1. TWO EPISODES
The installation has two episodes. The first presents archival documents and a model of the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center reconstructed from historical photographs and drawings. The second episode shows recently conducted video interviews with migrants and asylum seekers in Greece. Combined with maps and models, the interviews illustrate how human movement at European Union border sites is monitored and communicated by a complex of informational objects and how physical movement is matched by a movement of personal data across and into different control centers and databanks.
2. DOXIADIS AND COMPUTATION
Launched in 1964, with its mainframe UNIVAC and spinning tape drives, the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center (DACC) was a startling venture for an architecture office in the 1960s. In 1969, when the larger and more sophisticated UNIVAC 1107 was prominently installed in the courtyard of the firm’s office, it became a beacon of computation and a new image for Doxiadis Associates. Lit both day and night, it sat behind a bulletproof glass wall and under an owl sculpted by Froso Efthimiadi Menegaki.
Greek architect and planner, Constantinos A. Doxiadis belonged to a cohort of international architects and intellectuals appraising the implications of new digital technologies for the future of cities. Yet unlike his peers, who often considered this impact abstractly or theoretically, the techniques and products of computation were deeply integrated into Doxiadis’ practice.
Computation helped Doxiadis Associates generate new kinds of drawings, maps, and urban analyses. It also accelerated Doxiadis’ approach to architecture long guided by information collection and visualization. From his ethnographically inclined documentation of Middle Eastern and African cities to later computer-assisted projects such as the “Great Lakes Megalopolis,” Doxiadis formulated an expansive practice of data-dependent Informational Modernism. With this Informational Modernism—and by surveying patterns of urban growth, tabulating census results, interviewing city residents, and writing code to predict the mobility of populations—Doxiadis Associates emerged as one of the most prominent sites of data incorporation and experimentation for postwar architecture and design.
3. DOXIADIS ASSOCIATES COMPUTER CENTER (DACC)
The documents shown here include photos from 1964 of a crated UNIVAC 1004 computer being hoisted to the window of the Doxiadis Associate’s offices. They mark a moment at which new kinds of experts, visual techniques, and ideas about data and the city were installed alongside the computing systems.
These novel procedures and training protocols populate the pages of internal DA documents and reports. Issues of DA Newsletter from 1964 narrate the launch of the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center, the training of staff, and the technical, spatial, epistemic accommodation of new computer systems.
The link between the computer and the city was stressed repeatedly. Published in the November 1968 UNIVAC News, “Cities of Tomorrow Planned on High-Speed Computers” lists DA projects then underway in the USA, France, South America, Pakistan, and Zambia. The article forms an image of a global territory soon to be analyzed and processed by the tools and techniques of a burgeoning computational urbanism. The collection of Ekmaps show algorithm experiments with gravitational attraction.
DACC Left
01. Ekmaps. Gravitational attraction mapping program tests. Photocopied computer prints, c. 1971.
DACC Right
01. Ekistics journal issues with articles on computation and DACC. April 1965 and September 1965.
02. DA Review issues with DACC articles and references. January 1970 to July 1970.
03. UNIVAC Computers in Greece program proposal, 1968.
04. UNIVAC News, November 1968, with an article on DACC and future cities.
05. Photographs showing the arrival of the UNIVAC 1004 at the Computer Center, 1964.
06. Photographs of a public presentation of the UNIVAC 1107 in the remodeled Computer Center, 1970.
07. Doxiadis Organization brochure with a photograph of the Doxiadis Associates office courtyard and the Computer Center, c. 1969.
08. Pages from issues of DA Newsletter featuring reports on the Computer Center, various issues, 1964.
09. Method of Similarity Analysis Dox-USA-A 37. DACC generated maps based on demographic change in the Great Lakes Megalopolis and bound volume, March 1968.
10. Traverse computation diagram. Doxiadis Associates General Reports A499, c 1971.
11. Announcement from Northwestern University’s Program of Planning concerning a new computer mapping program, 1964. Doxiadis Associates General Computers files.
4. THE HUMAN COMMUNITY (HUCO)
Through the Graduate Center of Ekistics, Doxiadis conducted a comprehensive study of the domestic and urban behavior of Athenians. Titled The Human Community, the study compiled unprecedented amounts of data on their daily tasks and movement patterns. The information was collected by interviewers, who visited Greek residents in their apartments and houses to complete surveys in the form of lengthy questionnaires.
Here, sample sheets and photographs are shown from a report on the “Physical Planning Characteristics of 20 Communities.” Attempting to locate neighborhood borders and boundaries, survey notes identify street conditions as well as “refugee houses” and other signs of mobility through which communities were defined. HUCO reports compiled and translated the findings into maps of residents’ trips and other forms of visualization that made legible the complex topography of community identification.
One of first computational tasks at the office was the transfer of HUCO questionnaire results to punch cards. Over the next decade these results were used for further research and to test new computer programs. Datasets and their analyses—as well as community maps and drawings—were copied, repeated, reprocessed, and folded back into the office. As HUCO mapped the lives of Athenians it also mapped the relation between those lives, their information, their behavior patterns, and the appearance of a new kind of being—the postwar computational data subject.
HUCO Left
01. Maps of residents’ trips in Kallithea, Athens, c.1965.
02. Survey participant being interviewed at home with the aid of questionnaire. Photograph, 1963.
03. Time and Activity diagram from HUCO Report no. 10, 1967.
04. Graph of residents’ trips to drugstores from HUCO Report no. 5, 1964.
05. Map of residents’ trips to drugstores from HUCO Report no. 5, 1964.
06. Graphs of Residents’ Satisfaction from HUCO Report no. 10, 1967.
07. Diagram of the City as System, c. 1965.
08. Diagrams from Study of Social Contacts in The Human Community, 1971.
09. Report on coding and programming Human Community data, 1964.
10. HUCO Facility Study computer plot, 1969.
HUCO Right Front
01. Neighborhood verification survey, Kolonaki, 1963.
02. Neighborhood verification survey, Ano Daphni, 1963.
03. Neighborhood verification survey, St. Barbara, 1963.
HUCO Right Rear
04. Neighborhood verification survey, Central Glyfada, 1963.
05. Neighborhood verification survey, South Glyfada, 1963.
06. Neighborhood verification survey, Kifissia, 1963.
5. THE NEW HUMAN COMMUNITY SITES AND OBJECTS
The Human Community sought to identify the functional nodes of postwar life. The post offices, pharmacies, cinemas, and other architectures of 1960s Athens were read as influencing agents, helping to organize and direct patterns of behavior and movement in the city. The New Human Community catalogs a different class of architecture—Coast Guard ports, border stations, crossing zones, surveillance centers, and immigrant administration facilities. These buildings and their components are also influencing agents. More emphatically and purposefully than did the buildings of postwar Athens, and with more immediately discernible consequence, the migration architecture of contemporary Greece organizes and directs patterns of movement and behavior in the early twenty-first century.
The models represent the instruments, objects, and spaces that manage and monitor the territories traversed by the people attempting to enter Greece. Taken together, the models catalog the elements of Greece’s informational infrastructure, forming a compendium of border sites, control systems, and territorial imaginaries.
BORDER SITES
SITE-7 Mediterranean Sea, Frontex Pre-Frontier Monitoring
SITE-8 Piraeus Port, Vessel Traffic Monitoring
SITE-9 Samos Closed Controlled Access Center, Biometric Data Collection
SITE-10 Athens Ministry of Migration, Monitoring Center
SITE-11 Patras Port Transit Zone
SITE-12 Lesvos Reception and Identification
SITE-13 Thessaloniki Police Station Asylum Request
SITE-14 Igoumenitsa Port Coast Guard Detention
SITE-15 Kakavia Border Foot and Vehicle Crossing
SITE-16 Idomeni Railway Foot Crossing
INFORMATIONAL OBJECTS
OBJ-1 Electro-Optical Sensor TDR-HR-300
OBJ-2 Electro-Optical Sensor NVTS
OBJ-3 Multi-Sensor M19 HD
OBJ-4 Forward-Looking Infrared M364
OBJ-5 Network Camera Axis Q1786-LE
OBJ-6 Synthetic Aperture Radar BCP ELM-2022U
OBJ-7 Iris Scanner BK 2121U
OBJ-8 Fingerprint Scanner Idemia TP-3000
OBJ-9 Handheld CO2 Detector
OBJ-10 Surveillance Aerostat Frontex
OBJ-11 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Heron 1
OBJ-12 Helicopter Bell UH-1
OBJ-13 Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat Rafnar 1100
6. THE NEW HUMAN COMMUNITY INTERVIEWS
In collaboration with the Greek Council for Refugees, the project team interviewed dozens of refugees and other new residents of Athens. It reconstructed their journeys into Greece to locate their trajectories within the contemporary informational geography of European borders, sensors, and surveillance operations. In the installation, these interviews appear through extracted video clips and animated maps showing routes taken to arrive in Greece.
VIDEOS
Interviews 1 to 24. Single channel videos on loop, 64 minutes.