In 1964 Konstantinos Doxiadis (1913-1975) founded it Doxiadis Associates Computer Center and a few years later, he installed a powerful UNIVAC 1107 computer in his office. The vision of the world-renowned architect and urban planner was to use IT to contribute to city planning that would satisfy people.

Thus, within the framework of the “Human Community” program, he conducted a study of the adaptation of the inhabitants of post-war Athens to the dynamics and pace of its development, using questionnaires focused on the ideas of the townspeople themselves about their happiness in urban everyday life. life. As a modernist, Doxiadis was interested in technologies aimed at human well-being. But he knew that their use may not always have a positive effect.

The exhibition “Konstantinos Doxiadis and Information Modernism: Machine in the Heart of Man”, presented at the Onassis Foundation from today to February 26, is divided into two parts. Or in two “episodes”, as two of its curators, architects Mark Vasuta and Farzin Lotfi-Jam, described them in yesterday’s presentation.

Two “episodes”

The first “episode” offers a “behind the scenes” look at the office of Konstantinos Doxiadis (exploring how an architectural project can be presented in a communicative form), through many documents, questionnaires, photographs and computer visualizations relating to cities. like Athens or Detroit and document how they are changing and benefiting their residents. Here you can see maps compiled by the Doxiadis office of the movements of people in a given urban structure (for example, to meet with their relatives), as well as questionnaires on the use of urban infrastructure, or even records of forced racist movements in the United States. The material is taken from the Doxiadis archive.

The second “episode” pits Doxiadis’ vision against data-gathering technologies that today are used not to benefit the city, but to prevent people from approaching it: replica cameras, surveillance devices, fingerprint scanners, and helicopters or airships. are presented along with a model of the Greek border, and interviews of refugees are projected on the walls, who talk about their unimaginably difficult journey, as well as the expulsion or other forms of violence they endured long before they reached (if they finally did) Athens . This is the “New Human Community”, a study carried out by the curators of the exhibition in collaboration with the Hellenic Council for Refugees.

“Where exactly is the city? Athens is everywhere because it is the ultimate goal of the movement of many people,” Farzin Lotfi-Jam explained. The “happiness index” that Doxiadis was interested in, concluded Mark Vasuta, was related to this question: how cities should be designed so that they do not collapse.