EIKASTIKON - Architecture - Dimitris Pikionis - P. PSOMOPOULOS: DIMITRIS PIKIONIS: An indelible Presence in Modern Greece

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Dimitris Pikionis
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P. PSOMOPOULOS

DIMITRIS PIKIONIS: An indelible Presence in Modern Greece

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

Dimitris Pikionis, with his multi-faceted and variously significant work stretching over half a century of artistic activity, was not only an intellectual and creative figure of the greatest importance but also an inescapable point of reference for Greek art. All Greek artists have at some time or other been answerable to him - perhaps without realising it themselves, and without any deliberate effort on his part. However, there are objective difficulties attached to the task of wishing to understand Pikionis as a personality, of understanding his work, of appreciating his contribution to the effort to create contemporary Greek architecture, contemporary Greek art and, in general, a contemporary Greek culture.

There are two main reasons for this. The first lies in the variety of his activity - theoretical teaching, folklore studies, painting, sculpture and architecture - which, nonetheless, cannot be split up and studied as a number of parts. Each aspect of his work sheds light on the others, eventually converging on a fixed intellectual message; they all reveal a more or less firm and specific vision. Yet that vision took numerous different forms in each area of his activity, in line with the difficulties and special considerations, which that area involved. As a result, superficial students of Pikionis' work have ample scope for erroneous comparisons and assessments.

The second reason is to be found in the man's own personality. Multi-faceted both constitutionally and by his education, contradictory by virtue of his roots and of his place in the world, sensitive to a fault- he not only assessed values theoretically and aesthetically, but lived them ethically and made their dissemination his personal destiny - and ever-ready to pledge his support, Pikionis cannot be classified. For that reason, I shall confine myself initially to biography, to his chronology, his intellectual career and his work - in whatever form - without misleading others by straying into schematic distinctions. Such distinctions, I believe, are fruitless and would be an arbitrary and unfair constraint on Pikionis.

Dimitris Pikionis was born in Piraeus in 1887. He dedicated the opening phrases of his 'Autobiographical Notes' to the sacred memory of his parents. He was of the moral propensities of his mother, he wrote, sensing the heritage within him, and of the artistic propensities of his father, "sometimes coexisting in balanced unison, sometimes opposed in agonising conflict", as he put it. He first heard the songs of the Greek people from the lips of his cousin, the poet Lambros Porfyras, and from him learned of the poetry of Solomos, which "opened up a magical world before his childish eyes". Apart from his pure-hearted friendship with his peers, Nature was his greatest teacher. It was Nature, which, in childhood and later in adolescence, taught him as he explored the landscape of Attica the "lesson that nothing else can replace", as he was to say later of Papaloukas, the lesson by which the moulded an "awareness of his land" and shaped its history.

His inclination towards painting manifested itself at a very early age. Even as a child he stood out for the rare sensitivity of his observation and the unusual maturity of his reductive powers. He completed his secondary schooling at the age of sixteen, passing up what would have been for him a wonderful opportunity to travel to India - where his maternal uncles lived - and see something of its art and philosophy. Obedient to the well-intentioned determination of his family that he should become a civil engineer, he enrolled at the National Technical University in the following year, attending classes in the School of Civil Engineering. Soon he took more interest in visiting the School of Fine Arts nearby, where Bouzianis and de Chirico were then studying: they were to become his close friends, first the latter and then the former. At a later date, he met Parthenis, who was his first instructor and teacher in art and who, with Periklis Yannopoulos, eventually persuaded Pikionis' father to send him to Munich to study painting.

Pikionis took no interest in the social problems, which disturbed the atmosphere of the time. In Germany, far from home, he continued to dream his dreams until his revelatory encounter with the work of Cézanne (of which he already had a theoretical knowledge) drew him to Paris. There he exercised himself more deeply in Cézanne's technique - that is, in "completion of the third dimension by means of colour". With Parthenis - whom he unexpectedly met in Paris - he spent two years visiting museums, drawing all the time, and developed a more substantial knowledge of the spirit and art of the West. This period of study and close comparison was to bear fruit later in the distinction, which Pikionis drew between the Western and the Greek-Eastern, between the plastic trends of each, which reveal two different constitutions. That distinction became more profound and more pronounced in Pikionis' mind over time, until the point at which it constituted the foundation for the idea of 'Greekness', which was the axis around which his aspirations and his work revolved. Necessities unrelated to art - financial considerations - won him over to architecture, the art most suited to the needy. In 1910, he joined Chifllot's studio. Architecture was not the true centre of his inclinations, as he himself was the first to admit, and he writes in his 'Autobiographical Notes' that "Architecture, as an object of aesthetic contemplation, had a certain attraction for me; I also gained a number of aesthetic and emotional insights through the study of spatial organisation and plastic composition, whose ideal end is the fulfilment of order as symbol. However, this was quite a different matter from the complex theoretical approach towards construction involving materials and practical structural problems, and from the long apprenticeship that an architect has to go through. Mt readings from Guadet's "Elements et theorie de l'architecture" not only helped me acquire a certain amount of knowledge on the subject, but also provided a kind of sentimental exploration of various times and places. Yet there were moments when I felt as if my spirit had become one of the innumerable, nameless stones buried in the deep foundations, the massive walls, the architraves and vaults of the buildings I contemplated."

Two years later he came back to Greece in the belief that he could deal with the practical side of life and supplement his training with self-teaching. This he did, but another ten years were to pass before built his first house.

Those ten years were of decisive importance for Pikionis' move in the direction of the Greek-Eastern tradition and for his ultimate intellectual orientation. In the intervals between the periods of military service in which that troubled period involved him, he moved away from conventional learning and progressively developed his own independent path forward. Greek nature, with its contrasts, spoke to his sensibility. Folk are revealed itself to his acutely observant eye as those contrasts in material form. That compelled him to review what he had learned. His use of the techniques of Cézanne had taken him far from Western ideals. Byzantine icon-painting revealed what he called a symbolic language drawn from nature and from the matter of mimesis - a language for expressing the spiritual, the transcendental, in contrast to the analytical naturalism of the West, which goes no further than phenomenology. In the folk architecture of Aegina, where "it is as though nature itself is at work, with the unconscious obedience of the craftsmen to the laws and constraints which nature imposes on them", he discovered, as he wrote, "a musical harmony, a mystical architecture of nuances from which stems the harmony of form". As a result, that form is objective rather than individual, as it was in Cézanne's solitary efforts. Pikionis subjected himself to the plastic language of vernacular architecture before he became "man enough to bend it to his own will", to use Solomos' expression. The fruit of that subjugation was Pikionis' first house, at Tzitzifies, on the left bank of the Ilissus - a spot which would be difficult to recognise nowadays after all that time and human beings have done to change it. Fotos Politis welcomed this building with three columns in the newspaper "Proia" under The symbolic title "On Paraschos", a reference to the exact opposite of Pikionis' house - the counterfeit structures, the Byzantine villas and the false and belated neo-Classical edifices of the time.

Allow me to make an intervention of my own at this point. A century earlier, after the liberation of Greece, neo-Classicism was accepted in a national sense. Yet the local tradition was never able to blend with this imported movement - except in vernacular architecture. Of course, the joyous light of vernacular architecture also shone on the 'official' architects, who often produced noble buildings such as the University and the Technical University. But that light soon faded out, and Greece, which always tends to follow the trends of the rest of Europe belatedly and in summary form, soon fell prey to the real trend of the 19th century, eclecticism. The general call for 'a link with the past', although manifesting itself as a demand for a return to the roots and for self-knowledge in a small circle of enlightened minds, degenerated in most cases into atavism.

This atavism, occurring as it did in parallel with the invasion of Faux Louis XVI and the Junge Styl, created impenetrable chaos in architecture. And it is of the greatest importance that Pikionis came on the scene at precisely this time, with - as Tsarouchis quite rightly points out - an awareness of that chaos deeply imprinted upon him. The love of the truth, which was Pikionis' aesthetic and also ethical inclination compelled him to turn towards folk models in order to gain something of their simplicity and purity.

Two years later, in 1925, at the time of publication of his study 'Vernacular Art and Ourselves', Pikionis built his second house, at Patisia. As he notes, it was inspired by a reconstruction of an ancient house at Priene. Pikionis appears to have been unable to rely only on what the turn of the century had brought. The plastic language and solutions of vernacular architecture were not sufficient in themselves. Faced with the problem of an urban house, of its nuances, of the size of its floor plans, he resorts to features, which strike us as dislocated in space and time, to forms, which 'are as if dia-Hellenic'. His desire to validate his work by using forms tried and tested over time led him to review the past and approach the Greek tradition in a more universal manner. This work could be seen as a turn towards a new kind of Classicism, but the solutions, which Pikionis finds - elimination of the cornice, squaring of the windows, elongated apertures with small columns and lintels - lead us in the direction of Classicism and approximate to the solutions of the Modern movement. Thus Pikionis was prepared to accept the Modern movement when he first encountered it two years later, with the first 'Cahiers d'Art'.

In 1930, Pikionis built a house for his friend the painter Papaloukas in accordance with the principles of Bauhaus architecture, which were also accepted by the avant-garde Greek architects of the time: functionality, organicity, freedom of floor plan and forms, which should arise rationally from requirements and techniques and should always be interpreted in the same manner. He used the same principles again in 1932, for the Lycabettus Primary School. Pikionis followed these trends because, as he wrote, the movement "promised completeness of organic truth, was strict and simple, and was governed by the geometry of a universal pattern capable of expressing our age". He attempted to serve the ecumenical spirit expressed in that new architecture.

For all the indubitable plastic virtues of the Lycabettus school - its brilliant adaptation to the terrain and the free organisation of the floor plan in parallel with and at right angles to the main axis of the interior road, which is the effective element in the entire composition (and was a favourite technique of Parthenis) - Pikionis was not satisfied with the finished building. "If that is all the Modern movement has to say, well then, I want nothing to do with it". He could see that this Modern movement would lead nowhere since it did not partake of "the historic memory of the nation" and was not in communion with "the spiritual wellspring of tradition". He then concluded that the universal spirit must be bound up with the spirit of nationality, and this was the thought which was to be the final determinant of his subsequent career in architecture - and in teaching, for as early as 1930 Pikionis had joined the staff of the Chair of Decorative Arts at the School of Architecture.

After revising his views in this way, his first project was once again a building from a relevant context: the Thessalonica Experimental School. Here, for the first time, we see Pikionis examining features from the great traditional of northern Greece architecture, whose solutions, as he was to write, are of value as an example for all of us. From this point on, he consciously attempted to apply those solutions to the dynamic equilibrium of the shapes in the horizontal and vertical action, so as to soften with half-tones the sharp contrast between light and shadow. He produced bold and extremely visionary drawings for that school. In the end, he decided to organise the composition around an inner courtyard, so that the whole building "would have something of the estate about it", as he said. He admitted to "a slightly Japanese character" in the building, which was the result of eclectic affinity and not of indefensible influence. Of all the Oriental arts which he studied, it was in Japan that he found the Greek virtues: simplicity, restraint, lightness, logic and "a shorter and ideogrammatic concept of representing the world".

Later, the apartment block in Hayden St. to floor plans by the architect Mitsakis, was built in the same spirit. Here there are elements of the mansion-house. Pikionis himself confessed to having envisaged features which went beyond what was actually implemented; it was characteristic of the way in which he worked that regardless of the reality being built, he was always enthusiastic, he always had a vision.

In the house for the sculptress Froso Efthymiadou which he built in 1949 on an irregular polygonal site. Pikionis arranged the rooms around a broad internal courtyard. The ratio of height to floor plan and the clear wall and aperture surfaces give the rooms an air of noble simplicity.

If it had ever been put into effect, Pikionis' largest project would have been the co-operative housing settlement of Aixoni, in the southeast of the Attica basin, behind Mt Hymettus. Pikionis had already gone into a similar problem, when he and Angelos Sikelianos made plans for a model Greek community at Delphi. When I entered the Technical University in 1951, I remember the students' plans for Aixoni. Pikionis was in the habit of setting his students problems analogous to those in his own mind, which allowed him to gain a more universal overview of his problems while guiding his students more vitally. The plastic conception of an entire settlement had attracted Pikionis' attention from time to time, and he had drawn elevations either from his imagination or from memory. Painting for Pikionis was a way of attracting architecture, and so with Aixoni he began work with elevations of the entire settlement in the belief that only thus would the ground plan be revealed to him.

In 1955 he built the hotel at Delphi. This project is permeated with the architect's sense of his responsibility in incorporating the building into the sacred precinct. He was prepared to juxtapose against Mt Kirphys only restrained, simple and unadorned shapes, shapes that had no "cosmopolitan nuances", as he put it. The buildings were decentralised from around their inner courtyard so as to blend humbly into the landscape, and the rooms were: arranged in small units like the cells of a monastery. Of course, a contractor performed the project - and according, to Pikionis contractors are the enemies of projects because their objective is profit. "Only constant supervision by the architect himself can guarantee interpretation of the architectural text, which is as abstract as musical notation and which, if a suitable 'performer' cannot be found, will be suppressed". Three of his last projects were executed under his own supervision, and he regarded them as representing him best. The Potamianos residence in Filothei was built at the same time as the Delphi hotel. In this mature work, we can see above all not only Pikionis' deliberate reference to the Macedonian tradition but also the fulfilment of all his inclinations by means of a sensibility which learning and practice had sharpened. This sensibility extended even to the selection, the processing and the proper use of materials - stone, brick, wood, plaster, bare concrete - to ingenuity of construction and to spatial organisation. Here, the careful observer will see the wise action of "the minimum necessary to blend the tones" and to "ensure the proper movement of the decoupements" (intersecting outlines). We receive no sense of the harshness of a mere building project, because transcendence towards the sculptural and painterly has occurred.

In the project to landscape the archaeological site around the Acropolis and lay out the little rest point at St Demetrius Loumbardiaris, which the Ministry of Housing decided to execute in 1950, Dimitris Pikionis was called upon to deal with a very difficult problem: the demanding task of combining interpretations of the landscape, the ancient spirit and modern life, as the architect Yannis Papaioannou put it, beneath and facing the most beloved images in his own life: "Pallas Athena, the Rock and her thrice-ennobled temple". More than in any other project, Pikionis ran counter to the fashions of his age and re-immersed himself in the tradition of his "long-lived nation", making reality out of a memory of its ideals. "By poring over ancient texts relating the cosrnogonic myths of Attica and by peering at the friezes of the Hekatompedon" he strove to find the roots of the symbolic myth of an entire people - his people - and to blend its centuries -old symbols with their wealth of meaning. In 1957, Pikionis retired from the Technical University. Quietly and without fuss, the greatest work of his life, teaching, came to an end. Above all, Pikionis was a teacher. In a note on Pikionis, Bouzianis remembered something he once said during a conversation about art: "You know, I don't want to do all those things myself - I want to be the cause of other people doing them, other generations, the next generation". And Bouzianis adds, "I felt as if he had a handful of seeds which he was dropping as he walked across the earth". It is difficult for anyone who did not study under him to appreciate his teaching in the School of Architecture. He gave, he showed, he expressed; with his uncommon charm and almost biblically allusive style, he led us on to efforts which were beyond our powers, just as he himself often attempted the impossible. He believed that no effort is ever wasted. "We may eventually be forgiven for not having been able to accomplish something", he says at the conclusion of his 'Autobiographical Note', "but [we shall] never be forgiven for not having tried".

Pikionis' last important project was the Children's Play Park in Filothei, where he produced a vibrant and highly organised space containing structures made of his favourite materials cleverly incorporated into the movement of the natural environment. Here, with complete control over his technique, Pikionis allowed himself the luxury of improvisation, assessing the site directly, on the ground, and working without plans side by side "with the men". His entire career had progressively released him from the external technical commitments of the 'trained' architect, the architect of the drawing board. With all the wisdom of a master-craftsman, he built, planted and created the symbols of the nation before the eyes of little children. The sensitive adjustment of the project to the scale of small children - a scale which was, however, not entirely disproportionate to his own "tiny stature", as he would sometimes jokingly say - gives the whole composition the air of a miniature and, quite apart from its other details, causes it to remind us of Japanese architecture and gardening. Yet, regardless of these affinities, which are plain at first glance, Pikionis even here had as his vision the wooden propylum of an Archaic Greek temple. It is no coincidence that in his notes a kouros stands by the propylum, as a measure by which the Greekness of the form can be assessed.

The Volos Town Hall, a project on which Pikionis began work later, was seen as a kind of 'public lesson'. His vision was to erect wooden busts of Rigas Ferraios and members of the Philike Etaireia in front of it; the form of the building and the presence of the symbols would give those who entered and left a sense of the lengthy history of their nation.

After these peregrinations among the thoughts and works of Dimitris Pikionis, during which I have tried to confine myself to the role of guide, I shall now attempt as objective an interpretative approach to it as I can. Not a critical approach: my purpose is to enlighten, not to evaluate. Of course, even such an undertaking as mine presupposes a critical stance, one that perhaps a pupil should not adopt towards his teacher. But I believe what Nietzsche said in 'Also Sprach Zarathustra': to be forever his pupil is to show very little gratitude to one's teacher.

If we are to understand Pikionis better as an intellectual figure, we must put him in the general intellectual climate of his age. After the late 19th century, the European spirit underwent a great shift. Its naive trust in rationalism seemed to have been shaken to the foundations. Physicists now had to juggle with possibilities over a universe in which a fundamental indefinability suddenly seemed to have become inherent. The non-rational foundations of the human soul were laid bare, and the predominant role of insight was proclaimed. Some genuinely religious voices were once more to be heard, and life acquired a tragic meaning. The philosophies of the Orient had exerted their charm over the thinkers of the West, who had also brought the pre-Socratic philosophers to the forefront. Ethnology and prehistoric studies (which had revealed the lingering traces of primitive mentalities) were with the study of folklore identifying strange affinities and restoring secret analogies. Europeans seemed to have found once more the thread of a shared world tradition. At the same time, and by way of contrast, German idealistic philosophy had handed down methods and approaches powerful enough to haunt more recent thought, and apart from nostalgia for lost paradises the romantic disposition had encouraged the cult of nationality and the Volksgeist. It was in effect this diversity which lead the 20th century lo eclecticism and syncretism.

Now, if I were to be forced to provide a concise and for that reason schematic definition of Pikionis' overall view of the world and of art more narrowly, I should call him a mystic of an idealism with naturalistic overtones. Let me explain: he was an idealist in terms of his metaphysical credo; he was an advocate of Naturalism in his conviction that it is the interpretation of natural phenomena which leads not only to a concept of the transcendental but also to its valid expression in human accomplishment; and he was a mystic in his certainty that not the rational manner but the path of intuition and insight leads to that concept and to its expression.

For Pikionis, "identical laws and archetypal forms govern the ordering and regulation of the Universe". Truth, beauty and virtue converge in the transcendental and blend with the Divine, the Universal Word. In its reference to the Divine, art encounters Ethics. And if Pikionis mentioned the disparity between ethical and artistic tendencies which often emerged within himself, that was because he was striving to arrive at the simultaneous application of both.

On the other hand, the aesthetic desideratum also has a cognitive aspect. Form is no more than the visible manifestation of the principle, of compliance with the law. Art's duty is to obey the eternal laws of the Divine as they are intuitively revealed in natural form. "Obedience to the laws of nature is the foundation-stone of true life and art", Pikionis wrote. And elsewhere he says: "When nature deepens its mystery, the soul strives, and in the depths of that passion lies understanding". It is this mystery which art sums up in shapes "which are in unison with those of nature". The forms which man can conquer when his stance is one of solidarity with the form of his land are of the earth, and for that reason valid. And their more profound kinship gives them an unshakeable continuity through the vicissitudes of time: tradition, "in the depths of which, unadulterated, lies the symbolic expression of the inner reality of each people".

The brilliance of Greek nature, in which the harmony of mountains, light and air is not coincidental but "a strict consequence of the harmony innate in the creative principle", as Pikionis put it, nurtured a tradition of particular brilliance. "The geometry of the earth, the quality of the light and the air, predestined this place to be the cradle of civilisation", wrote Pikionis in his 'Sentimental Topography'. "As I walked over this ground, the kingdom of limestone and clay, I saw the stone being transformed into an architrave and the red clay colouring the walls of an imaginary cella". This Greek myth has no need of an analytical approach to phenomena as practised by Cézanne or, among the Greek artists, by Parthenis, in "lucid natural geometry", even if naturalism in verbal form may lead to idealism. In Greece and in the eastern tradition, the myth has been formulated with "inner geometry" and with symbolic local colouring, in unison and bound up with shape. Consequently, architecture - which of all the arts is the most capable of "putting poetry into our everyday lives" - must develop links with the spirit of tradition, which still lives on in Greece in vernacular art. It was from this vernacular art that Pikionis started out, from 'mimesis' of its truth. Indeed, he was to find it again a little later, "open to view", as he put it, in the messages and shapes of new avant-garde architecture. But in order to counterbalance the ecumenical nature of that new movement, he was soon compelled to deepen the universality of the Greek tradition.

He turned against the tide, swimming up river like a trout (his own simile) in search of 'dia-Hellenic' forms. In his own mind, he gradually elided folk elements, Byzantine elements and ancient elements, and using that elision of the forms achieved by the Greek nation during the course of its history he attempted to give shape even to those things, which the nation itself had not managed to express. If the works of Rodin are, to use Carrier's expression of which the sculptor himself was so fond, "the sculptures of the non-existent cathedral", then Pikionis tried to make his works "the products of the Greek Renaissance that never occurred". That was his more profound vision, his intellectual and spiritual aim. And as I tried to demonstrate earlier with reference to the intellectual trends of our own day, that aim contains a response to the inner passions of mankind today.

And so we come to the question of whether Pikionis managed to put his sublime vision into practice in his architecture, and, if so, how far. Did he at least point the way forward? And is that way "valid" and "suitable" - as he himself would have said - for the moment in history at which we live? Regardless of the unanimous recognition of the supreme plastic quality of his work, one often hears the objection that his architectural work (to go no further) exhausts itself in romantic atavism, that it is form-dominated, that it is not contemporary.

Of course, seen from one point of view Pikionis was a romantic. He did not trouble himself with the burning problems for architecture raised by the technological revolution and the social changes of our age. He did not succeed in serving industrial man, using his media, or working at his speed - or rather, he did not wish to. He dedicated himself to those ancient roots from which contemporary man is in danger of severing himself completely. He sensed very deeply the risk of that severance, and he had a vision of what could still spring from those same roots. His main problem was how to save himself from the same danger and how to save others by setting them to rights. Is that problem less urgent than any of the others? Is it not a contemporary problem par excellence? And if it is true, as Pikionis himself writes of reconstruction somewhere, that "the material magnitude of the project, the main conventionalities with which it is bound up - and with them the inner conventionality we find in ourselves - can only be expected, in practice, to drag the project down below the ideal level at which theory envisaged it", then I think that in his attempt to raise his own work to that ideal level he demonstrated that somewhere in mankind there is still powerful resistance to changing the level of architectural projects.

Pikionis is valuable, even essential, for us because of the sublimity of his thoughts rather than for the virtues of his works. And I believe that those who have gone 'the other way' may well find themselves, at some point in the future, face to face with some luscious fruits of his labours. As Miguel de Unamuno, the sage of Salamanca, put it, "Anyone who fights for an ideal, even if that ideal seems to lie in the past, leads the world forward into the future. As always, we move into the future, and anyone who walks is going in that direction, even if he looks backwards as he does so." And who knows: that may even be the best way!