Article 02, paisea 020. Dimitris Pikionis’ landscape: from eccentric to ecumenical | Fotini Margariti
Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis (1887-1968), an alumni of the National Technical University of Athens, which he would later return to as a professor after an apprenticing period in Munich and Paris (1908-1912), became a creator with international recognition during the last two decades . His name is linked to a group of intellectuals and artists of the interwar (known as the 30ties generation) whose main legacy is a research of the Greek identity in close correlation with early western modernism.
Our main hypothesis is that Pikionis’ devotion to tradition although framed by the wider ideological current of this period, i.e. the ideology of “Greekness”, broke free of its narrow ethnocentric and ideological nucleus and gained a radical modern perspective.
This phenomenon is particularly complex. In any case the differentiation from the western definition of modernism does not resolve the question of what Pikionis defines as Greek. Through his work he will legitimize the existence of “antinomy” and fragmentation; he will express a sort of continuous uncertainty about the definition of what is Greek as the West approaches the problem, about the relation between Western and Oriental Culture. Two of his works, the interventions in the Acropolis and Philopappos area (1954-57) and the childrens’ recreational park in Philothei (1961-64) selected as the most prominent, can be included in the contemporary category of landscape architecture.
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paisea 020 [cultural landscapes], available in online store HERE and in digital edition HERE
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