A study of the ancient built environment

In the 1960s and ’70s, a growing chorus of architects and town planners felt their field wasn’t responding adequately to the modern era. They wanted less focus on “cemented cities,” and, instead, a bigger spotlight on ecological concerns, says Mantha Zarmakoupi, Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman Architecture in the Department of History of Art in the School of Arts & Sciences.

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One of the loudest voices calling for change was urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis. “He believed that the ancient Greeks—and it wasn’t just because he was Greek—struck the right balance between population density and the built environment,” Zarmakoupi says. “In a place like classical Athens, for instance, one could walk across the city within a manageable amount of time.”

Doxiadis started what became known as the Delos Symposia, “inviting leading thinkers of the time, from architecture and beyond,” Zarmakoupi says. They spent a week in Athens discussing ideas, then boarded a boat where, following the practices of the ancient Greek sympósion, they feasted and danced en route to the ancient settlements inspiring them. “The meeting culminated in Delos, this ancient city on a tiny island in the Aegean, and the focus of my research now for 20 years,” Zarmakoupi says. “There, participants went to the theatre to sign the symposia’s yearly declaration—by torchlight. The meetings were eccentric, ceremonial, and very much of their time.”

In a series of essays in a new book “The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis,” Zarmakoupi and Loughborough University’s Simon Richards bring together such stories in one place for the first time. Drawn from three meetings the research duo led for scholars pondering nature and the built environment, the essays include tales of Doxiadis and his influential colleagues, among them town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, economist Barbara Ward, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and architect Buckminster Fuller.

Though the resulting book is written by and (mostly) for academics, Zarmakoupi believes it has broad appeal given today’s environmental moment. “We tend to think questions and discussions about climate change are just about the present. We wanted to give a historical context,” she says. “Discussions about the ecological crisis have happened before, and just as intensively, and we need a deeper understanding of those moments to have a more informed opinion about the present.”

Read more at Omnia.