The Architecture

Guiding Attitudes

In 1972, we purchased a tract of land on a small, isolated cove on the western coast of Kythnos. From the outset, we viewed ourselves as stewards of the land. We set out to learn about the life of the islanders and to discover what living almost like pioneers entailed. Early on, we adopted an attitude of respect for what we found in place on the site, and made a conscious decision to maintain and improve it to the extent possible, and to limit our interventions only to what was necessary to live there.

Christos viewed our land as a potential laboratory. As an architect and an academic, teaching Architectural Design and Systems of Visual Order, he saw the search for shelter as an opportunity to put into practice ideas about form and proportion; scale and visual illusion; unity and diversity; structure and construction. The process of research and design, of experimentation and discovery assumed significance equal to, if not greater than, the finished product.

Among the features that distinguish architecture from the other arts is the incorporation of function. In the case of the Kythnos shelter, functional needs became points of departure for pushing the envelope of design to the limits of our abilities as builders.

From the beginning, we had decided to do as much of the work as possible with our own hands. Local craftsmen were employed for specialized labor or the toughest physical work. Friends and students contributed valuable effort, motivated to volunteer by the surreal insanity of the project.

Our endeavors over the years can be summarized under three broad headings:

The resulting aggregate is a compound which we call Mikro Horio (Little Village). This name was first uttered by an island friend, and we adopted it immediately, feeling it captures the essence of our efforts.