2/7/2016 From Dom­ino to Polykatoikia

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From Dom­ino to Polykatoikia

This article was originally published in Domus 962 / October 2012

In recent years there has been a resurgence of the "informal city" within the discourse on architectureand urbanism. In times of economic recession, the "informal" is often advocated as the solution to theevils of the neoliberal city. A protagonist of the informal city is "infill architecture", in which housing isreduced to a flexible framework customised by the inhabitants. This conception of the house responds tothe rapid growth of cities, but it is also promoted as a way to encourage participation from theinhabitants themselves in building their own environment. Against over­designed architecture, the infillmodel is celebrated as a way to give space to inhabitants' creativity. Indeed there is a thin line thatdivides this model from the reality of many shantytowns in which do­it­yourself is a forced option ratherthan a fancy model for housing. The same model can be interpreted as a cynical solution that confirmsthe status quo in which low­cost constructions and adaptability are exploited in order to socially andpolitically tame an increasingly homeless population. Perhaps the best way to discern the ambivalenceof the infill model is to reconsider its progenitor — Le Corbusier's Dom­ino construction system — andone of its most radical applications, the Greek multifunctional dwelling also known as polykatoikia[1].

Dom­ino

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Designed in 1914 as self­help construction system, Dom­ino (from the Latin dooms, "house", and anabbreviation of "innovation") has become the ubiquitous form of construction in all developing countries:a reinforced concrete framework open to any infill and thus to any spatial interpretation. In developingthis model, Le Corbusier was inspired by wooden pillar buildings in Turkey [2] on one hand, and Flemishhouses on the other. Le Corbusier looked attentively to vernacular construction systems in order toshorten the distance between architecture and everyday building processes, but he reinterpreted thesevernacular examples within the logic of a typically industrial plan and the new developments in concreteconstruction.

Le Corbusier developed his prototype imagining a post­war reconstruction in which the urgent need ofhousing would demand new and more flexible ways to build houses, especially for the low classes. Inthis sense the Dom­ino principle is the best embodiment of Le Corbusier's motto "Architecture orRevolution". In Dom­ino, architecture is not simply a shelter, but in the words of Michel Foucault, it is a"dispositif", an apparatus that puts to work and controls the most basic faculties of unskilled workers.

The seeming informality of the Dom­ino is the perfect housing counterpart of the rigid Fordist­Tayloristorganisation of work in which workers were uprooted from their native environment and taken as pure

Top: Manolis Baboussis, View of a polykatoikia skeleton under construction, 1987. Photo and courtesy of ManolisBaboussis. Above: Perspective view of the Dom­ino system, 1914. Source: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, OEuvreComplète Volume 1, 1910–1929, Les Editions d’Architecture Artemis, Zürich, 1964

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labour force devoid of any specific skill by the automatism of the assembly line. The Dom­ino system hasproved to be effective beyond the industrial age, thanks to its extreme genericness and adaptability. Inthe Dom­ino model, flexibility is not only a positive quality, but also a fundamental apparatus of socialengineering that controls the economic development of supposedly spontaneous settlements from theBrazilian favelas to the Turkish gecekondu. First of all, while it exploits the cheap informal labour force,Dom­inos are also based on industrially produced raw materials that drive the profit back to larger scalecorporations. Secondly, beyond the rhetoric of offering a house to everybody, this apparatus boosts —sometimes artificially — the construction sector, a sector that breeds a new range of small enterprises.In this way, the possibility of social unrest is tamed by building a class of home­owners and micro­entrepreneurs who, while economically not privileged, are however sceptical towards the possibility ofcorporativism, sharing, and the demanding of social equality. The subjectivity of the Dom­ino, in spite ofwhat Le Corbusier had hoped, did not result in a shared effort to construct readable urbanenvironments, but rather in the myth of self­entrepreneurship. If this result is often blurred by the povertyof such developments, one of the best illustrations of this phenomenon is perhaps the Greekpolykatoikia, which on the contrary addresses primarily the middle class, and which had a major impactin the development of post­war Greece.

Dimitris Philippidis, An Inner City Squatter Settlement in Athens, 1966. Source: Dimitris Philippidis, “TownPlanning in Greece”, in 20th Century Architecture in Greece, Prestel Publishers, 1999. Courtesy ofDimitris Philippidis Archive

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The polykatoikiaThe polykatoikia was originally conceived in the 1930s as a multistorey apartment building for theAthenian bourgeoisie [3]. The proliferation of this type was supported by the State in the form of ageneral building regulation and a property law [4], which directly produced the basic rationale behind thearchitecture of the polykatoikia. This law allowed landowners to barter tax­free their buildable ground inexchange for built indoor space, effectively deregulating the construction industry. Another goal of thepolykatoikia as promoted by the State was to advance (and thus appropriate) local constructionknowledge towards a coherent and yet flexible system of building techniques, materials, details andstructural schemes. Like in the Dom­ino model this system combined advanced industrial solutions withlow­skilled manual labour. Through the apparatus of the polykatoikia, the project of the city wasadvanced no longer through top­down master planning, but through the production of abstract legislative

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frameworks, which materialised in the bottom­up practice of self­building.

This building logic was extensively mobilised with the post­war reconstruction of Athens. After World WarII, Greece entered a bloody civil war that ended with the defeat of the Communist forces. The new"democratic" government put forward a plan to tame the rebellious potential of the working class. Afundamental issue was to avoid big industrial concentrations and encourage a small­scale buildingeconomy in order to fragment and thus control the population. By advancing the small­scale buildingsystem of the polykatoikia, the government promoted the reconstruction of the country and theconsequent economic recovery with minimum state intervention [5]. In this way increasing housingneeds were met without a welfare programme [6], while a large part of the population was guidedtowards private ownership [7]. The generic form of the polykatoikia was able to absorb all classes andallow any kind of infill and thus became a type suitable for all sorts of urban densities.

From the 1950s until very recently, the construction industry was a major asset in the economy of

The polykatoikia was originally conceived in the 1930s as a multi­storey apartment building for theAthenian bourgeoisie

Dimitris Philippidis, Typical View of Athens, 2000. Source: Dimitris Philippides, Modern Architecture in Greece, Melissa,Athens 2001. Courtesy of Dimitris Philippidis Archive

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Greece. In this way the polykatoikia has transformed the city itself into a gigantic factory (the city as afactory of itself). The massive development of this building process produced a middle­class subject thatwas simultaneously owner, producer and consumer of space. Just before the economic crisis, Greecehad 84.6 per cent of home ownership, ironically the second highest in Europe after Spain [8]. In spite ofits questionable political origin the polykatoikia has been often celebrated as a successful experiment ininformal, bottom­up housing building. However, its implementation has produced a subjectivity based onradical individualism in which the household itself became a source of economic speculation. It isprecisely this subjectivity that is under pressure with the dramatic economic crisis that has been affectingGreece since 2008. If with the beginning of the Cold War Greece was forced to develop a radicallaissez­faire agenda, promoting a deliberate social fragmentation of its working class, within the currenteconomic crisis this fragmentation has proved extremely problematic as private ownership becomesunsafe ground in times of recession when the value of properties dramatically decreases.

At the same time the architecture of the polykatoikia itself, with its small scale and lack of collectivespaces, has developed an urban ethos completely locked within its extreme individualism. And yet if thepolitics of post­war Greece were advanced through the architecture of one single archetype it isprecisely by altering this archetype that it is possible to promote a large­scale reform of the city withoutrecurring to a master plan. An important premise of this reform is to show how in spite of the urbanfragmentation, the polykatoikia, as an architectural language, manifests itself (in its utmost radicalintensity) as a common and thus deeply collective construction system. The fundamental goal of thisreform would be to overcome the fragmentation provoked by the application of this building type, byworking towards a reconstruction of collective urban formations.

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A project for Athens In the financial and urban crisis that Athens has been undergoing since 2008, we have developed at the

The proliferation of new archetypes in the polykatoikia carpet would create a new anatomy for central Athens througharchitecture rather than through abstract legislation. This map does not represent the real geography of Athens, but ratheran ideally reconstructed, analogous collage of its main urban conditions: the analogical character of the drawing serves tounderline the idea that no coherent master plan is put forward here, but only a catalogue of possible actions that willunfold in different ways depending on the context, changing the city through physical space one act at a time. Researchproject “Athens: Labour, City, Architecture. Towards a Common Architectural Language”, conducted at the Berlage Institute,Rotterdam, by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria S. Giudici, Platon Issaias, Elia Zenghelis and postgraduate researchers JuanCarlos Aristizabal, Hyun Soo Kim, Ivan K. Nasution, Davide Sacconi, Roberto Soundy, Yuichi Watanabe, Ji Hyun Woo,Lingxiao Zhang (2010­2011)

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Berlage Institute a project that starts from a critical evaluation of the polykatoikia protocol and thesubjectivity it has produced. Both the economic rationale and the social functioning of the urbancondition created by the polykatoikia have shown their limits. The disastrous current situation makes therethinking of this model a very urgent task. With this project we aim to expose the generic nature of thepolykatoikia, while recovering the architecture of the city beyond the pixel of the single dwelling. Insteadof a master plan we propose a catalogue of architectural actions that aim to connect the fragmenteddwellings into coherent and formally finite collective urban forms. These forms are the courtyard, theblock, the street, and the most collective layer of the city: the ground floor. The flexibility and opennessof the polykatoikia is thus manipulated towards the opposite scenario for which it was developed. Whilethe Dom­ino approach encourages the individual house owner to become an independent entrepreneurwho fills in, organises and manipulates his part of the skeleton, the forms we propose all imply a form ofcollective will and collaboration. The courtyard, the block, the street, and the ground floor becomefigures that can be rescued from the polykatoikia carpet. Our proposal radicalises these figures intodistinct architectural archetypes.

Repetition and discontinuity, paradoxically, are the two hallmarks of contemporary Athens: at a largescale, the Athenian urbanisation is repetitive and homogeneous — it lacks hierarchy, public space and aclear anatomy — while on the other hand, if we look at the scale of architecture, every city block is built

Left, Cloister. By constituting a block community, the inhabitants of a block could transform together the empty space in itsmiddle, and the possibility of a new, generous courtyard would emerge. The courtyard could become a cloister, hosting anenlargement of the existing properties in the form of a shared balcony framing the collective space. (Ji Hyun Woo, BerlageInstitute, 2011). Right, Platform. With the demolition of all the non load­bearing partitions of the ground floors — which arealmost never used except for retail — the street level becomes a private, yet publicly accessible platform. The platformwould expose the genericness of the polykatoikias: a continuous space punctuated by a loadbearing structure, ready to beused for new activities (Ivan K. Nasution, Berlage Institute, 2011)

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in a fragmented and chaotic way. The archetypes we propose are part of the grammar of anyMediterranean city, but they are unreadable in Athens today: courtyards are cut up by fences, poorlymaintained and never used simply because they are divided between too many owners; city blocks arebuilt without logic because the properties are too fragmented; and the streets and ground floors of thecity are plagued by thousands of failed, discontinuous attempts at building stoas that end up becomingunpleasant pockets rather than social spaces. Our archetypes suggest looking again at the strength ofthese basic figures to reconstruct spaces that can be shared. The archetypes of the cloister and theplatform are based on sharing (i.e. demolishing divisions) in order to reclaim residual intersticesrevealing physical and linguistic possibilities for an architectural "common". Other proposals focus on theneed to insert new spatial arrangements, since in Athens the space for work, production and interactionis often stuffed into the straitjacket of bourgeois apartments that do not fit the need of the users anymore(see archetypes entablature, roof and stoa). Beyond the manipulation of existing forms throughdemolition and localised insertion, the proposed grammar also puts forward archetypes that challengedirectly the polykatoikia as a tectonic model. The Dom­ino skeleton can be rethought as a frameworkwhere different productive and social activities can happen (see theatre, wall and in­transit).

These archetypes — cloister, platform, stoa, roof, entablature, theatre, in­transit and wall — arenot meant as definite projects, or as parts of a large­scale plan: they are examples [9] of how it would be

Left, Entablature. Urban blocks could be improved by the insertion of an extra rooftop level on existing buildings—acontinuous beam, a sort of entablature that hosts wide working spaces and contrasts the fragmentation of contemporaryAthens, offering new readability to the block as a distinct piece of city (Davide Sacconi, Berlage Institute, 2011). Right,Roof. An added linear structure hovering above the fragmented façades of the polykatoikias gives definition to the streetalignment while providing areas for production and education dedicated to the inhabitants of the existing buildings. Thenew roof underlines the street as architectural space and seeks the establishment of urban continuity (Lingxiao Zhang,Berlage Institute, 2011)

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possible to act on the existing tissue. These examples are not normative: their principle can be appliedin a variety of sizes, shapes and characters depending on the context. They are paradigmatic actionsthat can trigger different reactions and evolve in unforeseen manners. By the same token, they have notbeen developed as diagrammatic universal principles: they are presented as precise and concretepieces of architecture, because examples work by doing, by having an effect, rather than by prescribingabstract rules. In this, the idea of remaking a city anatomy through examples radically opposes the logicof the master plan; a proliferation of these examples would change Athens through architecture, addinggardens, galleries, promenades, and attics. In short, through making space.

This new city would not be another Athens. It would be Athens as it really is, hidden under the chaos ofan apparently informal development that is actually one of the most violent bio­political projects of thepast century. The apparent individual differences that gave the budding bourgeoisie in Greece theimpression of having unique lifestyles have ended up as a rather dreary and monotonous environment.It is the hope of this project that through sharing, rather than fragmenting, we might gain back realspatial variety; that maybe by exposing the polykatoikia skeletons in their genericness, rather thanpraising the fake originality of their fillings, a more habitable and straightforward city might emerge. PierVittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici teach at the Architectural Association in London; Platon Issaias is aPhD candidate at the Delft University of Technology (@cityasaproject)

Left, Stoa. A free­standing layer of stoa added in front of the current facades, eating a few metres from the street, wouldprovide a new public portico as well as the possibility to close the existing discontinuous stoas and turn them intoproductive spaces (Roberto Soundy, Berlage Institute, 2011). Right, In­transit. Logistic spaces are proliferating at theground level, especially on large thoroughfares, making street life impossible. This archetype proposes to group suchspaces and implement them with temporary living accommodation for precarious workers and visitors. It is conceived as ascreen shielding smallerscale neighbourhoods from traffic and providing a largescale architectural backdrop to suburbanhighways (Juan Carlos Aristizabal, Berlage Institute, 2011)

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Notes:1. The term poly­katoikia is a composite word, from poly, translated as multi, and the noun katoikia,dwelling. In Greek, polykatoikia stands for the multi­storey apartment building, eventually becoming aterm that describes every housing building except for suburban single­family villas.2. See Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage, The MIT Press, Cambridge 2000. 3. For a thorough analysis on the birth and the evolution of the polykatoikia type in the 1920s and 1930ssee Dimitris Emmanuel, The Growth of Speculative Building in Greece: Modes of Housing Productionand Socioeconomic Changes, PhD Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, London1981.4. See "The General Building Regulation of the State" (April 3rd 1929) and the 3741/1929 law "OnHorizontal Property Divisions and other provisions".5. On the particularities of this economic model (in Greek): Panos Kazakos, Between State and Markets:Economy and Economic Policy in Greece, 1944­2000, Patakis, Athens 2009. 6. Dimitris Emmanuel, Housing Public Policies in Greece: The Scale of an Absence, National Centre forSocial Research, Athens 2006.

Left, Theatre. By simply manipulating the vertical circulation into a promenade sequence, the skeleton becomes a theatreof sorts, a covered public space offered to the citizens of the neighbourhood. This archetype bares the bones of thepolykatoikia as all non load­bearing partitions disappear and the typical apartment building becomes again a Dom­inostructure. It shows how the Dom­ino approach makes the wall itself, as an architectural element, irrelevant (Hyun Soo Kim,Berlage Institute, 2011). Right, Wall. This archetype looks at the spatial qualities that wall architecture—the opposite of thepolykatoikia — can offer: the possibility to define boundaries, to distinguish inside and outside, to create privacy. Such awall is an alternative to the polykatoikia landscape: a thick slab containing services, opaque towards the street, supportingample balcony apartments facing an inner garden. While the service wall could be fixed, providing continuity on theoutside, the balconies can be occupied flexibly — thus reusing the infill logic of the Dom­ino (Yuichi Watanabe, BerlageInstitute, 2011)

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7. This particular process and the political implications of this economic project were thoroughlydiscussed and described in a fundamental text of 1951, the report "On the Economic Problem ofGreece", by the Greek economist Kyriakos Varvaressos. The report foresaw and analysed theparticularities of this major reform. Recently republished (in Greek): Varvaressos, Kyriakos, Report onthe Economic Problem of Greece, Savalas, Athens 2002. 8. N. X. Rousanoglou (in Greek), "84.6 is the Percentage of Home Ownership in Greece", Kathimerini,04/01/2006, figures from the General Report on the Activities of the European Union­2005, EuropeanCommission Brussels, Luxembourg 2006. 9. As an example, we refer to the essay by Paolo Virno, "Virtuosismo e Rivoluzione", in Mondanità,Manifesto Libri, Rome 1994.

Cloister. Ji Hyun Woo, Berlage Institute, 2011

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Platform. Ivan K. Nasution, Berlage Institute, 2011

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Entablature. Davide Sacconi, Berlage Institute, 2011

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Roof. Lingxiao Zhang, Berlage Institute, 2011

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Stoa. Roberto Soundy, Berlage Institute, 2011

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In­transit. Juan Carlos Aristizabal, Berlage Institute, 2011

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Theatre. Hyun Soo Kim, Berlage Institute, 2011

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Wall. Yuichi Watanabe, Berlage Institute, 2011

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