From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
If you have been to the Acropolis and climbed those winding paths up the hill towards the Parthenon you will have walked upon the work of Dimitris Pikionis. Probably, you will not have noticed it at all. Yet his work on constructing that complex network of paths and a few modest buildings around the back is among the most influential and enduring contributions to 20th-century architecture. If you cast your eyes downwards, you will see a carefully constructed footway built from the ruins of an Athens that was being demolished as the path was being laid. This patchwork of stones, fragments and spolia (pieces mined from the remains of older buildings) is almost like a layer of fossils of past architecture reconstituted to create a kind of puzzle. It is a remarkable and beautiful thing, a meticulous treatment of a surface destined to remain underfoot and the creation of public space from a once-dusty hillside.
Paving made from ancient stones and architectural fragments on the paths around the Acropolis. Photo: DEA/Archivio J. Lange via Getty Images
Born in Piraeus, Pikionis (1887–1968) did not have a formal architectural education. He began by studying civil engineering in Athens and then art and sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he became close to the Greek-born Giorgio de Chirico, and a trace of the surreal continued to haunt his work. Moving back to Greece after his studies, he designed a number of humble dwellings and a few larger blocks in styles that ranged from a kind of rough modern vernacular to a pure, white modernism. Little survives from this period except drawings and fuzzy photos. For a time after the Second World War his work consisted mostly of tombstones. In parallel, though, Pikionis enjoyed a 37-year career at Athens Polytechnic as an influential teacher. Because he communicated his ideas through lectures rather than writing, his legacy has faded a little and has led to some confusion about the intent of his work, about where – or if – he slots into the modernist canon.
The project that Pikionis is now best known for, the landscaping of the Acropolis, came about in 1951 when Konstantinos Karamanlis, minister for public works (later prime minister and then president), invited him to join a commission on improving public space around the site. For Pikionis this was an almost sacred commission. Perhaps unusually for an architect with a modernist background, he considered it a work of artistic intervention. The brief was to improve public access to the site. But the wider goal was to help to re-establish Greece, which had been devastated by the Second World War and a civil war that lasted until 1949, as a cultural and tourist destination. Pikionis barely moved beyond the ground plane. It is an incredible work in three dimensions, with the vertical dimension being mostly in the depth and range of the paving stones.
The wars had left their ruins and Athens, a mainly Ottoman and 19th-century city, was being remade. The Greek vernacular of the white cube converged with the stripped, plain walls of modernism as a complex collage city sprang up. The new Athens left a wealth of detail and material in its wake; fragments of 19th-century villas, many built by architects (often German, Danish or French) attempting to emulate the historic detail of the Hellenic legacy but also more mundane pieces of weathered marble floor, cobbles, hearths, thresholds, pavers, conduits, slabs, steps and slices through columns which appear as slender discs. Pikionis’s team meticulously laid out every path and platform, accommodating the rocks which swelled from the ground and winding around the steeper hillsides to maintain a manageable gradient.
The result is seductive but never insistent. Occasionally it looks like modernist whimsy, a little evocation of something that might be happening in Milan (Gio Ponti or Fornasetti, perhaps); a sun with a face and rays, a patchwork geometry like those of the Milanese apartment block lobbies. At other times, if you draw back, the stones evoke an urban plan, a city of ruins laid out in the earth. Occasionally you recognise a little bit of detail: a cornice or a frieze, a piece of column, each a fragment of an earlier evocation of ancient Greece. Occasionally there are concrete insertions, long strips with sudden bends and loops, like the lines in a print by Eduardo Chillida. And, at points, the landscape rises up, like the ruins of a base of a wall, to provide seating for the tired, overheated walker.
Detail of a section of Dimitris Pikionis’s pathways. Photo: Robert Wallace via Flickr
There are moments of more conventional architecture, too. There is a pavilion, a solid stone base with a timber structure that looks more Japanese than Greek, and a series of spaces roofed but mostly open to the air on either side, elevated above the earth and shaded by trees. They are among the most beautiful modern buildings you might ever encounter, yet there is nothing really that looks modern about them. A small church, St Demetrios Loumbardiaris, is part 16th century, part Pikionis concoction, an extrusion of the stone patchwork into three dimensions. It looks like it might be a thousand years old, as if it might once have been a bathhouse or a mosque.
In a way, this remarkable project is a nod to the ineffability of ancient Athens. We each see in the remains of the Acropolis something different: a reconstruction, a ruin, a fantasia, a warning; we might have a sense of awe or a feeling of loss. Pikionis’s work is about creating an armature for an endless set of possible stories in the landscape itself. It is like a Calvino novel, taking as its language the fragmentation of architecture to create a new narrative, or rather to create a framework to allow each walker upon it to interpret in their own way. Perhaps most people just assume it is the fragments of an older walkway.
The architectural historian Kenneth Frampton regarded Pikionis as one of his defining ‘critical regionalists’; modernists who responded to their cultural context. But even if you create a category especially for Pikionis, it remains impossible to classify his work in any one way. Perhaps that is why this unassuming labour of love has lasted so well. It is an acknowledgement that the route is as important as the destination; that the texture of the landscape, so often seen as a poor cousin of building, is indispensable to the experience of architecture.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.