The springs of architecture
He’s an architect who builds, teaches, paints, writes and, above all, reflects. Simplicity is the keynote of Tassis Papaioannou, professor of architectural composition at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He keeps a distinct distance from mass culture, the dictates of the market and society as shaped by television programs. A man of action – but not part of the fashionable architectural scene – Papaioannou is one of the few who, while building, withdraws a little, keeps an invigorating distance and reflects. First on life, then on architecture and the city. «When you design and you have no vision for the city, when you don’t have the ideal city in mind, then you are not creating architecture,» he says. Writing and painting His book «Architecture and the Everyday,» recently released by Kastaniotis, contains articles he has published in the Athenian press, where he delves into contemporary society and talks in depth about the ethics of architecture. «Architecture does not exist in a vacuum,» he says. «It has to do with what has already existed and what is to come. The architect must imagine the future.» Meanwhile, he has an exhibition called «Painterly and Architectural Space» on at the Casa Bianca Municipal Art Gallery of Thessaloniki. The exhibition, which runs until January 31, is a joint exercise in fantasy with Alekos Fasianos, with whom Papaioannou feels in tune. «I have always painted,» he admits. «Through painting you approach architecture by another route. You imagine other paths that the narrow confines of an architectural plan may not allow you. As an architect, I paint imaginary buildings. In that way, I rethink the building.» With his belief in color, in the unified line of the independent but interlocked worlds of painting, architecture and sculpture, as an architect, Papaioannou expresses the purity and dedication of a person before the era of information bombardment. He says convincingly, «I really love my work; I want my hands to be busy all the time.» And his mind. Formed in the climate of comradeship and endless discussions about life that marked the return to democratic rule after the fall of the dictatorship, Papaioannou is someone one can talk to about matters great and small – local issues seen through an international perspective and public space, which in Greece is stifled by the dominance of private ownership. The discussion turns to Athens, from fashionable architects and the glossy magazine notion of architecture as decor, to the bright colors of childhood that are still faintly visible in alleyways and model schools, and the need to go beyond oneself and one’s country and to return enriched with knowledge and motivation. «For an architect to speak, he has to have built,» says Papaioannou. His everyday existence is bounded by the lecture halls of the NTUA and his private office, nearby on Themistocleous Street, which he has run since 1979 with former fellow-student and colleague Dimitris Isaias. It is a low-profile office that deals with contractors, people who speak the same language. Among its projects are houses (some of which have won awards), public buildings designed after winning competitions (such as the courthouse of Aigion) and schools (the Arsakeio schools in Patras and Tirana), all without insisting on a particular style, since Papaioannou doesn’t believe in specialization «but in the method of approach.» He seems to counterbalance phony trends. He responds to the mass-produced with a painstaking attention to detail and to the merely trendy with the timeless. As for standardization, he shrugs. «Our era is ruled by the image,» he claims. «This is a culture in a hurry, a culture that seeks novelty, something which hasn’t existed, which is absolutely new.» It is a sign of the times, like the famous architects who are stars of the international scene. «They move in a circle that belongs to no country,» he comments. «They operate on a level of which the ordinary architect cannot conceive. They build relations with power, talk to governments. That kind of architecture gets saturation coverage, shapes trends, and makes some organizations rich. It is a commercial transaction that has nothing to do with architecture.» While acknowledging the importance of emblematic buildings, Papaioannou believes that «the everyday is what shapes the city. It is the way we live which guides the architect.» He has an open, democratic approach to architecture. He does not distinguish it from life and the way life springs up in the street, in neighborhoods, in the city or on the outskirts, and how it unfolds in waves of imagination over the city. «I believe an architect should travel a lot. Travel is the architect’s second school, because the further away you go, the better you understand your own country and yourself.»
