Populism as Counter-Theory in Greek Architectural Discourse

While the established histories of architectural theory generally focus upon the discourse produced by eminent architects and/or famous scholars, there is another counter-discourse that has developed gradually in the background. This is a discourse against architectural theory, in an effort to undermine theory’s importance, even to eliminate its value, scope and use altogether. Yet this implicit anti-theory – which has slowly but steadily become embedded in the international architectural scene over the last decades – is usually ignored or underestimated by architectural historians.

Drawing upon the recent literature on populism (e.g. Arditi, Moffitt, Taggart, Laclau), and also taking into consideration the few, but valuable, recent texts about populism within architecture (e.g. Fausch, Fowler, Shamiyeh, Lootsma), I will argue that a populist trend against theoretical inquiry is nowadays dispersed horizontally, thereby legitimizing particular, even if diverging, research methods and design practices. The fight against intellectualism and the elites, the promoting of a new sense of architectural ‘morality’, the use of simplistic procedures, forms and slogans, are among the many symptoms of a populist mentality that traverses ideological boundaries, social contexts and conflicting political identities, linking dreams of radical communal utopias to fantasies of limitless post-capitalist markets.

This essay discusses in particular the ways in which such a counter-theoretical discourse has re-emerged in the last decades among architects in Greece. By examining the publications about twentieth-century Greek architects (notably Dimitris Pikionis and Aris Konstantinidis), as well as looking at the informal talks and interviews being spread today through the internet (such as greekarchitects.gr on the Vimeo channel), I will comment on how, in the case of Greece, a long established populist architectural rhetoric was, and still is, disguised behind various anti-theoretical façades.