[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.
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