Delos Network

在过去的二十年里，关于生态影响和可持续性的讨论已经在建筑和城市规划领域变得突出。建筑学院创造了新的硕士课程，如“景观城市主义”，建筑理论家创造了新的术语，如“生态城市主义”，以解决全球城市发展带来的紧迫的环境和人口压力。这种担忧最近得到了集中体现，有人将当前的地质时代重新命名为“人类世”——这个时代开始于人类而不是自然现象开始对地球的外观和生态系统产生主要影响的时代。但这些担忧并不新鲜。在20世纪50年代末，希腊建筑规划师Constantinos Doxiadis和英国规划师jacqueline Tyrwhitt通过将建筑、规划、技术和许多其他领域结合成一门新科学——“ekistics”，寻求解决类似问题的方法。通过一系列的12次专题讨论会（“Delos专题讨论会”，1963年至1975年），这一活动在国际上引起了重视，其中10次在爱琴海的一艘游艇上召开，并在Delos岛结束，并以雅典的“Ekistics月”活动和讨论为开端。许多被《时代》杂志称为“才华横溢、见多见广、有影响力的人”和“有魅力的知识分子”（1969年8月8日）参加了研讨会，包括玛格丽特·米德、芭芭拉·沃德、康拉德·沃丁顿、阿诺德·汤因比、麦克卢汉、让·戈特曼和巴克明斯特·富勒等等，并在国际媒体上广泛报道，从八卦专栏到学术期刊。他们的名声部分是由于乘坐游艇的“Delians”精英阶层为了解决世界上的问题而将自己与世界隔绝，同时也是因为他们的“解决方案”的古怪和狂野乐观：其他星球的地球化；核动力潜艇的公共交通会排放“无害”的二氧化碳；预测了如果当时刚刚起步的军事通信网络扩展到民用——很快就实现了我们今天所知道的万维网——将会产生变革性的社会行为影响。1973年的石油危机引发了全球经济衰退，两年后Doxiadis的去世标志着CIAM“立法者”一代建筑师和规划师的乌托邦愿望和推测的结束，这些建筑师和规划师不仅包括Delos集团，还包括与他们有密切联系的日本新陈代谢集团。对他们拯救世界的目标持怀疑态度的建筑和规划意见的浪潮，转向了更温和的小规模设计方法。这些晚期现代主义者完全被新的建筑和规划正统所掩盖，如今Delos专题讨论会的知识议程及其从20世纪60年代到今天的规划倡议的影响很少为人所知，甚至在学者中也是如此。从一种解读上看，提洛斯的时刻是独特而奇怪的，是一个自封但与外界脱节的精英们雄心勃勃、荒唐可笑的计划所带来的最后乐观时刻。从另一个角度来看，Delos时刻具有非凡的先见之明，并且仍然具有现实意义，它开创了思考全球范围内人口、经济、卫生和自然资源压力之间关系的新方式，结合最新的建筑发展、基础设施和通信技术，以及区域价值、传统技术和地方智慧。这个研究网络将首次汇集学者们，他们目前正在研究这段迷人但迄今为止被遗忘的思想史时期，不仅要理解它的重要性，而且要解决Delos辩论如何与当代建筑师，规划师和其他人对人口压力和环境可持续性的关注相比较并提供信息。

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.