Delos Network

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the past two decades, discussions about ecological impact and sustainability have come to prominence in the fields of architecture and urban planning. Architecture schools create new MA programs, such as 'landscape urbanism', and architectural theorists coin new terms, such as 'ecological urbanism', in their efforts to tackle the urgent environmental and demographic pressures of global urban developments. Such concerns have been epitomized recently by initiatives to re-designate the current era of geological time as the 'Anthropocene' - the epoch that began when human rather than natural phenomena started to have the major influence on the Earth's appearance and ecosystems. But these anxieties are not new.In the late 1950s the Greek architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis and British planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt sought solutions to similar problems by combining architecture, planning, technology and many other fields into a new science: 'ekistics'. This came to international prominence through a series of twelve symposia (the 'Delos Symposia', 1963-1975), ten of which convened aboard a yacht in the Aegean Sea and concluded on Delos island, and prefaced by an 'Ekistics Month' of activities and discussion in Athens. Many of what Time magazine called "brilliant, informed, influential people" but also "glamour intellectuals" (8th August 1969) participated in the symposia, including Margaret Mead, Barbara Ward, Conrad Waddington, Arnold Toynbee, Marshal McLuhan, Jean Gottmann and Buckminster Fuller to name a few, and featured extensively in international media, from gossip columns to academic journals. Their fame was in part fuelled by the elite cadre of yacht-bound 'Delians' shutting themselves of from the world in order to solve its problems and also to the outlandishness and wild optimism of their 'solutions': the terra-forming of other planets; public transport in nuclear powered submarines emitting 'harmless' co2; predictions on the transformative socio-behavioural effects should the then-incipient military communications networks be extended to civilian use - soon realized as the World Wide Web we know today. The global economic recession precipitated by the oil crisis of 1973 and Doxiadis' death two years later marked an end to the utopian aspirations and speculations of a generation of architects and planners descended from the 'Lawgivers' of CIAM, including not only the Delos group but also the Japanese Metabolist group with whom they were tangentially associated. A groundswell of architectural and planning opinion, sceptical of their world-saving goals, shifted towards more modest small-scale approaches to design. These late-Modernists were utterly eclipsed by the new architectural and planning orthodoxies and nowadays the intellectual agenda of the Delos Symposia and its repercussions in planning initiatives from the 1960s to today are little known, even among scholars. On one reading, the Delos moment is unique and strange, a last-gasp moment of optimism in the power of a self-appointed but disconnected elite with ludicrously ambitious plans. On another reading, the Delos moment is extraordinarily prescient and still relevant, pioneering new ways of thinking about the relationship between demographic, economic, health and natural-resource pressures at a global scale, combined with the latest construction developments, infrastructural and communication technologies, as well as with regional values, traditional techniques and local wisdom.This research network will bring together for the first time scholars who are currently looking into this fascinating but until now forgotten period of intellectual history, with a view not only to understanding its significance but also to address how the Delos debates compare with and feed into contemporary concerns about demographic pressures and environmental sustainability by architects, planners and others.