“I won’t try to convince you.”
“No, convince me. Try. Convince me!”
Aristomenis sighs. He drums his fingers on the leather steering wheel.
“Where should I begin?”
“From the beginning.”
In the beginning, then, were the mountains of Epirus, blanketed in untouched snow. In the beginning was a simple, honest life. A barter economy, spontaneous regional cooperatives, an anarchic utopia regulated by human need: I’ll trade you my eggs for your wine, that sort of thing. When he was fifteen he left for Athens, went to live with his bookseller uncle. He was happy to have traded the open horizon for a top-floor apartment in Pangrati. School during the day, afternoons at the bookstore. In the evenings he would go up onto the roof and look down at Athens unfolding beneath him in a sheet of grayish white, like snow that’s melted under the wheels of a truck. The apartment buildings that had sprung up all over the city seemed to him like so many bumps on a person’s head. He wanted to make bumps, too. He was fascinated by how a life can take shape around a lighted window, a window constructed to embody that life and to project it out toward the horizon. In a book about architecture he came across some strange houses with low concrete roofs. The architect’s name was Frank Lloyd Wright.
The first things you read that really influence you can create a kind of metaphysical obstinacy: you keep trying to prove that your life has something in common with the life of a person you admire. So what did Aristomenis and Frank Lloyd Wright have in common? Their love of nature, of harmony, of simplicity — their admiration of a snail’s shell. The daydreaming, the shared ideal of a decentralized city. Their indifference to money and material things. Their persistence, their single-mindedness, their ability to commit landscapes to memory. The idea that decoration is simply emphasized form, and that form and function are one. And also, as it later turned out, their chaotic, tragic personal lives. Of course if you begin with this notion of convergence, sometimes you actually shape your life, even unconsciously, to accord with that of your idoclass="underline" in response to Wright’s religious beliefs, Aristomenis developed a confused metaphysics of the natural order of things. In response to Wright’s undisguised arrogance, he developed an equally undisguised imitation of arrogance.
He got his undergraduate degree from the architecture department at the University of Athens, then went to Paris on a scholarship from the Institut Français. At the height of May 1968 he got involved with the situationists and abandoned his master’s thesis in the middle—“work” was practically a curse word, a blight brought by consumer culture. He got used to committing acts of vandalism and sabotage, the only legitimate responses to the society of the spectacle. He took the slogan “free your passions” literally and discovered the joys of sex. At the end of that amazing period he felt poor and deeply alone. He spent his days drinking and drawing his own versions of Piranesi’s fantastic prisons. A phrase from the committee for the occupation of the Sorbonne—Humanity won’t be happy till the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist—sent him back once more to the source. How had Frank Lloyd Wright put it? Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. And how else? Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy. How else, again? Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. That was it, the idea of architecture as a saving grace, as ideology and political essence. Aristomenis set to work, struggling to balance his romantic nature with concrete action. On the one hand was Pamela Reed’s theory of self-transcendence and the Goodman brothers’ “communitas”—an intellectual return to the villages of Epirus, to a society in which production isn’t divorced from consumption. On the other was the slanted drafting table where buildings took shape at a feverish pace, combining form and function.
His personal life was chaos. His first wife left him for a right-wing French politician. His second was an eccentric, final-stage anorexic who might as well have used their fridge as an umbrella stand. He was so wrapped up in his work that he didn’t realize how bad things were until a few weeks before her death. He fell into a deep depression. Then he started to work even harder than before. The only kind of woman he wouldn’t drive insane was one with whom he could share his ideas. At the house of a friend of his, a professor, he sometimes ran into the professor’s daughter: a young woman who spoke in quotes, who slammed doors and went bright red with rage. Startlingly beautiful, with a dimple in her chin and one half-white eyebrow. The professor died and the daughter fell apart, revealing in the process her inner beauty, another landscape for Aristomenis to commit to memory. After all, that was where his talent lay: after a visit or two to a site he could imagine the ultimate result, the building that didn’t yet exist, the building he would create.
The young woman, of course, was Anna. When she came back to Greece for what would turn out to be our final summer together, Aristomenis had already taken things a step further: tired, disappointed by the utter stupidity of society, he had begun to overturn some of Wright’s theories. A positive is the sum of two negatives. So if form and function are one, then function can also destroy form, which can in turn destroy the original function. Architecture as the destruction of the system that nourished it.
He started to take on big projects, office buildings, in an attempt to solve that awful equation: how can you influence people’s lives through form, materials, function? How do you mobilize workers whose lives are a senseless cycle of daily needs, daily exploitation and tedium? How do you fight a rotten system that transforms creativity into mere labor? One way is to reverse function and use: you give a bank the form of an ancient temple. You build a sky-scraper whose windows don’t open, thus creating the illusion of a world that both belongs and doesn’t belong to the worker. You design an enormous, open-plan office that’s also a cell of sorts: no walls anywhere, yet the very openness of that space comes to oppress the people who work there. They can’t pick their nose or eat garlic or make a personal phone call without the person at the next desk knowing. Life becomes harsh, unbearable. It takes on an outward sheen of luxury that only heightens the sadness, the lack of freedom. People cease to think. The rage within them builds.
Rage — now there’s a word that must have charmed Anna back then, when her inner world was a battlefield of unbridled rage and contradictions. They ran into one another at some reception, Aristomenis talked to her about Stamatis, about situationism and his theory of what he had started to call inorganic architecture. His method of exploiting the system captivated Anna from the start. I can imagine what happened next. They joined forces, joined their lives.
“How does she seem to you?” he asks, downshifting smoothly. We’re almost at my place now. We pull up at the corner of Ippocratous Street and he turns on his right blinker. The downward slope of Kallidromiou always brings an inner warmth.
“She seems fine. Happy, I mean.”
“It’s a fragile happiness,” Aristomenis says, combing his eyebrows again. “I feel more secure when I know she has people around. I’m so glad she has you now.”
You’re just like Stamatis, aren’t you? You want me to look after her.
“She doesn’t take care of herself. Have you heard that cough? She’s always running a fever, and gets sick at the drop of a hat,” he says.
Then she shouldn’t smoke so much. What am I, her nurse? I’m tired of dealing with Anna’s problems. “Spring can be tricky,” I say. “It’s so easy to catch cold when the weather changes.”