Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism: The Machine at the Heart of Man

The exhibition examines one of the most pressing and transformational conditions of the last half century—the overlapping and intertwining of cities, people, and information systems. The exhibition shows this in two episodes. The first covers the prescient use of computers in the 1960s by the Greek architect and internationally celebrated planner of cities, Constantinos A. Doxiadis through the work of DACC—the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center. The second episode traces these computational practices to present day Athens, with new research into the physical form, technical administration, and territorial spread of city and state border management systems.

Each episode pivots around a population group and a form of information collection. In the 1960s, Doxiadis Associates ran The Human Community, a DACC-assisted study of Athenian residents that gauged their adaptation to the growth and pace of the postwar city. The exhibition includes The New Human Community, a critical restaging of Doxiadis’ survey conducted with recently arrived residents and refugees. The Machine at the Heart of Man: Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism tracks how our contemporary and postwar periods are linked through techniques of data extraction and accumulation. In the exhibition, these two episodes chart Greece’s emerging informational geography, locating its boundaries, borders, and the data subjects they engender.

With its mainframe UNIVAC and spinning tape drives, DACC was a startling venture for an architecture office in the 1960s. Doxiadis belonged to a cohort of international architects and intellectuals appraising the implications of new digital technologies for the future of cities. Unlike his peers, who often considered this impact abstractly or theoretically, the techniques and products of computation were deeply integrated into Doxiadis’ practice. Spanning early analog data collection to later urban computation, the exhibition recasts Doxiadis’ practice through informational processes and automation, placing it within the emerging postindustrial logics of the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition also puts the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center in communication with our current debates on computation and community. For Doxiadis, community was an ideal of social integration and resident satisfaction. It was also a dynamic measure of urban scale seen via neighborhood boundaries made volatile by postwar upheaval and migration. For many residents of contemporary Athens, these local boundaries have multiplied and expanded to encompass state borders and their control systems. While The Human Community and DACC mark a pivotal early moment in the historical formation and articulation of computational urbanism, the information extraction technologies that appear at and through this contemporary border complex are its most current elaboration.

-Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Mark Wasiuta

Constantinos A. Doxiadis (1913–1975) was one of the most prolific and influential architects and urban planners of the postwar period. He regularly put forward proposals for the urban landscape of Greece, and distinguished himself through his outreach and work across four continents. On the one hand, we have his Aspra Spitia (“White Houses”) on Paralia Distomou (“Distomo Beach”): a model settlement he designed in 1963 to house the families of “Aluminum of Greece” employees – a settlement that also featured the first urban wastewater treatment plant of its kind in the country; on the other, we have his masterplan for the city of Islamabad, and his plans for the reconstruction of Skopje after a catastrophic earthquake in 1963 – plans commissioned by the UN. On the one hand, we have his proposal for connecting the port at Lavrion to the Greek capital by rail (a transport link that never moved beyond the planning stage); on the other, we have the projects undertaken by “Doxiadis International Co. Ltd. – Consultants on Development & Ekistics” in 44 countries, with offices in the US, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ghana, Libya, and elsewhere.

Constantinos Doxiadis was a man of many facets. A modernist who approached technology and craft as a means of bringing about prosperity for humankind, and for society as a whole. The recipient of a doctorate in engineering from Charlottenburg University in Berlin [known today as Technische Universität Berlin]. Chief of the “Hephaestus” National Resistance Group during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Undersecretary and Director-General of the Hellenic Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction in post-war Greece. A man alert to the refugee experience through his family (he was born in Stanimaka, Eastern Rumelia in 1913), who experienced the 1922 Asia Minor refugee tragedy first-hand, not to mention the millions of refugees he encountered flooding into Karachi, Pakistan when he visited in 1955.

According to his theory of ekistics, anthropos (the human individual) is the most important component of a city, one that – in combination with the other four elements (nature, society, shells, and networks) – leads to a city functioning harmoniously. At the very first Delos Symposium (1963), one of twelve he would organize in total, he noted: “The aim must be to produce settlements which satisfy man not only as parent and worker but also as learner and artist and citizen.”

He was also, however, an architect open to the changes brought about by his times, while still retaining his admiration for the architectural space embodied by the ancient Greek “city”. At the Delos Eight Symposium, held in 1970, the participants had their eye on what was to come in future: “Information systems today have more power in social systems than ever because computers have magnified the capabilities of the human senses.”