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.

Find locally

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



You may also like…

  • Architectures of Healing

     €12,00 Buy onlineFind locally

    Today, many feel fettered by insomnia, untouchability, and restrictions on movement. Looking for a more holistic approach to bodily and mental health, this book explores architectures and elementary forms of care and healing in different time periods: from the powers of sleep, touch, and travel in Asklepieia, the ancient healing temples for divine dream encounters alleviating the pain of the ailing pilgrim; to the attentiveness carried through the healing touch from the establishment of Byzantine hospitals till our times; to a pilgrimage center in modern-day Lesbos on a personal search for healing from the traumas of war and patriarchy; to the liberating and self-preserving powers of sleep as a healing response to past and current systems of oppression.

  • Bodies of Extraction

     €12,00 Buy onlineFind locally

    What does it mean to drill deep and interfere with the configuration of tectonic plates? What does it mean to hollow out and alienate islandic undergrounds? How is wealth extracted and exploited from the ground, crumbled into fragments, transformed into matter, pieces of power, moved away to be represented elsewhere? Whose lungs and souls are capitalized upon and hidden under the suffocating dust in mining shafts? To whom do the surface of the land and its underground belong? This book takes proto-industrial mining in the Aegean island of Serifos as an entry point for disclosing historical and contemporary consequences of politics of the soil through land extraction, and looks at how mineral evidence was historically produced, disseminated, and capitalized upon in the Aegean region and beyond.

  • The Beach Machine

     €12,00 Buy onlineFind locally

    Aggressively rebounding after recessions and the pandemic, sprawling landscapes of tourism in the Mediterranean continue to build upon the iconic spatial typology of sea & sun vacationing: the beach. But behind the leisurely scattered bodies and the quiescent summer shores, beachfronts are assembled as intensely ordered infrastructures for the heavy machineries of tourism. Approaching the beach as an operational socio-technical landscape, this book unpacks stories of construction, programming, and maintenance: from traces of moving sands in Lefkada island to mirror postwar developments in Delos and Mykonos islands, and from historic and bodily excursions to workings of the Athenian riviera to rituals of eco-certification under Blue Flags. The texts frame the beach as a machine, one with protocols of function and metabolic needs, studying how it directs the capture of land and bodies, while establishing forms of environmental control.

Related books

  • Mediterranean Icebergs

     €12,00 Buy onlineFind locally

    While the largest parts of icebergs — or islands — remain beneath the sea surface, often unmapped and perilous, a myriad of creatures and non-organic matter connect them to other lands. Nowadays, in the era of the climate crisis, what is hidden in the depths of the sea exponentially manifests the impact of anthropogenic activity on the planet. Plastic waste and pollution, deep sea mining, and undersea network infrastructures affect marine biodiversity and life on Earth at large. Mediterranean Icebergs sheds light on forms of agency, be it human, more-than-human, or machinic, that operate in marine environments, paying attention to their entanglements, encounters, and asymmetries. Addressing the interconnectedness of environmental, political, and legal issues, this book takes the Mediterranean as a starting point to discuss what is at stake for all lives depending on the planet’s seas and oceans.

  • Islands of Exile

     €12,00 Buy onlineFind locally

    Surrounded by unyielding waters, islands have long served as ideal sites of banishment: places where those deemed unfit to exist within the political order, are cast away. Today, at the edges of democracy, and as obedience increasingly becomes an imperative for public presence, the specter of exile islands resurfaces. The entry point for this book is a research trip to Gyaros, an island scarred by memories of displacement and persecution — memories today at risk of erasure and privatization. Islands of Exile weaves together stories of exiled mothers, dogs, dissidents, and psychiatric patients in the Aegean Sea, narrating how humans can carve out spaces of hope and persistence.

  • Islands After Tourism

     €12,00 Buy onlineFind locally

    Tourism does more than transforming spaces and forcing emotions: its geographies also conceal a persisting power that captures the imagination. In their operational sturdiness, tourismscapes appear intractable and inert, making their alternative renderings almost unthinkable. It feels uncanny to picture islands and their coasts freed from programs of leisure. But in recent years, the exhaustion of people and landscapes has brought forth a renewed imperative to think outside this ubiquitous extractive industry. Through essays, pieces of fiction, and visual references, this book discusses both the difficulty and the necessity of disrupting the monocultural imaginations of tourism. To escape the devouring vortex of its sticky nature and messianic promises, the cultural and political work necessary is not only this of negation and resistance, but also that of bold re-conceptualizations and re-imaginings.