Takis Zenetos Digital Vision Built Architectures

The center materializes at the time and place of action Takis Zenetos, 1969 This phrase by Takis Zenetos, written in the introduction to Electronic Urbanism—a trilingual publication presenting his technotopia on urban planning for what was then only a future information society (TZ 69)—is of great interest as it already envisions architecture as a “modifiable” field of forces. Throughout this volume, we will use this sentence as a guiding thread to examine his writings, his projects, and his built works. Zenetos’s oeuvre reveals form not as the resolution of an object’s design, but as the momentary materialization of activity. Activities condense into mutable states, and a center temporarily emerges around them. According to Zenetos, the possibility for the center to materialize at the time and place of action stems precisely from the creative potential of information technologies. And it is this very centrality of information technology that fuels a radically different idea of architecture—an idea that permeates his entire body of work and writings, making him an indispensable precursor or elder sibling to new generations of architects. The juxtaposition of two of his sketches suggests a new approach to his work: “Cabins hidden behind artificial sand hills” (a drawing for the development of the Plakias coastline) shows a beach with no visible built elements, while another sketch from Electronic Urbanism depicts the land entirely covered in a tangle of activity. This oscillation in his thinking—between emptiness on one hand and endless architecture on the other—opens up a range of interpretive avenues and invites a closer look at his work. In both his built works and writings, technology plays a crucial role—not only in shaping his formal strategies but also in articulating a political dimension for the future. A powerful tension emerges between what is realistically buildable and what could be built if the latest innovations and promises of technology were fully implemented. This tension, now widely recognized, is accompanied by an equally familiar discourse on the ethical foundations of the reality in which one is immersed, and which his projects seek to promote. Takis Zenetos (1926–1977) left Greece after the war in 1945 to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he joined Otello Zavaroni’s atelier. He lived in France until 1956, working in three different architectural firms. Upon returning to Greece, he established his own practice, which remained a site of intense activity until his tragic suicide in 1977. Between 1953 and 1977, he completed over 120 projects—including houses, industrial buildings, offices, interiors, public buildings, and urban planning proposals. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his personality is that a man trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition, and recognized for his talent as a painter, would embrace and advocate a vision of architecture’s electronic future—what he himself called non-architecture. Zenetos was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science), as well as the Association Internationale de Cybernétique. His marginal notes reveal a personality constantly forging new paths into the future. At the time of the first organ transplants in the mid-1960s, Zenetos was reflecting on the boundaries of the human body and envisioning its integration into the public sphere. He drew on the genetic relationship between inertial and evolutionary factors to define the concept of transformability. Elsewhere, he noted: “There is no invention. Innovation is the addition of information to what already exists.” Zenetos’s architectural journey is closely linked to the Greek periodicals Architecture in Greece and Design in Greece, and to their editor, Orestis Doumanis. Doumanis not only published Zenetos’s work but also supported his early efforts to formulate an alternative vision of architecture and urbanism, encouraging the dissemination of new ideas. Prior to 1967—the inaugural year of the aforementioned journals—Doumanis featured Zenetos’s projects in the magazines Architecture and World Architecture, notably curating an article on Greece (Doumanis 64) that paid particular attention to Zenetos. The history of these two journals and their influence on architectural thought in Greece has yet to be written. Through the involvement of a broad circle of contemporary architectural theorists and critics—and through debates on critical regionalism, the relationship between modernity and tradition, and more recently, new technologies—they offer an in-depth overview of contemporary architectural thinking and practice. Within this context, Zenetos assumes an extraordinary position, emerging as an essential reference point for reflection and inquiry. It is thus only natural that our initial focus turns to the Electronic Urbanism project, where the impact of information technologies on urban and architectural design becomes a catalytic force. Already in the early 1960s, he was reflecting on the changing ways of perceiving the environment and envisioning design methods adapted to a time when information technologies would dominate the organization of both production and thought. “We do not design anything—at least not with the known tools. We do not perpetuate the errors of the past. We do not pin down a rapidly changing future to the drawing table,” he wrote in the margin of one page (TZ sd). Looking at his built work, beyond the uniqueness and strength of each project, one finds elements or concepts either stemming from or leading back to Electronic Urbanism. It is noteworthy that Zenetos never considered his work as complete; rather, he saw the materialization of a product as part of an evolving process. In the future, the same architectural question might receive a different answer. This makes a particular mention of the school in Agios Dimitrios essential. Here, projecting the building into the future is not an obstacle to the project’s guiding principles. On the contrary, Zenetos proposes a methodology of transition in which time itself becomes the primary material of design. The school in Agios Dimitrios is the first of his works to be restored to its original form. Beginning with Electronic Urbanism—the pioneering project Zenetos worked on throughout his life, developing a veritable repertoire of ideas intimately linked to his built projects—and concluding with an analysis of the school in Agios Dimitrios, this publication moves through Zenetos’s designed and built oeuvre by tracing the thread of his innovative architectural thinking.