The Architect is Absent
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The Architect is Absent

Approaching the Cycladic Holiday House

€12,00

The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.

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96 pages, 102 x 162 mm
isbn 97-894-64202-82-3
illustrations color and b/w
language English
1st print fall 2020
2nd print fall 2021
3rd print spring 2023
4th print fall 2024

 

contents

Constructing through Absence
by Hülya Ertas

Meteorites
by Mâkhi Xenakis

Summer Home for François-Bernard Mâche by Iannis Xenakis, 1966–74
by Sharon Kanach

Villa Mâche: a harsh hijack against the space of the sun
by David Bergé

Traveling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections
by Dimitra Kondylatou

Iannis Xenakis, Selected Projects from Critical Index
by Sven Sterken

 

edited by
Dimitra Kondylatou
David Bergé

Sometimes an absence – such as other forms of silence and invisibility- can turn into a form of becomingness. This is precisely what can be found in these pages, histories about absences that connect architecture, politics and other human relations, making this out-of-frame even more evocative than presence itself.
– Anna Puigjaner, 2024.

kyklàda.press brings genealogies to the foreground, counterhistories of elements and spaces that appear to have been without history. Here, the architect may be absent, yet form is all present in the relations established between the Cycladic house and the Mâche villa, between the monastic cell and the vacation home, and between the topography of an island and the lines constructed in a wall.
– Tülay Atak, 2024



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