A Tale of Two Architects: The Doxiadis Brothers and the Power of Planning

Abstract

It has long been said that the “dynastic” families of Athens hold an extraordinary amount of power. But what does that power look like in practice? How does one put that truism to the test? By which touchstone can that power be measured? And how would that influence have worked in the postwar decade, when power structures, much like devastated Greece itself, were under construction and reconstruction? This article focuses on the brothers Constantinos and Spyridon Doxiadis, whose vision and praxis may shed some light on the above questions. I argue that each one of them in his own definitive way shaped an era, a landscape, and a demographic. Both were born planners, but at which point did their comprehensive planning become ideologically charged, even biopolitically decisive? Where and when did the architecture of the new capital city meet the architecture of a new postwar Greek population? How did the Doxiadis power team expand the meaning of “physical” planning? This article aims to illuminate a long-overlooked family and power connection that was also a potent vector of design, biological and other.