The Architecture
Art and Ornament
Architecture has been called "the mother of arts" because of its complexity and breadth of scope. Good architecture is the result of successful collaboration between architect and client. In Mikro Horio, with Christos wearing the architect's hat, Kathy took on the responsibilities of the client, with all its ramifications, including that of unyielding critic. The result, however one assesses it, is much better that it otherwise would have been.
Architecture has also been deemed the mother of arts because it forms the backdrop against which all other arts thrive. Against the backdrop of Mikro Horio, Kathy displays thematic groupings of her photographs, and Christos, under a somewhat different hat, produces sculptural pieces, some integral to buildings and others free-standing.
Photography and Other Two-Dimensional Work
With a heating system in place and with winter visits to Mikro Horio at regular intervals, the problem of indoor humidity, and with it the danger of molding diminished. We can now display works on paper. The wall surfaces lend themselves to thematic groupings, especially of Kathy's photographs. Works by other artists, mostly friends, occupy other walls.
Of Imps and Demons
A collection of demonic figures gradually took up occupancy in GBB I. It started with a wood tourist-grade mask, about 15 cm long, given to us by a friend in the port of Merihas. He had found it washed up on the beach, and he thought we might like it. It appears to be of Southeast Asian (possibly Indonesian) origin. A short time later, in a New Orleans tourist market, we found a concrete head of a satyr, also about 15 cm long — a copy of an ornament from a local neoclassical building; this found its way to a spot above the sink.
These two pieces suggested a theme, so when we found ceramic copies of two Etruscan fiends (again about 15 cm in diameter) in a museum shop during a visit to Tuscany, we knew we had a place for them. The most recent additions to the collection came from a London flea market. They are four small (5-6 cm across) brass buckles — part of a horse harness — decorated with the figures of an imp, a fairy, a leprechaun and a fiend.
We are not sure yet whether these objects provide any protection against greater evil, in the homeopathic mode of Gothic cathedral gargoyles, or are just "kitsch", a word that our Bulgarian assistant (with us from 2004 to 2007) was convinced meant "art." We never tried to dissuade him from this notion, preferring instead the jolt that his use of the term gave to Christos every time he embarked on one of his art projects. "Ah!" he would say to express his appreciation, "It's kitsch!"
About Ornament
By the time Christos began his studies at Iowa State University in 1961, modern architecture had prevailed in U.S. architectural education. The faculty at ISU were second-generation modernists, and included a professor who had apprenticed with Auguste Perret, another who had studied under Mies Van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and one who had been Bruce Goff's student at the University of Oklahoma.
There was no room for traditional ornamentation under the modernist dogma drilled into students of Christos' generation — although Goff could be said to have side-stepped the issue with his self-admittedly eccentric use of materials, such as blue and red marbles (of the toy variety) embedded in the white mortar of an anthracite wall to give off sparkles when light hit them.
At Mikro Horio, where high-style architecture co-exists with vernacular approaches, Christos was able to violate the injunction against ornament with only minimal cringing.
We have incorporated ornament primarily in the concrete doors and window shutters, which replaced the wood originals. We have employed sea shells, and small brass or ceramic artifacts, typically centered in a circular recess of the flat surface. The moon and the sun, stars, cherubim and mermaids are motifs of Greek popular and naif art. They also reinforce our connection to sea and sky, the dominant elements of our largely outdoor living.
Found Objects
The Roman's wise reminder of mortality in the form of bucrania — ox skulls carved in metopes of buildings — is the inspiration for the skulls of mules and goats hanging at several locations. Originally, bucrania were actual skulls from sacrificed animals displayed as decorations — and serving as reminders of mortality. An attempt to obtain ox or cow skulls has failed: by order of the European Union, bovine heads are incinerated immediately following slaughter for fear of mad cow disease, and we have had to make do with sun-bleached bones found on hillsides and beaches.
An intriguing object on display is a sea-rounded stone picked up on a Cretan shore in the late 60s. Seen in a certain way, it resembles a dancing pregnant woman — like a Henry Moore reject cast into the sea to be further smoothed by the waves. We have labeled it "Aphrodite Gastromeni" — Pregnant Venus — in reference to the name of our land and the legend of Venus rising from the waves. (An early wishful attribution to a prehistoric sculptor was quickly dismissed when we realized that the stance was too modern to relate our Venus to her namesake from Willendorf.)
The sea has also brought us a peculiar piece of driftwood, a smooth, somewhat flattened ovoid with an elliptically shaped hollow on one side. Christos capitalized on the cues offered by the gnarled wood in the hollow to transform it — with the judicious addition of a few pieces of standard hardware — into a face, sufficiently reminiscent of a mustachioed, head-banded Cretan to be dubbed "Michalis," the nom de guerre Patrick Leigh Fermor adopted when, dressed in Cretan garb, he led a band of resistance fighters on the mountains of German-occupied Crete during World War II. (We hold PLF in the highest esteem, both for his valor in life and war, and for his prowess as a writer.)
Another driftwood piece inspired Chris to construct a sea dragon with the addition of fiery eyes and coppere wings.
The Lararium
When a collision of geometries next to the east gate presented the opportunity for a niche, Christos decided that it should be consigned to a Lararium.
A Lararium is a shrine of the ancestors, the guardian spirits (lares) protecting the Roman household. It is typically located by the entry of ancient Roman houses. The "spirits" in our Lararium are Christos' professional ancestors, installed by the entry of Mikro Horio to help answer the often-asked question, "why are you using so much concrete?"
Christos traces his professional ancestry to Auguste Perret, the French architect-planner-builder and pioneer in reinforced concrete, who in 1903 erected the first building in which the concrete was undisguised (the apartment building at 25bis Rue Franklin in Paris).
The lineage descends through one of Christos' professors at Iowa State University, the Polish-born architect Karol J. Kocimski, who worked at Perret's atelier in Paris before WW II; and through Alexander Oswald Petermuller, the senior partner in the firm of Gibb, Petermuller and Partners of Athens, where Christos worked between undergraduate and graduate studies. Petermuller worked in Perret's office following his graduation from the Ecole de Beaux Arts in the mid-1950s.
The Lararium (which consists of three heads, sculpted in clay and cast in concrete) is a link not only to a modern pioneer in concrete, but also to the Romans, who first used concrete more than 2,000 years ago.
Flying Concrete
After lightweight concrete, in the form of ferrocement cladding for the buildings, and after moveable concrete, in the form of doors and shutters, it followed quite naturally that concrete could, and should, fly.
Wing and Wang: the Blue-nose Cherubim are suspended pieces assembled with a 10 cm concrete sphere and painted copper wings for a total wingspan of 40 cm each. The wings rotate with the wind and each is half of an elliptical yin-yang diagram (which also inspired their names).
Aeolus' Balls is a string of five concrete spheres suspended in front of the west facade of GBB IV. Each sphere is cast, with four half-spheres (of half its diameter) subtracted from it. The five spheres are connected to each other with stainless steel spinners. Munsell's five primary hues are present in each sphere, one on the surface and the others in each of the four "pockets".
In "Homage to Michael Ventris," a concrete cone is suspended from a tripod made of 1" galvanized pipe and chain, assembled according to the principles of tensegrity. The cone incorporates a shallow basin, connected to the automatic drip system to provide water in the summer for birds, bees and bats. Michael Ventris was an English architect who in 1952 deciphered the Mycenean script Linear B, discovering that it was an early form of Greek. He started with the assumption that the alphabet was syllabic. The first word he decoded had two syllables: tri (three) and pod (foot). (Christos wonders: did he subconsciously figure out the tri because it is also a syllable in his name? Hmm...)