable manner, with the correct orientation and the correct sanctification (a custom continued in Greece today, with the priest's blessing on the new house).

Pikionis never forgot the spiritual and enlightened origins of the builder's craft. He knew that the force of man is irrevocably darkened when that inner spiritual light is absent -the light, which unites man not only with his Creator but also with all the other creatures and with creation itself. Pikionis was afraid that we might exchange the face for the mask, once and for all.

"Truly", he wrote, "we have placed the humble kingdom of the individual higher than the eternal kingdom of mankind" (Greek Vernacular Art and Us). In the arts in particular, the human face is transformed into a mask full of strange fancies and individual caprices (what we approvingly call 'originality') when that inner spiritual light is absent and cannot shine out over the thousands of nameless craftsmen of the great spiritual traditions - those we admire and study today - and man will never have the good fortune to become man: he• will remain an individual. The craftsman never emerges from his individual confines to express, in the community, his own section of the general vision, which belongs to a universe faith. When he does so, what Pikionis calls 'the humble kingdom of the individual' takes the place of ''the eternal kingdom of mankind", the mask replaces the face, and Heraclitus' "common speech" is elbowed aside to be supplanted by the whims or individual beliefs of each of us. Faith grows numb, and the limbs of doubt stir once more. Cohesion is lost, together with difficult concord, and disintegration and facile discord begin. Our minds, rather than being 'as one; are 'divided'. Rather than advancing together and, under a shared roof, each of us being responsible for himself - a determinism which all the universes and all the great civilisations have obeyed in the monuments they left us, fixed or mobile - we each take our own course and, like dead celestial bodies, fall out of orbit and stray aimlessly through the void of individualism.

At any event, it is man who is lost. The same is true today, when, having gone to the other extreme of the individual who does not see fit to become a member of the human race, we pursue the equal abstraction of humanity, and in fighting to save humanity savagely hack the human being to pieces. A mere glance at the mass myths of our times is sufficient to convince us of our everyday mistakes from which we never learn. In both cases, whether under the flag of the individual or the banner of humanity, it is always man who disappears or is mutilated: now with the sword of Gog, now with the axe of Magog. The middle way: man is a creature of the middle. He follows Heraclitus' path without return, descending the uphill slope and climbing the downhill slope, dying in life and living in death, "immortal mortals, mortal immortals". Such men do not surrender to abstract ideas, to the empty creed of the individual, to the salvation (salvation by the Devil?) of humanity by force. They will not run aground on the reefs of ephemeral philosophers or false prophets. As Pikionis puts it, they stand "on the fiery ground of reality" (ibid.).

God placed man at the centre of creation, "a second world, a small world within a greater", according to St John Damascene, one of Pikionis' spiritual guides, and made him "…king of all things upon earth, ruled himself from above; earthly and heavenly, transient and immortal".

Pikionis found such people in the highest or official forms of each great art whose monuments he studied, but he also discovered them in unofficial or eternal art, in art's most humble form, the vernacular. Official art shows us man as king by virtue of his mind, while vernacular art shows us him as king by virtue of his instinct. Both forms are always present in cultures which have a common spiritual background or a shared faith - that is, cultures which presuppose what Pikionis called a "human set" or "life set", where all "the partial truths are interlinked and all stem from the depths, from the essence of that set" (ibid.). I have called vernacular art 'eternal' because although official art often comes to a halt or disappears, the vernacularis never lost. In these two manifestations of art, Pikionis saw the spirituality of man in actu. Indeed, he displayed particular care and kindly interest in the most humble form of art, the vernacular, which he saw as the mother and wet-nurse of all other art, whether small, moderate or great, which he viewed as holding the keys to truth and necessity, and which he believed was the perennial fount of all physical and metaphysical teachings. The sweet-tongued teacher could become relentless when recalling our culture to order or reprimanding it; most of the architectural works of that culture, which sprang up in this country at a far remove from the ancestral heritage (that which can still be drawn on creatively, not that which is exhausted) and from the hard school of self-knowledge, were sweepingly condemned by Pikionis as "desk work", as "doodles in pencil on paper, transplanted into this sacred earth of ours" (ibid.).

Pikionis had strict words of instruction for prospective sophists, and even for his chosen disciples: "You will never find great art up in the mountains or in the villages, nor will you find art which is always outstandingly beautiful. But it will always be absolutely natural - that is, true - and it will always be the gift of God, and so just as nature is not always full of beauty, so the natural life is not an unmixed blessing. That is the way it is, and you have to conform with it; if you cannot, that is because your body or your mind is sick" (ibid.)

Pikionis based his particular preference for art in its vernacular form on necessity: as a thinker of strong constitution, he never indulged in ill-timed nostalgia for the past or in catatonic leanings towards lyricism, in whatever foundering form. And that necessity, which emerged in Greece right from the start, was as described below.

As soon as the Greeks raised their heads from slavery and looked around themselves, it was immediately apparent that only unofficial or eternal art, art in its humblest, vernacular form, had stood by them and helped them throughout their lengthy spell of death in life, Calvos' "centuries of night". In its much-scorned forms, it had preserved - together with more than a few proud remnants of earlier ages - the lares et penates of the nation of the Greeks (as natural models) and of the human race (as metaphysical content). No art in its official and higher form was created during this period, all such potential had been locked away centuries before, and the seed of life had lodged in the simplified patterns of folk wisdom or in the art which, as Pikionis puts it, is art "thanks rather to the absence of art than to its presence" (ibid.).

Of course, art in its higher or official form was present during that period in the great wall paintings of certain monasteries - Mt Athos, Meteora - and such art was a continuation of Byzantine art, but in a covert, unofficial, confined manner- intra muros, we might say. Roughly speaking, the trajectory of those travelling masters, based on Crete (which the Turks took from the Venetians in 1669), crossed the firmament from 1453 to 1700. It was an exception. It was a comforting, but falling, star. And the rule remains that, as we know, the Greeks were unable within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire to build or repair their churches unless they had permission, and then only in purely Christian areas. Still less can we speak of imperial art (without an empire), of even state art (without a state), of palace art (without a palace) or of metropolitan art (without a metropolis).

Driven by necessity, then, Pikionis devoted his attention to Greek vernacular art, just as Solomos - for the same reason - had devoted his attention to the vernacular language. Pikionis was among the first in his field to realise that the start had to be made at the bottom, among the foundations, with what had been preserved and handed down in a living manner and was there to be seen, and that the unshakeable creative basis on which we are compelled to stand if we wish to produce viable art is none other that the double-headed tradition (spirit and letter, metaphysical and physical) that the wise and nameless people has preserved intact down to the present. Only necessity bestows true freedom; licence and arbitrariness forge man's bonds. Pikionis had this to say of the life (and art) of the people: "That life is so full of the necessary and useful that there is no room for the arbitrary or the superfluous" (ibid.). And he concludes with a reference to the world of architecture, once more guided by Solomos: "The people, which handed down its words to authors, bestows these shapes upon us, as words in our plastic language" (ibid.).

Pikionis wished to speak the language of architecture. And he spoke it, as Solomos spoke the language of poetry. Both of them drew on the words or the shapes of the people. And they spoke. Others merely stammer.