On December 5, 1966, within the ornate chambers of the United States Capitol, Senator Abraham Ribicoff called the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization to order. Nine senators sat at their elevated desks, examining the celebrated figure sitting before them. Besides Ribicoff, one other lawmaker was intent on making the most of this hearing. This particular senator wanted to know what their guest—this world-famous architect and city planner—could do to address the urban crisis then afflicting cities in the United States.

Ribicoff leaned into the microphone: “Mr. Doxiadis, you may proceed as you will. Go at your own pace […] after you are through, we might have a few questions.”

“I consider it a great honor, and a great challenge,” Constantinos A. Doxiadis replied. The Athenian architect was fifty-three years old, and is impeccably coiffed hair and mustache had begun to gray. In many ways, Doxiadis had reached the pinnacle of his career. By this point, a constellation of institutions based out of his headquarters on the slopes of Athens’s Mount Lycabettus brought business, education and cultural outreach to the city and to those who came to study Doxiadis’s planning theories in Greece. These organizations included Doxiadis Associates, his architecture and planning firm employing 700 draftspeople, planners and engineers; the Athens Technological Institute, his undergraduate and graduate school in planning; and the Athens Center for Ekistics, his think tank, as well as Ekistics magazine, his scholarly journal spotlighting exciting developments in the field of human settlements. Additionally, by this time the Delos Symposia, Doxiadis’s human-settlement-themed conference cruise on the Aegean, had run for its third year, in the process becoming a noted event for intellectuals the world over. Six months earlier, Doxiadis had been given the Aspen Award in Colorado for his lifetime of work on human settlements in at least forty countries; by the New Yorker’s estimate, his work had already impacted the lives of 10 million people.

“I was impressed by your letter to me,” Doxiadis told Ribicoff. “One thing you said was: ‘We don’t know enough about the problems; we know even less about the solutions.’ Allow me to support that statement […] I can only add that, because we now have the courage to make such admissions […] we are beginning to learn.” Immediately, Doxiadis entered into a detailed, eloquent twelve-point description of his life’s work – his design philosophy of Ekistics, the science of human settlements; his findings derived from a lifetime of studying and planning communities around the globe. In the course of this “lecture,” he shared his firm’s maps; his drawings of the five elements; his iconic, often comical, sketching style. It was a lecture he had given many times, and it was hardly the first time he had given it in Washington, DC.

Georgetown was the home of Doxiadis’s American headquarters, along the historic Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Noting the high-speed water taxis in operation at the time in Venice, Doxiadis was of the opinion the same might be useful for Washington, since the Potomac River linked Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, and therefore might be the perfect vehicle to shuttle commuters back and forth between their various shoreline communities. “The river is a cheap, ready-made means of transportation that will cost nothing to maintain,” Doxiadis had told a Washington newspaper in 1958—a sunny suggestion few took to heart.

But, as Doxiadis went through his projector slides—his drawings of cities expanding; ballooning; intersecting in wavy, curvilinear forms—the interested senator, who had been listening so intently, could not contain himself any longer.

“Could I see the last painting again?” Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York asked, in his iconic New England accent. “Did you do that yourself?”

“Yes,” Doxiadis said—they were indeed drawings by his own hand, and he said as much to the brother of the beloved American president who had been slain three years earlier in Dallas, to the man who would run for president in two years, the man who would then be assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Here and now, Robert Kennedy allowed Doxiadis to continue for a few more minutes, before the senator interjected again:

“Could I just interrupt? I know it is wrong of me, but I don’t understand some of this.”

In that moment, out of this interruption, something remarkable happened. Over the course of the next hour—more than thirty pages of transcript—Doxiadis and Kennedy traded their opinions on the state of cities in their time: the problems of urban decay, of the failure of public housing, on how to provide a future for many minorities left behind in cities while more affluent white populations fled to the suburbs.

Repeatedly, Kennedy asked Doxiadis: What would he do? How would he do it? Finally, when Doxiadis concluded with his points—and his responses to Kennedy—Senator Ribicoff asked some questions himself: “Are you doing work for any cities in the United States today?”

“Yes, sir,” Doxiadis said. “One of the urban areas we are working with is in the city of Philadelphia, where we have an urban renewal project to create a city within a city for almost ten thousand families. It is called the Eastwick area, and there we try to carry out the principles of communities in a human scale”

Several minutes later, as the committee was just about to adjourn, Kennedy would speak up once more: “Mr. Doxiadis, I am going this afternoon to Philadelphia to see your project […] I have heard of it and some of the other work that is being done in Philadelphia, and I wanted to look at it and see whether we can do something like that in the city of New York. I am looking forward to it.”

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Fifty-two years after Robert Kennedy said he would visit the Eastwick neighborhood of Philadelphia, I did. It was a bitterly cold weekend day in March 2018 when I took the pitted I-95 south from Princeton to the City of Brotherly Love. I drove through downtown, past City Hall and the Comcast Tower; I drove up and through the double-decker, trussed Girard Point Bridge, crossing the Schuylkill River. I took the exit for Penrose Avenue, entering the district of Eastwick, though there are few signs announcing the fact. From a metropolitan standpoint, the area’s most important amenity is Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). Outside of the airport, one can find industrial sites, landfills, strip malls, a public library branch and a SEPTA suburban-rail station that can take you out of this somewhat forlorn place and back downtown. There are even still the original phases of rowhouses planned and designed by Doxiadis Associates, the subsequent houses built and designed by later development corporations—though you would never know that, if you weren’t familiar with the history of Eastwick. This is astonishing, because in the 1960s this neighborhood was the site of what was the largest urban-renewal project in US history, its cost a whopping $78 million—the equivalent of more than half a billion dollars today. Eastwick was so nationally prominent, it was even floated as the location for a failed bid to host the 1972 Olympic Games. And yet, this is not a historic planned community, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia, New York; or the original Levittown in Long Island; or James Rouse’s celebrated Columbia, Maryland. There are no signs.

On this cold March day, the only way I could deduce I was in the right place – that I had entered the network of a Doxiadis plan—was through the street layout, which was highly engineered. The streamlined collector roads made it extremely difficult to enter the residential neighborhoods. Again and again, I was steered onto other major streets, pushed in the direction of the highway, down one-way streets and circles that led to empty blocks covered in weeds and trash – abandoned and deteriorating housing; the borders of the marsh, where all this had been built. Finally, after more than an hour of navigating this labyrinth, I came into a neighborhood that had, in many ways, held up relatively well. One house even had solar panels. Here, I finally stopped.

About 12,000 people live in Eastwick. The median household income is $39,000 a year —for a Northeastern city, this is a lower-income area. The neighborhood is 76 percent African American. Like some other parts of Philadelphia, it is a place frequently tested by violence—with eighteen reported homicides from 2010 to 2017.

The gulf between Doxiadis’s high-minded rhetoric of Eastwick and the disappointing reality is stark and demands explanation. For a moment, consider Doxiadis’s background. The Athenian was no stranger to working in less-than-ideal conditions— in Greece, he had led a resistance group against the Axis Occupation; in Iraq, his team of architects survived a coup d’état; in Pakistan, he had realized an entire capital city from the ground up. Doxiadis’s efforts in Eastwick were no less ambitious—and in some ways, perhaps they were even greater. Despite the praise of its initial residents, the redeveloped Eastwick never took off, and today, to the untrained eye, it appears an unremarkable, low-income suburb on the fringes of the Philadelphia Airport. What happened to Eastwick? The answer lies not in the idealistic vision of its international master planner but in what his dream ran up against. At the heart of Eastwick’s disappointment was a deep-seated American phenomenon: the racial prejudice of its prospective inhabitants.

Read the rest of the essay in The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis, available now from Lars Müller Press (and for a better price in the U.S., on Amazon).

This is the sixth essay in The World Planner series, chronicling my biographical investigations into the life and times of Constantinos Doxiadis. These pieces take longer to write than the other posts, so they’ll appear on an intermittent basis.

If there are stories you would like to share about Doxiadis for inclusion in my work, please write to me at doxiadisbiography[at]gmail.com.

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It is unusual to read an enigmatic master’s thesis and come across the parody image of a Pokémon-esque trading card game depicting a “globetrotting planner.” The portrait on the trading card consists of Constantinos Doxiadis, an influential Greek city planner. The game is called “Big man^TM.” On the card, Doxiadis’ “powers” include high levels in diagramming, urban design, and infrastructure, an average ability at “nation building,” but possessing a “diagram bonus.”

Doxiadis, despite being active in thirty-plus countries from 1953 to 1975, is an historically under-appreciated figure in modernist urban history. The efforts of Doxiadis and his firm have only recently begun re-evaluation in urban studies conferences and journals. For Doxiadis to appear so bizarrely as a figure in a fictional trading card game, in a book about Lagos shaped by the guiding hand of another star architect, demands further scrutiny.

That curious text is available to be read at the Frances Loeb Library of Rare Books and Special Collections at Harvard University, and it is titled The Lagos Handbook, or a brief description of what may be the most radical urban condition on the planet. The volume is anything but brief—it runs some 612 pages, with seven maps and 193 drawings. Crafted as part of the Harvard Project on the City, the effort was submitted as a master’s thesis for the project’s participants at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, under their faculty advisor, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.

Within architecture and design circles, The Lagos Handbook has taken on the status of a myth. One blog entry on Archinect by Quillian Riano enigmatically stated, “As far as I know there are only two copies, one in the GSD’s Loeb Library main collection and one in the GSD’s special collections.” On another thread of Blogger, Riano posted, “I wonder what’s up with that book, even the librarians at the GSD laugh when I ask if they have any insider knowledge.” Another respondent on that thread, Nate Slayton—one of the credited authors of The Lagos Handbook—wrote, “The single copy in loeb’s special collections is likely the extent to which it will ever be broadcast.”

In fact, the Lagos Handbook thesis was the basis for a book called Lagos: How It Works, scheduled for publication in 2008, its listed authors Koolhaas and Edgar Cleijne. According to an interview in The Guardian, Koolhaas explained that in the end, the adaptation of the thesis was not pursued due to political correctness. “There’s an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go [to Lagos],” Koolhaas said. “Because of that innuendo, in the end we didn’t publish… it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do.”

However, sections of the Handbook were repurposed and adapted into a section on Lagos in Mutations, a publication that accompanied a 2000 exhibit in Barcelona. A 55-minute documentary directed by Bregtje van der Haak, Lagos Wide and Close (2004), was re-released in 2014 online. But most of The Lagos Handbook, as Slayton iterated, sits in the Loeb Library for the curious researcher to stumble upon.

Other writers, such as Kostas Tsiambaos, have previously linked the ideas of Koolhaas to those of Doxiadis. Granted, the Harvard Project on the City was not the effort of one personality, but several. But the involvement of Koolhaas is interesting, particularly since few contemporary figures in architecture and planning have sought a connection to or dialogue with Doxiadis.

The Lagos Handbook’s admiration for Doxiadis’ theoretical work in relation to Lagos and the idea of the megalopolis indicates an intellectual influence on the thinking of the Harvard Project on the City, and on that of Koolhaas himself. Since the 1980s, architectural theorists have become suspicious of modernism and its neocolonial undertones. Koolhaas has elsewhere argued (and lamented) that the discrediting of modernist city planning as a profession has ironically come at a time in history when neo-modernist planning studies might have utility.

The Lagos Handbook

The copy of The Lagos Handbook in the Loeb Library entertains a far-ranging breadth of topics—from ethnographies of the Oshodi market, to the informal lake-bound settlements of Makoko, to the phenomenon of oil company “compounds” for wealthy expatriate contractors. Taken altogether, The Lagos Handbook is a truly dizzying opus of seemingly limitless proportions—fitting, given its object of study is the eponymous Nigerian megalopolis, whose metro area in 2021 enumerated a population of over 14 million. Such a book’s argument is hard to assess, but its epilogue spells it out:

A pressure cooker of scarcity, extreme wealth, land pressure, religious fervor and population explosion, Lagos has cultivated an urbanism that is resilient, material-intensive, decentralized and congested. Lagos may well be the most radical urbanism extant today, but it is one that works. This book is an account of the convergence of extreme conditions, the consequences and adaptive responses of urban form at the leading edge of globalization.

The book follows the house style of Rem Koolhaas and his Office of Metropolitan Architecture, its presentation evoking the avant-garde images and large print of his classic doorstop compendium created with Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL. The handbook opens with a provocative slideshow featuring images of Lagos’ dizzying sprawl against the text of various luminaries, Western and African (but mostly Western), to reflect on the Nigerian milieu. The quoted figures include Joseph Conrad, Paul Theroux, Bill Clinton, Graham Greene, Robert Kaplan, and Chinua Achebe. The first slide—juxtaposing a map of Nigeria with a quote from a 1996 article in the Houston Chronicle—certainly sets the tone. It reads, “The most corrupt nation in the world.”1

In citing so many colonial authors and 1990s-contemporary elites, the text makes the effort to indicate it is the final word on such omniscient declarations. Lagos, in its view, is a form of hell, but, against all odds—it works, apparently. There is also a teleology to the narrative in The Lagos Handbook—that Lagos is an image of the future of all cities, of all mega-regions, the ultimate product of globalization and the capitalist system. As Lagos became Nigeria’s primate city, it monopolized the economic growth of the country, driving more and more low-income arrivals from rural areas searching for jobs that didn’t always exist, a desperation driving the growth of informal settlements and marginal forms of employment. In that way, the reality of Lagos has a lot in common with Doxiadis’ idea of ecumenopolis, the theoretical city that, in his view, would one day encompass the entire globe due to unchecked population growth.

Constantinos Doxiadis and Doxiadis Associates in Africa

Headquartered in Athens atop Lycabettus Hill, Doxiadis Associates (DA) was best known for its master plan of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. But during the firm’s apex from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, it was involved in hundreds of projects, in more than 30 countries, most notably in the firm’s work for a housing plan in Iraq, a master plan for the state of Guanabara in Brazil, and a study projecting a “Great Lakes Megalopolis” centered around Detroit, Michigan.

Central to DA’s organizational mission was Constantinos Doxiadis’ design philosophy of “Ekistics,” the science of human settlements. Coined from the Greek word for “settling down,” ekistics in practice was an early form of interdisciplinary city planning, with its own language and methodologies. The ideology formed the intellectual backbone of Doxiadis’ constellation of related organizations based in their shared office complex in Athens—a think tank called the Athens Center for Ekistics, degree-granting institutions such as the Athens Technological Institute and the Graduate School of Ekistics, the Ekistics journal of planning, and the Delos Symposia, a conference series on human settlements held on a cruise ship which sailed the Aegean every summer. Doxiadis also wrote many books to develop his ideas, from his textbook Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements to Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable World City. These texts represented an interesting precursor to Koolhaas’ similarly ambitious publications

In Africa, DA conducted projects of varying extent in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Ghana, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Zambia, and Nigeria. The work in Tema, Ghana comprised one of the firm’s most significant projects on the continent. In Nigeria, DA’s involvement began in 1972, when they produced development plans for twenty urban centers. This led to master plans for the Black Arts Festival Village (also known as FESTAC), a master plan for the city of Illorin, the capital of Kwara State, the master plan for Jos-Bukuru, capital of Benue-Plateau state, and master plans for a series of towns, including Eket, Etinan, Opopo, and Oron.

In one of the most comprehensive retrospective volumes of Doxiadis’ career, Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis cautioned that attributing Doxiadis’ singular vision or intent in his Nigerian projects was a flawed prospect, given Doxiadis’ death in 1975 of ALS and his declining health in the lead-up to his passing. The Lagos Handbook added: “It is unclear whether or not Doxiadis actually spent any time in Lagos, because of a conspicuous absence of his usually excessive documentation of site visits.”

But Doxiadis’ practices were well-established at his firm by this time, and though the firm was sold and substantially restructured after his death, for several years afterward his associates carried on with his design ethos in his absence. Moreover, even though his Nigerian projects didn’t officially begin until 1972, he began writing about Africa in the 1960s, a point that The Lagos Handbook authors raised to justify his inclusion in their work.

Read the rest of the essay, originally published by AISU, here.

This is the fifth essay in The World Planner series, chronicling my biographical investigations into the life and times of Constantinos Doxiadis. These pieces take longer to write than the other posts, so they’ll appear on an intermittent basis.

If there are stories you would like to share about Doxiadis for inclusion in my work, please write to me at doxiadisbiography[at]gmail.com.

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In July 2022, I traveled to the Truman Library on a mission—to find more information about Constantinos Doxiadis and the Marshall Plan in Greece.

In the 1960s, Constantinos Doxiadis was an architect and city planner of global influence. His firm Doxiadis Associates was involved in 40 countries, and most notably designed the capital city of Islamabad, Pakistan from the ground up. But before he transformed himself as the postcolonial planner par excellence, he was the Greek Undersecretary to the Ministry of Coordination, the government department that liaised with the American administrators of the Marshall Plan in that country.

The Marshall Plan, of course, was the US’s extraordinary effort to rebuild Western Europe after World War II so as to stabilize the region economically and thwart the advance of the Soviet Communist bloc. More than $13 billion in 1947 dollars ($183 billion adjusted for inflation) was spent in these efforts, and about $400 million ($6 billion today) was earmarked for Greece and Turkey, the part of the program known as the “Truman Doctrine.” Though Turkey had been neutral in the war, Greece had suffered absolute devastation during the Axis occupation and faced a civil war between the royalist government and Communist insurgents funded out of Moscow.

Of all the Greek officials the Americans worked with during the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Greece, Constantinos Doxiadis was their favorite colleague. With an efficient management style and an intolerance for delays, he was sympatico with the American pace of things. And that aggressive and economical vision led to conflict with his Greek peers.

In November 1950, Doxiadis was hospitalized for a perforated ulcer. And in that time, his superior at the Ministry, Giorgios Papandreou, plotted to oust him. Gathering 30 of his allies in the Hellenic Parliament in the middle of the night on December 19, 1950, they voted to abolish Doxiadis’ position. And when Doxiadis, still bedridden, read the newspaper, he was shocked to see that he was no longer a public servant.

The moment changed Doxiadis’ life forever. He decided to pursue a new life in Australia, bringing his wife and three daughters in tow. However, Australia didn’t recognized his architectural credentials, so he resorted to becoming a tomato farmer. And after two years, he returned to Greece, launching the firm for which he would become known around the world.

When I visited the Truman Library, I was looking for more information on this pivotal period of Doxiadis’ life from the American perspective. The Truman Library had interviewed Doxiadis in the 1960s for an oral history project, so I knew that the library had held an interest in Doxiadis.

Unfortunately, the library’s holdings did not have the wealth of information about Doxiadis which I hoped to find. However, what I did uncover was a very interesting collection of sources. In the 1980s, Paul R. Porter, one of the American officials who led the Marshall Plan efforts in Greece, organized a memoir-collecting effort for the presidential library. Asking his former colleagues and their spouses to contribute memoirs, Porter assembled an impressive range of anecdotes chronicling the travails of a very-green group of diplomats stationed in war-torn Greece. Porter called this ‘collective memoir’ “Greece at the Turning Point,” but in fact America was at the turning point as well—it was the US’s first international aid venture as one of the two dominant superpowers, and Americans were not accustomed to the role.

I’ve just published a peer-reviewed article about these memoirs in Ex-Centric Narratives, an open-access journal out of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki that focuses on English-language interactions with Greek culture. The (admittedly lengthy) article considers the most interesting stories in the collective memoir, including the experiences of American women in Athens and American perceptions of the Greek Civil War.

It also includes a fascinating revelation about the American reaction to Doxiadis’ dismissal—‘Doxiadis at the turning point,’ you might say. And though I did not find the treasure trove of material about Doxiadis that I had hoped for, on the few occasions when Doxiadis was mentioned in the texts, the references were quite telling.

One of the most interesting stories was supplied by former American Marshall Plan official John Russell, who attached a fictional narrative published by Konstantinos Tsatsos, a prominent politician and literary figure in Athens who eventually became president of Greece. Tsatsos’ story was a purported cache of letters between a Roman senator and the newly appointed Roman governor of Greece, supposedly found in a jar as part of the various real-life papyri found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and was later published in English translation as “Letters to a Roman Proconsul in Greece.”

In the story, the senator advises the appointee about the difficulties he will face in governing the Greeks, and how Greek infighting, pride, and jealousies would likely hamper his administration. As Russell explained in his archival note, the story was initially published in Athenian newspapers and was a “clever way to present what might be unpopular,” with the Roman authorities representing the Americans and the ancient Greeks their modern descendants.

Finally, Russell concludes by saying that the letters’ insights reflected “the sort of thing that happened [in a] one night session of Parliament to Dino Doxiades when he was Minister of Coordination.”

Both Giorgos Papandreou’s conspiracy to oust Doxiadis and the fictional story of the Oxyrynchus Papyri clearly resonated with Russell. He recognized that the internal jealousies of the Greek political class had led to the elimination of Doxiadis’ role in the government.

Ironically, Tsatsos was the person appointed to replace Doxiadis in his position at the Ministry of Coordination. Did Tsatsos write the essay in partial reference to Doxiadis’ dismissal? Given the available sources, I can’t prove this, but what’s interesting is that John Russell made the connection between Tsatsos’ story and the Doxiadis case.

For more on this episode in the life of Constantinos Doxiadis, check out pages 135-138 in my article for a more detailed account, as well as the rest of the article for a fascinating lens into what transpired during the Marshall Plan in Greece.

Correction: A previous version of the post stated that Doxiadis’ position was abolished in 1951, when these events occurred in 1950. The article has been corrected to reflect the error.

This is the fourth essay in The World Planner series, chronicling my biographical investigations into the life and times of Constantinos Doxiadis. These pieces take longer to write than the other posts, so they’ll appear on an intermittent basis. (It’s been a minute since the last one, but two more installments are on the way in the near future.)

If there are stories you would like to share about Doxiadis for inclusion in my work, please write to me at doxiadisbiography[at]gmail.com.

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On November 1, 2011, perhaps the most important work of global architect and city planner Constantinos Doxiadis (1913-1975) was reduced to rubble. That was the day when the architect’s house at Porto Rafti on the east coast of Attica, part of the Apollonio complex was demolished. The house at Porto Rafti was the culmination of Doxiadis’ lifelong goals as an architect, constructed with urgency in the last years of his life as a testament to his design ideas.

The building’s 2011 demolition did not go uncontested, leading to a strange limbo situation that was eventually exploited by the current landowners. The story of the remarkable building at Porto Rafti, as well as its untimely destruction, are the subject of this entry in The World Planner.

The construction of a masterpiece

Many famous architects of the twentieth century have come to be identified with a signature project that demonstrated the facets of their design philosophy. Le Corbusier had the Villa Savoye outside Paris, a house designed as a “machine for living”; Frank Lloyd Wright had the Jacobs I House in Wisconsin, the first Usonian house that realized Wright’s ideal suburban house (forming the namesake of this publication).

Constantinos Doxiadis, on the other hand, concentrated his efforts in city planning. “If we want to think about architecture we cannot think merely of buildings isolated in the countryside,” Doxiadis wrote in his 1963 manifesto, Architecture in Transition. “To think of isolated buildings is really to evade the main question related to architecture, for architecture does in fact lead towards the formation of cities.”2 Doxiadis’ focus was usually in planning for functioning cities, rather than designing flashy architecture. But that did not completely dissuade him from crafting a monument of his own, albeit in the service of community-oriented architecture.

Toward the end of his career, Doxiadis’ evolving design philosophy began pointing to a desired “entopia.” A utopia, as coined by Sir Thomas More, referred to “no-place.” For Doxiadis, the proper word in Greek for a perfect city that could be achieved would be called “entopia,” a utopia that could be achieved.

In 1958, Doxiadis and his wife Emma visited the east Attican coastline. This experience inspired him to build a house in Porto Rafti, one of the coastal villages in the region, not far from present-day Athens International Airport. Eleven years later, in 1969, the project began in earnest.

Doxiadis began developing symptoms of ALS in the early 1970s, the disease which finally claimed his life in 1974. In his final years, he set out to complete two projects—four “red books,” which would form the final iterations of his planning ideas, and his own literal version of entopia—the Apollonio development at Porto Rafti.3 For Doxiadis, the typical Cycladic village, with its pedestrian-oriented streets and intimate modest dwellings, formed the ideal urban pattern for the Aegean context.

Doxiadis had built modern iterations of island villages before, such as the Aspra Spitia village near Delphi, Greece, but at Porto Rafti he sought to construct a masterpiece. Investing much of his finances into the project, Doxiadis threw his remaining energy into a project that would, he hoped, form a seaside community for creatives, complemented by his own house, chapel, conference center, and amphitheater. He named the development the “Apollonio,” an evocation of Apollo, god of light. His Delos Symposia were held at the mythical birthplace of Apollo, and in the name he perhaps sought to connect this project to the earlier effort.

The ensuing product was a marvel that evoked the traditional Cycladic island village. It was the fullest encapsulation of Doxiadis’ design ideals, built in a modern version of ancient and traditional building forms, a style that invoked the example of his collegiate mentor, Dimitris Pikionis, whose work is best known through the cobbled walkway around the Acropolis.4

In Building Entopia, Doxiadis cited the example of the Apollonio community as a realization of the entopia concept. At the conclusion of that work, published posthumously in 1975, Doxiadis wrote, "We have an exact diagnosis of our disease and begin the therapy, not by nervous and uncoordinated magical solutions, but by properly conceiving and trying to build the Entopia we badly need.” Triumphantly he proclaimed, “We are on the proper road for the best harmony that humanity has ever achieved.”5

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Demolition, a protracted struggle, and limbo

Doxiadis’ dream of entopia at Porto Rafti was realized in terms of what was constructed, but several factors limited the success of his aspirations. For one, the high cost of living in the Apollonio community, as well as the community’s expensive membership fees, ended up excluding many of the artists-as-residents whom Doxiadis hoped to attract within its walls. Instead, the development became a popular resort community for wealthy Athenians.6

In 1981, faced with the high expense of paying the Apollonio community dues, the Doxiadis family sold the Porto Rafti house to a new owner who suggested they would retain the property as designed. For many years that promise was upheld, but in this time the building was never listed as a protected monument.

In 2010, the municipality of Markopoulo Mesogaias issued a permit to demolish the house under the pretense the structure was composed of “old two-story and ground-floor buildings” of no architectural importance. This allowed the contemporary owner, named in court documents as Alexandras Gryparis, a descendant of the second owner, to begin demolishing Doxiadis’ house within the Apollonio complex.

Euphrosyne Doxiadis, one of the architect’s daughters, was informed of the demolishment on the third day. She immediately filed an application to the Council of State (the Supreme Administrate Court of Greece) to ask for a stay of demolishment. The stay granted, the demolishment was halted on the fourth day, with the foundations and multiple sections of the house still standing.

The Council of State subsequently overturned the municipal permit, leading to the site’s unusual status—ruins from which, as I understand it, nothing could be built, and nothing could be further demolished. It was a state of limbo.

For several years, the partial remains of the house survived. I visited the ruins at Apollonio in 2018. At that point, the chapel and amphitheater remained intact. The rubble, frozen in time, was a disquieting sight. The upturned stone could have been from any previous century, the ruins of a building of much older vintage, if not for the knowledge the demolition occurred in 2011.

However, in 2019 a new house was built on the demolished site by exploiting a technicality regarding historic places. Though the greater Apollonio community survives, its centerpiece, the house and conference center as conceived by Doxiadis, has been stripped away and replaced with new construction. The destruction seemed complete, but Euphrosyne Doxiadis has pursued further legal action against the landowner, with the aim of one day restoring the house to its designed specifications.

Doxiadis amidst the ruins

Ruins loom large in the writings in Doxiadis. They factored into the situations he witnessed as a Greek growing up in the shadow of ancient monuments and a Greece ravaged by World War II and the ensuing Greek Civil War. It also factored into the work he conducted rebuilding Greece as Undersecretary of the Ministry of Coordination during the implementation of the Marshall Plan in his home country.

On February 19, 1952, Doxiadis gave a lecture at the University of Chicago. In that speech he told a story of the Second World War. During a cold winter night in 1941, he was heading back on a mountain path to avoid the advancing German forces, when he sought shelter in an affluent village. Doxiadis recalled being confused when he arrived, because he could not find the white houses of the village anywhere. Thinking he had taken a wrong turn, he suddenly came to the horrifying realization that the village, or what was left of it, was right before him.7

“It was in ruins. Nothing was left standing. Here and there were stark, black heaps, among which moved emaciated shadows of men, in the pale light of the moon. ¶ I gazed silently at this grim sight. I could not bring myself to speak to anyone, to ask for food or for water from the ruined spring. ¶ Everywhere around me was desolation. The people seemed like ghosts, and the whole impression was of devastation wrought by an earthquake.”8

In the morning, he said, a loud noise awoke him. He emerged from the cave and encountered a little boy with an injured leg who asked Doxiadis if he would carry him into town. Doxiadis obliged.

When they arrived, Doxiadis was amazed to find the village in working order. Makeshift stalls had been erected, and a church held a service in a damaged church. The boy whom Doxiadis had carried loped into the ruined schoolhouse for his lessons. As Doxiadis told his audience at University of Chicago, the moment gave him an epiphany: “In that moment, I understood why the picture of the village had changed and how the face of Greece could be altered.” In so many words, it was the Greek people who were the key to recovering the village from the rubble.

Doxiadis often cited this moment as a critical one in his development of his design philosophy of ekistics. For his finest work at Porto Rafti to be rendered into ruins seems like the rhyming verse of a cruel poetry.

This is the third essay in The World Planner series, chronicling my biographical investigations into the life and times of Constantinos Doxiadis. These pieces take longer to write than the other posts, so they’ll appear on an intermittent basis.

If there are stories you would like to share about the Apollonio house or Doxiadis for inclusion in my work, please write to me at doxiadisbiography[at]gmail.com.

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The Greek architect Athanasios Hadjopoulos was almost 40 when Frank Lloyd Wright stood over his drafting table in Baghdad. Wright, ever the irascible American icon, pointed at the plan on Hadjopoulos’ desk and asked what it was. Hadjopoulos explained it was a design for a low-income housing project to be built in the Iraqi capital. “You know, I wouldn’t do this,” Wright said, grabbing a sheet of paper and hastily sketching a three-story building with roof garden. “I would have done it like that.”

Hadjopoulos then did the unthinkable—he challenged Wright. He said that the project was meant to house 10,000 people. What, then, was the capacity of Wright’s plan?

“Two to three thousand,” Wright replied. “What about the rest?” Hadjopoulos asked.

Wright shrugged. The great architect didn’t care.

That was in 1957. In 2018, Hadjopoulos pulled out Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing and put it on the desk in front of me. The frayed paper wasn’t even in a plastic sleeve, and suddenly I was touching Wright’s distinctive handwriting.

Hadjopoulos was 98. One of the reasons I had come all the way to Athens was to see him. I was glad I did, as the ensuing interview of Athanasios Hadjopoulos was astonishing in ways I could not have anticipated. As an eyewitness to some of twentieth century architecture’s biggest stars—Wright, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Constantinos Doxiadis—Hadjopoulos possessed a unique perspective to evaluate these key figures and their competing priorities.

In the end, I was extremely fortunate to meet Hadjopoulos—after all, his time was running out.

Athanasios Hadjopoulos was born in 1919 in Faliro, a coastal community now part of the sprawling Athens metropolitan area. Hadjopoulos’ paternal grandfather was a professor of French in Istanbul and moved the family to Greece ahead of the Greco-Turkish war, in which Greece gained and lost territories in Asia Minor; the ensuing exchange of populations, mandated by the League of Nations, led to massive refugee crises in both countries.

As for Hadjopoulos’ father, he was the kind of man interested in everything mechanical; he had a habit of going into train stations and ducking his head under locomotives to see how they worked.

Some of that interest in engineering and systems must have rubbed off on Hadjopoulos. In 1939, Hadjopoulos entered the School of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens. There he encountered Constantinos Doxiadis, assistant professor of town planning. The young, dashing, and ambitious Doxiadis recruited Hadjopoulos to his project cataloguing all the housing data of the Hellenic state. A year later, Italy, eager to start its own lightning war, attacked Greece; the Greeks repelled the Italian army but were quickly defeated when Germany came to Italy’s aid. Soon Hadjopoulos was a member of Doxiadis’ underground resistance group, collecting records of destruction, placing them in metal tubes, and hiding them in a cottage garden for retrieval by British Intelligence.

Thereafter, Hadjopoulos’ life, in his words, was the result of two phone calls. In 1945, he answered the phone to discover he had won a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne; in France, he later worked as an unpaid apprentice of Le Corbusier, the famed modernist. In 1955, Doxiadis, now a globetrotting architect with projects growing by the day—called him and asked whether he’d join his team in Iraq. Hadjopoulos said yes—and his life took on unforeseen directions and dimensions.

That was because he joined Doxiadis Associates (DA), Doxiadis’ massive urban planning firm based in Athens. During its peak period from 1955 to 1975, the firm worked on projects in more than 40 countries. Most known for designing Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, DA also worked on notable projects in Nigeria, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. In his native country, Doxiadis designed major sections of the Deree College campus, as well as an aluminum company town near Delphi. In that time, Doxiadis was a media star, appearing on Meet the Press, with profiles in The New Yorker and Life Magazine. Doxiadis also went on to found his own design philosophy, ekistics, the science of human settlements, along with a technical school, think tank, journal, and floating conference series on the Aegean to promote it.

But before all that took shape, Doxiadis Associates tackled a national housing program for Iraq’s twentysomething King Faisal II. Frank Lloyd Wright, on the other hand, was hired to build the Baghdad opera house. A year after Hadjopoulos’ encounter with the American architect, the king was assassinated and a sequence of revolutions ended Doxiadis and Wright’s involvement. Hadjopoulos’ brother, Nikolas, who also worked for the firm, was almost murdered by a mob if not for his Iraqi companion, who asserted Nikolas was Greek and thus more acceptable to a society justifiably frustrated with Western imperialism.

Much of Hadjopoulos’ later career with DA was spent in Brazil—where he became friends with Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brasilia—and in Nigeria, where he was one of the designers of Festac, a new town built for the Festival of Black Arts.

Decades later, Hadjopoulos welcomed me into his home.

The house of Athanasios Hadjopoulos is in Peania, hometown of ancient statesman Demosthenes. Today, Peania is in the vicinity of Athens International Airport. In 2005, Hadjopoulos built the house for his wife, Odny, on a cliffside with a view of the airport so they would watch the planes come and go, to remind themselves of the travel they loved, a passion they could no longer pursue in old age. Odny had passed away in 2017—the pair had been married for 65 years.

“And a very good time, we had both,” Hadjopoulos said. “A marriage is successful when the two persons are different or complementary.” Interlocking his fingers, he explained that a husband and wife needed to adapt to each other—then you had strength. He took his hands apart. “Like this, you have nothing!”

I had come to Hadjopoulos’ house because of my interest in Doxiadis; I had been researching the life of the planner for several years to write a biography. And so I went to Greece in June 2018 for several Doxiadis-related reasons, but one of the most important was to see Hadjopoulos, who, at 98, was almost certainly near the end.

Indeed, Hadjopoulos’ body was in decline. Not long before my visit, he had fallen, and since then moved with the aid of a walker, in Greece called the “π” due to its similar shape to the Hellenic letter. He relied on the “π” until late in our interview, when he decided to leave it behind to walk around the kitchen—a reckless display which frightened me.

Despite his disability, Hadjopoulos’ mind was sharper than most people, of any age. The first question he asked was whether I was married. I was not. At that point, I was 23.

“You have to enjoy this decade from 20 to 30 and then there is time to marry,” Hadjopoulos said. “Not too late… I don’t think children would like to have a father who is old.”

“Right,” I said.

“You cannot even understand them!” Hadjopoulos said. “You cannot understand anyway…”

He led me to his office, where he showed me a photo of himself as a child. He was a cute little toddler standing on a pontoon seaplane, his hand holding the stationary propeller, a mischievous grin on his tiny face. When he was a kid, he said, his tinkering father had built one of the first radios in Athens, and when he turned it on for the first time, they mostly heard static—until, in the evening, music started piping in from Italy.

He then took me aback when he said he quite clearly remembered when Neville Chamberlain claimed to have successfully appeased Hitler by ceding to Germany Czechoslovakia’s region of the Sudetenland. “Things like this cannot happen today,” he said. “I think.”

He gave me his business card. In his mind, it was his current one. It read: ATHANASIOS HADJOPOULOS, MANAGING DIRECTOR, DOXIADIS ASSOCIATES (NIGERIA) LTD., VICTORIA ISLAND, LAGOS.

Before Nigeria, Hadjopoulos was stationed in Rio de Janeiro; Doxiadis Associates was then working on a plan for the Brazilian state of Guanabara. One day, a Soviet nuclear submarine made a visit to Rio. Guanabara’s Secretary of Education invited Hadjopoulos to attend an honorary event for the visiting Russians. A Brazilian official introducing the submarine commander added, “We have the pleasure and honor to have here Dr. Doxiadis.” Hadjopoulos was shocked—they couldn’t be referring to him, right? But the Secretary was insistent. She nudged Hadjopoulos. “Get up!”

Hadjopoulos confessed he could not admit the truth, not to the Brazilian official, and certainly not to the Soviet officer. So he went on with the charade.

“One thing that I learned all these years with Doxiadis is that nothing is isolated,” Hadjopoulos said. In his view, other architects, such as Wright, Le Corbusier, and Niemeyer— they designed beautiful buildings, but were uninterested in crafting sustainable systems of communities. For example, when Hadjopoulos worked for Le Corbusier, he was required to follow the golden ratio. Doxiadis, however, had the “Ekistics grid” as his design precept, a system of analyzing scalar levels of community, from a single room to the world-spanning ecumenopolis. “[The other architects] were not interested in this kind of problem,” Hadjoupoulos said.

Doxiadis’ views were evident in his design for Islamabad. Rather than focus on dazzling buildings at the expense of housing for the lower classes—as Niemeyer did in Brasilia— Doxiadis’ plan for the Pakistani capital conceived the city as a system of neighborhoods; he avoided flashy architecture and instead prioritized housing for lower-income groups. “When I say you cannot compare Doxiadis,” Hadjopoulos summarized, “[it’s] not that he is better—he is different!”

Soon, Hadjopoulos turned to more philosophical subjects. The height of the Greek classical period was around 500 B.C., he said, 2,500 years ago. And there are about four generations per century, each twenty-five years. Divide 2,500 years by twenty-five, and it seems we were just about a hundred generations from the golden age of Athens. “So, this Pericles, et cetera, was not very far as we believe,” Hadjopoulos said. “It’s nothing!”

Suddenly, an eerie feeling possessed me. A few days before, I had been standing on the ruins of the ancient road from Athens to Piraeus, and an old man came up to me and said the same thing—we were just a hundred generations from Pericles. We could take one person from each generation and fit them in a hotel ballroom.

Why did these two old Greeks perceive ancient Athens as such a recent occurrence? Was it merely a product of living so much of their life around ruins, or were they hitting on something we in the United States have forgotten? In North America, few reminders of antiquity remain—Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings, Mesoamerican pyramids. European conquest and genocide had erased so much cultural memory. Perhaps it took a near-centenarian to urge a return to perspective.

I blinked. I was exhausted. All this talk of history was wonderful, but this 98-year-old man was wearing me out!

The sun was low in the sky when Hadjopoulos asked when the book would be done. I was polite, but I knew I could not finish it in the near future, before he died. He told me he wanted to review the interview’s transcription for ‘misunderstandings.’ To this I agreed. Then he asked me, again, how old I was. I said I was 23. “I am four times as old as you,” he said, laughing.

As my driver took me back into Athens, I observed the neon gas stations along the way and marveled at the encounter I had just experienced. Who had I met? What had I witnessed?

When I returned to the States, I fell into a busy period, exacerbated by a cross-country move to begin graduate school. Weeks turned into months, and I had little time to transcribe the five-hour interview. Fearing the clock was ticking, I ultimately hired a friend to complete the task. By the time the transcript was complete, I needed two weeks to perform the final edits. Then I emailed the file to Hadjopoulos’ son to pass along for his father’s review.

His father would be unable to help. He had fallen the previous night and broken his hip. I was stunned. I knew it was coming, but when it finally came—I was stunned. The irony that I had finalized the transcript just as Hadjopoulos was injured seemed to evoke the poetic justice of classical drama.

Two weeks later, Hadjopoulos entered his eternal rest, after a lifetime of global activity.

In his life, he had met Frank Lloyd Wright, interacted with Oscar Niemeyer, and worked for both Le Corbusier and Doxiadis—perhaps four of the most important architects of the twentieth century. Some would argue that Hadjopoulos’ work for Doxiadis Associates brought sensitive design to low-income communities all over the world.

At the end of our interview, I asked Hadjopoulos if he could reflect on his life—after all, he had more time on this earth, and seen more of it, than most.

“Well, at the end of life, you always find things you should have done, and did not,” Hadjopoulos said, before remembering how much he missed his wife Odny. “Very often, I tell my head, as I am sitting here, believing that she is next [to me]… and I don’t like this house which was built too large for somebody, just as I am, to sit here alone.” Hadjopoulos paused. “On the other hand, I think that she did like very much the house and the veranda. In summer, we were sitting outside…” He trailed off. The sky was dark and it was becoming difficult to see the planes landing and taking off. My driver was waiting for me. Five hours had passed. My driver had his young son with him and needed to take him home.

Hadjopoulos’ daughter took our picture. He told me I was always welcome to come back and see him again. I told him I would try.

This is the second essay in a new series, The World Planner, chronicling my biographical investigations into the life and times of global architect and city planner Constantinos Doxiadis. These pieces take longer to write than the other posts, so they’ll appear on an occasional and quality-not-quantity basis. Keep up with the series on its homepage.

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In 1969, on the eve of the first moon landing, CBS correspondent Mike Wallace interviewed the global architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis from the ancient ruins of Delos, an island once known as the birthplace of the god Apollo.

The segment was a CBS special spotlighting Doxiadis’ seventh Delos Symposion, an annual gathering of some of the world’s greatest intellectuals at the time, held aboard a cruise ship in the sparkling waters of the Aegean. Among the guests that year included space-age architect Buckminster Fuller, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. As such, the conference brought together leading intellectuals to grapple with the problems of the urban crisis and consider the possible solutions offered by Doxiadis’ trademark design philosophy of ekistics, what he defined as “the science of human settlements.”

But as Mike Wallace interviewed Doxiadis, the famous reporter displayed little interest in ekistics, nor the architect’s ambitious projects which spanned the globe. Rather, Wallace was preoccupied with what Doxiadis thought about the moon. With his characteristic snark, the correspondent asked, “at a time when our earthly concerns are so serious, Mr. Doxiadis, should we be dreaming of the heavens?”

The 56-year-old architect shifted his pose on the time-worn marble. The dark circles around his eyes revealed his exhaustion, but his rhetoric soared to meet the grandeur of his antique surroundings. “We must do it,” he said. “We have learned in humanity that in order to make progress on our problems, we must have the courage to reach far up… with some of us.”

Doxiadis proceeded to cite the courage of the ancient Greeks who explored the Aegean. He added, “and now, in order to reach a place we all need, the universal city of man, which is going to give us peace and happiness, we have to reach out, to the moon.”

Mike Wallace gave a sly grin. “Now that we’re there, Mr. Doxiadis, what should we do with the moon?”

Doxiadis smiled, bemused by the absurd question. “Well, first we must keep it in the sky. Because people don’t like moonless nights.”

To be sure, Doxiadis had fun with this response. He had a sense of humor. And with CBS broadcasting a segment on Doxiadis’ symposia, the architect had a great opportunity to make the case for his design approach to the American public.

The sheer volume and scale of Doxiadis’ projects more than justified the CBS spotlight. For decades, Doxiadis had worked in his homeland of Greece, where he had supervised the postwar reconstruction under the Marshall Plan; later, he had worked in Iraq, where he developed a massive national housing program, until a bloody coup curtailed the project; in Pakistan he had designed the capital of Islamabad from the ground up. In America, Doxiadis’ urban redevelopment project in Eastwick, Philadelphia, was touted by Senator Robert Kennedy; meanwhile he plotted a comprehensive and futuristic analysis of 866 counties in the Great Lakes Region. In total, his firm worked on projects in 40 countries, from Ghana to South Vietnam to Brazil.

In his time, Doxiadis’ productivity did not go unnoticed, and he was frequently profiled in American magazines. Some reporters wrote of him in superlative terms. Ada Louise Huxtable of The New York Times called Doxiadis city planning’s own “world supersalesman.” The New Yorker considered him“the greatest city planner now at work in the world.” In 1975, the geographer Jean Gottmann declared Doxiadis one of the four most important architects and planners of the 20th century, alongside Raymond Unwin, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Doxiadis’ contributions overshadowed his personal story—born a refugee of the Balkan Wars in modern-day Bulgaria, he grew up the son of a cabinet minister in Athens. In World War II, his military experience as an artillery officer on the Albanian front evolved into his leadership of a clandestine resistance group during the Axis Occupation of his country.

After his surprise dismissal from his governmental role implementing the housing program of the Marshall Plan in Greece, he had gone into exile as a tomato farmer in Australia, only to return to found a massive global planning and consulting firm of 700 employees, its offices on a hill overlooking the Acropolis. The firm was followed by a technical school, a graduate school, a think tank, a journal, and a computing center. All of these efforts were complemented by this conference series on the Aegean, conversations on the island of Apollo.

Had Mike Wallace given Doxiadis the chance during the Delos conversation, the planner might have discussed the ecumenopolis, his startling forecast for an urban network which spanned the entire globe. But no—Wallace was more interested in the moon.

The broadcaster was not the only one.

In college I was drawn to urban studies, excited by the sublime architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the strange quality of Le Corbusier’s absolutist maxims.

In 2015, at the suggestion of an academic advisor, I began researching the life and times of Constantinos Doxiadis, a global architect and planner. This research formed the basis of my undergraduate thesis at Princeton, which earned four departmental awards upon graduation. But all the same I felt like my work was incomplete.

Doxiadis’ life story was like a grand tapestry for the arc of the history of architecture and planning over the course of the twentieth century. It touched on the story of the world wars, decolonization in South Asia and West Africa, the rise and fall of modern architecture, and the American urban crisis—important chapters within the history of the twentieth century.

I proceeded to conduct archival research at the Doxiadis Archive at the Benaki Museum in Athens, the Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. Among my travels I conducted field visits to his project sites in Eastwick, Philadelphia, Aspra Spitia in Greece, and Doxiadis’ hometown of Asenovgrad in Bulgaria. And I’ve talked to many people—scholars, practitioners, and figures close to the original planner and his team. And I’m grateful to the many people who have lent their time to speak with me and the archivists who have assisted my efforts.

As of this writing, the biography project remains a work in progress. But in my research I uncovered some tangents that do not fit the main biographical thread of the story. Without timely news leads, these stories do not lend themselves well to placement in conventional media outlets.

Yet these stories are illuminating for their wonder and complexity, their capacity to say something greater about the ambition and struggles of the twentieth century, and I feel that they deserve to be shared—they can no longer wait. And that’s what this newsletter series, The World Planner, is about.

This series will chronicle episodes in my biographical investigations into the life and times of global architect and city planner Constantinos Doxiadis. These pieces take longer to write than the other posts, so they’ll appear on an intermittent basis. You can keep up with the series on its homepage. A free subscription to The Usonian or its offshoot The Cyprus Files will give you access to all the posts in The World Planner.

If you have stories you’d like to share about Constantinos Doxiadis and the world of ekistics, please write to me at doxiadisbiography[at]gmail.com. I’d love to add them to the files.

I thank my readers for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you on the road.

“The Heritage of Apollo” (CBS News, 1969) segment can be found at the Doxiadis Archive in Athens (Archive File: 29147).

This is the first essay in a new series, The World Planner, chronicling my biographical investigations into the life and times of global architect and city planner Constantinos Doxiadis. These pieces take longer to write than the other posts, so they’ll appear on an intermittent basis. Keep up with the series on its homepage.

Subscribe now

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, presidential archives have been in the news of late. Recently I had the chance to spend a couple of weeks examining presidential records of another sort—the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri. Truman led the United States in a critical period at the conclusion of World War II and the turbulent years that followed. After his presidency Truman chose his hometown of Independence to serve as the location of the presidential library and museum which now bear his name and, in a curious choice, surround his tomb.

A couple of years ago, I received a grant from the Truman Library Institute to conduct research at the library, on the topic of the Marshall Plan in Greece. As I got the grant in 2020, I wasn’t able to make the visit until now, after the library had reopened. This research formed one more essential component for my long-running biography project on the life and global impact of Greek architect and city planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis (1913–1975), who had a key role in the administration of the Marshall Plan in Greece before becoming a planning consultant of global scope, working in places including Baghdad, Islamabad, and Detroit.

If you know me well, you’ve probably heard about C.A. Doxiadis, and my research about him. In the coming months, I aim to share more aspects of this research on the blog through another upcoming newsletter series, The World Planner, named after the working title of the book-in-progress.

The Marshall Plan in Greece

Even before President Truman announced the “Truman Doctrine” in a March 1947 speech declaring his intention to financially assist Greece and Turkey (as well as to thwart a Communist uprising in Greece), the U.S. was planning to support the reconstruction of Greece, one of the allied countries which suffered the most under Axis occupation.1

As time went on, the assistance program to Greece and Turkey was expanded into aid for most Western European countries under the umbrella of the European Recovery Program, better known as the “Marshall Plan” named after General Marshall, Truman’s first Secretary of State. The U.S. eventually spent $2 billion in relief efforts in Greece, about $21 billion today.

Of course, that aid wasn’t just to support Greek recovery, but its independence from the Soviet sphere of influence—and to keep Greece in the American orbit. In his “Truman Doctrine” speech, Truman said “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

Controversial at home and abroad, as well as a plank in the Cold War policy of “containment,” the Marshall Plan in Greece was an extraordinary effort that, in the end, transformed and modernized the Greek nation. It also amplified social wounds in the country that would play out again during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967– 1974) and the Cyprus crisis that followed. Taken all together, it’s difficult to read about the period of the Greek Civil War (1944–1949) and not think about how world events repeat themselves (albeit in very different forms and contexts) given the present-day proxy conflict in Ukraine.

I am grateful for the opportunity from the Truman Library Institute to immerse myself in a presidential collection with so many interesting threads and lens into diplomatic and foreign policy history. It is a testament to the foresight of the architects of the presidential library system. These archives craft a critical public record of American government for all its citizens to parse. In this way, we can decide for ourselves the actual shape of events, to read beyond the headlines and textbooks, to uncover the truth with the benefit of hindsight. The fact that some presidential records had been illegally removed by the last occupant of the White House is truly disheartening and a grave threat to the democratic institutions of the United States.

In short, for me history is about finding universal themes hidden in the minutiae of the day-to-day chatter. For two weeks, I got to do that a lot.

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Truman’s modern parallels

The Truman Museum, recently renovated for the first time since its opening in 1957, is an excellent overview of Truman’s consequential presidency, with thoughtful exhibits and a lot of interactive components that make history come alive for both high school students and adults who may need a refresher.

For example, the museum has a section on the Red Scare and McCarthyism, complete with a group video game where participants are asked to evaluate the careers of civil servants amidst allegations of their Communist tendencies. Even if you as the player are inclined to give the civil servant a free pass for their private political beliefs, your tune may change when the game’s virtual interlocutor starts bullying you, threatening that you may be accused of political subversion next, and that you may lose their job if you don’t agree to blacklist the alleged Communist.

Through this kind of simulation, a visitor might be able to appreciate how events happened the way they did, and put themselves in the shoes of the time period. The past was a different world, but there are many elements from our past that remain frightfully relevant.

One of the most compelling exhibits is the one which tries to contextualize and walk through Truman’s controversial decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ultimately, the visitor is left with more questions than answers, though the museum appears to argue that Truman’s military advisers seemed to have misled him on the true nature of the bomb. Equally damning is a fact that a letter from leading scientists who begged that the bomb not be dropped on civilians was withheld from Truman’s view until it was too late. The exhibit also takes pains to demonstrate how disastrous and tragic the bomb’s use was for the Japanese who lost their lives, as well as the Japanese who survived and were forever scarred and affected by the event.

Another interesting revelation—Truman only had two meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt before FDR died. FDR didn’t keep Truman in the loop at all. As a result, when Truman ascended to the presidency, pundits made comments to the effect of—“Who is this Truman? Is he up to the task?” In our current political climate, one cannot help but remark how similar questions are today leveed against Biden’s ability in office. (Granted, Truman was way younger than the current commander-in-chief.) In another familiar wrinkle, Truman defied the polls—and inaccurate newspaper projections—and defeated his rival Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election.

But it’s Truman’s aphorisms which probably have the most longevity in the popular consciousness. It’s hard to get more iconic than “the buck stops here.”

A glimpse at Independence, Missouri

As for where “the buck started”? That would be Independence, Missouri, a small town that in some places retains the intense “classic Americana” imagery of a Norman Rockwell painting.

If St. Louis, on the other side of the state, was the gateway to the West, Independence was the gateway’s main terminus, forming the jumping-off point for the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe Trails that fueled the country’s westward expansion. A generation before that, Independence was a center for the Mormon church, until the Mormons were run out of town, though some LDS denominations eventually returned to the area.

Independence began losing its prominence after the railroad came through nearby Kansas City, which was also the main port on the Missouri River.

Truman’s unlikely ascendancy to the presidency put Independence back on the map. Today, many statues of Truman can be found all over town, as well as historical markers and references to his boyhood home, his actual home, and his church. One gift shop downtown goes by the name, “All About Harry.” Modern Independence is certainly all about Truman.

My experience in quiet Independence was a very interesting way to decompress after a frenetic year in Cyprus. I appreciated the visit, and now look to the future. As Truman said, “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” On a more humorous note, he also said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

ICYMI: Check out my recent triple-book review essay “On Privacy, Paranoia, & Genre,” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.