NATURE AND THE PEOPLE

The Vernacular and the Search for a True Greek Architecture

Ioanna Theocharopoulou

5Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More.

Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece,New York, Pella, 1986, p. 13. It is also notable that unlike other young (Northern) nations such as Finland and Ireland where “folk”

culture was used in order to support those nations’ claims to independ­

ence, in Greece laographyas an object of study and as an academic discipline begins almost a century afterIndependence. The first sus­

tained scholarly study of laography by Nikolaos Politis – illustrated by Dimitris Pikionis – was published in 1918.

6This claim has a long and complex lineage. See Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colon ­ ization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Stanford, Stanford Uni­

versity Press, 1996. See also Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore and Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece.

112 IOANNA THEOCHAROPOULOU

art and architecture and sought intimate links between “humble buildings”

and the Greek landscape. Like their Northern European counterparts, the perceived connection with nature was what allowed them to talk about

“timelessness” and “immutability” in respect to this vernacular. Greeks “found”

their lost – or at least buried – past in the Hellenic landscape and they pro ­ jected some of their history as well as their creative ideas onto their readings of the Hellenic landscape. But the similarities with Northern Europe end here. Rather than praising the great awe­inspiring forests, Greeks talked about a sun­drenched, bleached, harsh, and barren land in the midst of a gentle blue sea.

In actuality, the Greek architects’ and other intellectuals’ interest in studying indigenous shelter – not only formally interesting structures but even explicitly uninteresting ones as long as they were built by “the people” – began during the mid­nineteenth century. At that time there was a shared concern to safeguard the previously orally transmitted cultural artifacts produced and inherited from almost four centuries of Ottoman rule (1453–1821). The research conducted included gathering and transcribing fairy tales, songs, poems, and stories, as well as collecting, sketching, and photographing material drawn from regional arts and crafts, clothing, and by the early 1920s, dwellings. Those who studied these artifacts were called laographers(from laòs= people and gràfo = to write, to transcribe). Although essentially identical to ethnography, as “èthnos“ means “nation” in Greek, laography rather than ethnography provided a new connection between the mostly uneducated laòs and the idea of new Hellenic state. In addition, as anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has pointed out, “èthnosdid not need a branch of study of its own . . . [being] one of the eternal verities, an absolute moral entity against which the laòscould be matched and measured.”5

Scholars have remarked extensively on the ideological project of Greek laographersas a way to bolster the claims for an “unbroken” cultural continuity between ancient and modern Greece.6Clearly there was a great deal of ideology there, but that was not all. Wishing to transcribe and record aspects of modern Greece was a timely quest, since there was extremely little information about the everyday life of occupied Greeks during Ottoman times. Until the 1940s – and despite the ample studies of classical Greece, primarily by non­Greeks – there were few scholarly studies of more recent geography, geology, population structure, religions, climate, etc. The wish on the part of Greek intellectuals to study ordinary people’s lives and local vernacular architecture during the long centuries of Ottoman occupation also had to do with restoring a sense of history – as well as ascribing some dignity, elegance, and even wisdom – to these “dark ages” of Greece’s past.

Pikionis and Konstantinidis discussed in this essay wrote about popular/

vernacular architecture, often in parallel with “popular art.” What did these studies give to these architects and what might we learn from a close study of vernacular architecture today? In what follows I explore the ways in which Pikionis and Konstantinidis approached the issue of “anonymous”

laographicresearch and discuss how it became a rich source of inspiration both in terms of theoretical work as well as building projects. By studying the relationship of buildings built by “men of the soil” to local land use and climatic conditions, these architects were able to learn by example, that is to imagine – primarily in texts as well as in projects, built and unbuilt – a new contemporary architecture, appropriate to local building materials, climate, and cultural life.

5.2 The Rodakis house, Aegina.

Source: © Neohellenic Architecture Archives, Benaki Museum, Athens.

7Kenneth Frampton, “For Dimitris Pikionis,” in Dimitris Pikionis, Architect 1887–1968. A Sentimental Topography, London, Architectural Association, 1989, p. 9.

THE SEARCH FOR A TRUE GREEK ARCHITECTURE 113

Dimitris Pikionis and the Languageof Popular Architecture

Dimitris Pikionis’s interest in the relationship of built form to nature and landscape is well known. In particular, his design for the topography of the walkway to the Acropolis at Athens and landscaping of nearby Philopappou Hill (1951–57) are widely considered masterpieces of modern landscape and architecture. In a catalogue accompanying an exhibition of Pikionis’s work held at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1989, Kenneth Frampton wrote about Pikionis’s “almost ecological insistence”:

Pikionis’ importance today derives from what one might call his onto­

topographical sensibility – that is, from his feeling for the interaction of the being with the glyptic form of the site. . . . It is this 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.7

Like many others of his generation, Pikionis began his studies in Athens but pursued some years of further education in Northern Europe before returning to practice in Greece. He completed his studies in engineering at the National Polytechnic School of Athens (there was no separate School of Architecture in

5.3 Dimitris Pikionis. House section and plan, Rodakis house, Aegina.

Note the niches in the thick stone walls for storage, as well as the outstretched palms carved on either side of the fireplace. In plan, the threshold (alòni) is marked by the small stone­paved circle at the edge of the building.

Source: Klaus Vrieslander and Julio Kaimi, Rodakis’s House in Aigina (To spiti tou Rodaki stin Aigina), [1934], reprinted Athens, 1997.

8Klaus Vrieslander and Julio Kaimi also collaborated with Pikionis in a progressive journal, perhaps the clos­

est equivalent to an avant­garde publication in Greece at that time.

The Third Eye[To Trito Mati] Journal (1935–37), was co­edited by Pikionis and the artist Nikos Chatzikyriakos­

Gikas. As cited on the journal’s cover page, The Third Eye published articles on “music, art, poetry, theater, ethnography, youth and philosophy.”

9The example I have in mind, although not at all similar in scale or form or ambition, is the house of postman Cheval, built in stone carried mostly by hand by Ferdinand Cheval alone, between 1879 and 1892.

114 IOANNA THEOCHAROPOULOU

Greece until 1918) before setting off for Munich to study painting (1908–09), and Paris to study drawing and sculpture (1909–12). Pikionis’s first in­depth studies of a popular/vernacular house, the Rodakis house on the island of Aegina, began almost immediately upon his return to Greece. He traveled to Aegina often, both on his own and later on with his students (he began teaching at the School of Architecture in 1921) to record this house in drawings and photographs.

Pikionis’s studies of the Rodakis house were complex. At one level, he perceived the house with European eyes, obviously knowledgable of major artistic movements from the North, such as Cubism and Surrealism. For him this house was a “primitive” other– an object trouvè, as fascinating as some of the African masks “discovered” by Picasso and Giacometti in the Parisian flea markets – and Pikionis often used the terms primitive and popularinterchangeably indicating how close he felt they were in meaning. Among the black and white photographs included in the book published by his friends the German painter Klaus Vrieslander and the writer and shadow­theater artist Julio Kaimi, are details of mysterious figures on the property wall: a pig, a clock, a snake, and a dove. According to Vrieslander and Kaimi they could symbolize “Luck, Time, Evil and Peace”.8Other photographs show plaster busts “that look away with a mystical gaze” leaning against the corners of the roof – reminding us, at least in spirit, of other “nạf” eccentric architecture admired by André Breton and Pablo Picasso.9

10Even though he collaborated with laographersespecially during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Pikionis did not think of his own studies as

“ethnographic” but as part of his architectural work. It is my contention that the level of detailed analysis and interest in recording different aspects of how everyday life was lived within these anonymous build­

ings, including the material culture within it, from furnishings to cooking utensils, was more akin to ethno­

graphic research than to architecture – or at least it was an architecture significantly informed by and engaged in ethnography.

11Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design, London/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969.

12Dimitris Philippidis, “A Return to the Roots,” Chapter 5, Modern Greek Architecture: Theory and Practice (1830–1980) As a Reflection of Ideo­

logical Choices of Greek Culture, Athens, Melissa, 1984, pp. 149–181.

13Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 69.

THE SEARCH FOR A TRUE GREEK ARCHITECTURE 115

At another level, the Rodakis house marked the beginning of a series of studies in popular/vernacular architecture that Pikionis was to continue throughout his life and that had a particularly local, ethnographic character. He was clearly not only interested in the appearance of the house and its many idiosyncratic details and decorative elements, but in how daily life was lived within it. In fact laographic research was treated by Pikionis as a repository of wisdom about how to go about building. He approached it with seriousness and a great deal of respect.10

The Rodakis house consisted of an L­shaped plan with a rather large courtyard surrounded by a high stone wall. The house was comprised of a series of four rooms, only three of which, apparently multi­use living areas, were connected together. Another L­shaped series of rooms directly adjacent and roughly as large as the main living areas, housed the animals. Cooking was done in a separate outhouse that contained a circular stone oven whose outline extended outwards from the otherwise orthogonal plan. The courtyard also contained its own threshing area (alòni).

Pikionis read this humble dwelling of Aegina as an extension of the island’s landscape and nature, recognizing similar kinds of characteristics and qualities in both: a sense of absolute simplicity, the ruggedness of materials such as stone, the extremes of light and shade, strong contrasts in color. He wrote about the great richness found in the poverty of means, a characteristic of vernaculars everywhere. In the Greek context and within the history of centuries of foreign rule where the population experienced extreme material restrictions, this was particularly valid. For Pikionis, to evoke a phrase we may be more familiar with, this popular/vernacular was nothing less than a kind of “survival through design.”11 Pikionis was not alone in evoking the interconnectedness of nature and culture, or the relationship between landscape (topìo), and place (tòpos) and the popular/vernacular buildings. The generation active during the 1930s, generally known as “The Thirties Generation” of high modernists, were particularly involved with evaluating Greek nature and talking about its specific qualities.

The preceding decade, the 1920s, was marked by traumatic political events, including a disastrous war with Turkey. Encouraged by Greece’s European allies, this war, which resulted in a flood of destitute refugees, has been known since as “The Catastrophe” in Greece. On the Turkish side, it was instrumental in bringing about the establishment of the Modern Turkish State. In the midst of a widely felt defensive sense and a painful population exchange with Turkey, there was a renewed interest in laographicstudies, that some historians have called “a return to the roots.”12

In addition, the men and women of the Thirties Generation were the first to travel freely in the Aegean. As Artemis Leontis has shown, at that point the notion of a Hellenic tòposbecame particularly important in “mapping the homeland”:

A genealogy of the Greek usage of tòposshows that the term receives its deceptively transparent referentiality during this [twentieth] century.

Under certain conditions, tòposbecomes the preferred term – competing with éthnos, “nation,” yénos, “nation, people, race” (Latin genus), filí, “race, nation,” laós,“people,” and patrída,“fatherland, homeland” – for invoking the self­presence of Hellenism.13

Pikionis drew and painted the Greek landscape throughout his life. Aside from the Rodakis house, Pikionis also published numerous sketches, drawings, and

116 IOANNA THEOCHAROPOULOU

14A collected volume of Pikionis’s texts used here as primary source material, Dimitris Pikionis: Texts [in Greek], Athens, National Bank Edu­

cational Institute, 1987, was published after his death, edited by his daughter Agni Pikionis and by Michalis Parousis.

15Dimitris Loukopoulos, Aetolian Dwellings, Utensils and Foods,Athens, 1925.

16An early mentor of Chatzimihali was the architect Aristotelis Zachos, who also published some studies of Greek populararchitecture, in the early twentieth century, “Altere Wohnbauten auf griechischem Boden,” Wasmuths, Monatshefte für Baukunst VII.However since these studies did not appear in Greek, his work, although well known among other intellectuals at that time, was not part of a more local discussion.

Chatzimihali’s own house, designed by Zachos in the Plaka area of Athens, now houses the National Laographic Museum.

17Dimitris Pikionis, “Our Popular Art and Ourselves,” Dimitris Pikionis:

Texts (in Greek), p. 69.

texts about the vernacular and its relationship to the Greek landscape in various journals and newspapers.14In 1925 he wrote an important text that he intended as part of a theoretical trilogy on the popular/vernacular, “Our Popular Art and Ourselves.” The same year there were two more significant publications about popular art and popular dwellings: Aggeliki Chatzimihali’s book Skyros, a treatise on that Aegean island’s locally produced arts, crafts, and architecture, and Dimitris Loukopoulos’s Aetolian Dwellings, Utensils and Foods, exploring the architecture and the culinary culture of that region of Greece side by side, complete with recipes, and illustrated by Dimitris Pikionis.15

Whereas Aetolian Dwellings was the only book­length study by Dimitris Loukopoulos, a teacher in mainland Greece, Chatzimihali, authored several studies and was very active in organizing the study of popular arts and architecture before, during, and after the Second World War. An upper­middle class artist, Chatzimihali’s work on vernacular architecture originated in her studies of material culture in isolated rural areas of Greece. Throughout her life she traveled all over Greece to live with her subjects of observation, whether they were Skyrian women or Sarakatsanian nomads living in tents, and was responsible for collecting a huge variety of artifacts from popular civilization that otherwise would have simply been lost and forgotten.16

In 1930 Pikionis and Chatzimihali were two of the founding members of the Association for the Study of Greek Popular Art [Syllogos Elliniki Laiki Techni], founded to document vanishing artifacts primarily from the Greek country ­ side. Some of the other members from a pool of well­known artists and architects included artists Nikolaos Chatzikyriakos­Gikas and Yiannis Tsarouchis, and architects Dimitris Moretis, Alexandra Paschalidou­Moreti, Giorgos Giannoullelis, and Maria Zagorisiou. In 1936 Pikionis became in charge of a systematic study of the Greek house. He organized a team of people who went on summer expeditions both to the mainland as well as to the islands to record local architectural culture. They held exhibitions of this work (Athens, 1938 and 1939) and intended a series of publications that remained largely unrealized until very recently, due to the onset of the Second World War.

It was Pikionis who introduced a sense of the vernacular closer to the European term. He discussed the vernacular was as a kind of language. The underlying idea was that like the Greek language, which has been alive for millennia, there could be built forms appropriate to the specific climate and landscape waiting to be revealed, or reactivated. If only one started to understand the different components properly, one could use them to construct a new, contemporary vocabulary of forms that would again be natural and indigenous, local to the Greek soil. Citing a fragment from the poet Dionysios Solomos, “first, learn to obey the language of the people, and then, if you are strong enough, conquer it,” Pikionis wrote:

as the people [laòs] give words to the writer, so they give us [the architects]

shapes as if other kinds of words, those of our plastic language. If only we could appreciate the meaning of this gift.17

The idea that the study of the architectural vernacular is akin to a new plastic language, that of the people,was illustrated further by an example about wood ­ carving, accompanied by a black and white photograph inserted in the text:

Look at the example of popular woodcarving. . . . Let us observe the influence that materials have in the creation of a plastic language. We can

carve wood with a tool [rural people] call sgorpia. The shapes emerge naturally from the use of this tool on the wood. These are the elements, the wordsof woodcarving.18

An important factor that contributed to Pikionis imagining a plastic language in parallel with or equivalent to a spoken language, was the larger intellectual context of his generation. At that time, the debates about architecture had as a constant backdrop the so­called “language question.” At issue was in which language should Greeks speak: the demotic– everyday, popular, vernacular language – or the katharevousa, constructed by nineteenth­century intellectuals by adapting classical Greek to the Greek of their time and by “cleansing” it from traces of “foreign” (and particularly Turkish) words. The so­called language question was the overwhelming issue of the day during the 1930s; it passionately divided not only the intellectuals but also politicians and the press, and was constantly encountered in all aspects of everyday life.19

Another member of the so­called Thirties Generation, the poet Odysseas Elytis, took the analogy between landscape and language – in his case poetic language – further by claiming that one can actually read the Greek alphabet in the landscape, discussing “places here and there in the soils of the Aegean,” bearing signs of the “many­century presence of Hellenism,” which furnish their own spelling, and where

each omega, each ipsilon, each accent mark or iotasubscript is nothing but a small bay, a slope, the vertical line of a rock over the curved line of a boat’s stern, winding grapevines, a decoration over a church door, red and white dotted here and there from pigeon houses and potted geraniums.20 Pikionis’s way of viewing the relationship between language, architecture, and nature was complex. He tried to develop a poetics of reading the landscape and to create buildings as an extension of this landscape. By understanding the vernacular, Pikionis felt more able to compose new syntheses suitable for the contemporary world. In addition, he also experi ­ mented with different “languages” or idioms in his architecture, especially in his early works. His Moraitis House (Athens, 1921–23) was a homage to an Aegean island vernacular. A courtyard house built entirely of stone, it had arched lintels, asymmetrical openings, niches carved in the walls, and a flat roof, whereas his next commission, the Karamanos House (Athens, 1925), experimented with a Hellenistic building type, inspired by a contemporary discovery of a house in Priene.

Pikionis’s first public building, an elementary school in Athens at Lycabettus Hill (1931–32), was part of the School Building Program initiated by the Eleftherios Venizelos government. As if wishing to learn from the modernist language – that as he wrote had “secret affinities” with the Greek vernacular – Pikionis’s building was comprised of a series of unadorned, flat­roofed, startlingly white, interlinked cubes that followed the contours of the landscape.

However, even before the CIAM IV meeting held in Athens in August 1933,

18Ibid., p. 64.

19On the persistence of the official and popular debates about language in Greek culture see Karen Van Dyck:

“Ever since the War of Independence in the 1820s. . . . the question of lan­

guage consumes Greeks [to this day]

in their newspapers and everyday interactions. . . . the power of the word has a claim on the Greek national imagination which provides a striking contrast to the status of language in many other Western countries where linguistic issues are often debated only among small groups of intellectuals.” From Karen Van Dyck, Kassandra and the Censors, Greek Poetry Since 1967,Ithaca/

London, Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 14.

20Odysseas Elytis, The Public and the Private[Ta dimosia kai ta idiotika], 1990, pp. 8–9, translated by Artemis Leontis. Even though this particular collection of poems postdates Pikio­

nis, Odysseas Elytis, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979, often brought these kinds of analo­

gies to his work.

5.4 Dimitris Pikionis.

Moraitis House, Tzitzifies, Neo Faliro, 1921–23.

Source: © Neohellenic Architecture Archives, Benaki Museum, Athens.