Doxiadēs, Kōnstantinos Apostolou.

[WAR AND SHOAH IN ISOTYPE: THE EMPIRICISM OF THE VIENNA CIRCLE AS BASIS FOR URBAN AND LAND PLANNING IN GREECE] Αι Θυσίαι της Ελλάδος στον Δεύτερο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. – Les sacrifices de la Grèce à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. – The Sacrifices of Greece in the Second World War. – Zhertvy Gretsii vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine.

Athens: Greek Ministry of Reconstruction, printed by Aspioti-Elka Graphic Arts, 1946. Folio (47.5 × 36.5 cm). Original pictorial half cloth binding; [214] pp. with 90 full-page, mostly color-printed maps, graphs, and photographs. Binding, especially the rear board, slightly stained; corners and edges slightly bumped; endpapers very faintly, barely noticeably fox-stained; inside very clean and printed in bold colors; overall very good. Item #55328

First and only edition of this comprehensive Isotype portfolio by the renowned architect and urban planner Konstantinos A. Doxiadēs, who is best known today for his concept of a city spanning the globe (“Ecumenopolis”). The maps and picture panels display the extensive destruction endured by the Greek population, environment, and infrastructure during World War II. This period began in April 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded Greece to support its ally, Fascist Italy, which had already been engaged in military confrontation with Allied Greece since October 1940. This work on visual statistics was begun in 1941 and was first exhibited in 1944. It was then exhibited in 1945 in Paris and London as well as at the U.N.O. Conference in San Francisco. (Cf. Introduction)

Doxiadēs had been chief planner for the greater Athens area since 1937, and from 1940 to 1945 he headed the Department of Spatial and Urban Planning in the Greek Ministry of Public Works. At the same time, he led the national resistance group “Hephaistos” and published the only underground journal in the occupied territories, entitled “Regional Planning, Urban Planning, Architecture.” After the war, he became a key political figure in the reconstruction effort. In the 1960s, he represented Greece on the Committee on Housing, Building, and Planning of the United Nations Economic and Social Council in New York. (Cf. >ht tps://w ww.doxiadis.o rg<, September 19, 2025)

Doxiadēs' work on the Isotype project began with the founding of the “Kyklos Tecnikon” (Circle of Technicians) group, which dealt with topics such as urban planning, economics, public health, etc. The group's research was presented in lectures, for which numerous charts, maps, tables, and diagrams were created. When Doxiadēs, as head of the Ministry of Reconstruction, had to compile a report on war damage, he was able to draw on this work. This report, in turn, was the starting point for the above-mentioned traveling exhibition, which was shown from Paris to San Francisco, where Doxiadēs participated in the founding conference of the United Nations as a member of the Greek delegation. The portfolio that emerged from this exhibition, with its colorful maps, tables, and diagrams, clearly shows the application and continuation of Otto Neurath's Isotype. However, the name Otto Neurath is not mentioned anywhere. (On this and the following: Kostas Tsiambaos, Isotype diagrams from Neurath to Doxiadis, in: Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 1, March 2012, pp. 49-57.)

When Otto Neurath spoke at the fourth CIAM conference (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) in Athens in the summer of 1933, he emphasized that he wanted his method of pictorial statistics to be understood not least as a “pictorial Esperanto” that could be read internationally beyond language barriers. Neurath's aim was to make statistical relationships accessible regardless of social and cultural background. As a member of the “Vienna Circle,” Neurath was influenced not least by the philosophy of language of Rudolf Carnap, to which he himself contributed. The debate between Neurath and Carnap within logical empiricism has gone down in the history of philosophy as the “protocol sentence debate.” The subject of the dispute was the distinction between sentences of observation (protocol) and theory. Unlike Carnap, Neurath did not see the sentences of empirical observation (protocol) as independent of theory. Nevertheless, he shared Carnap's goal of a “clear,” unambiguous language. Accordingly, the Isoytpe was intended to develop a standardized, empiricist information system that would be internationally viable.

To develop the Isotype, he ran a graphic design studio in the “Society and Economy Museum” he had founded, which was headed by the representational constructivist Gerd Arntz from 1929 onwards. For Arntz, the development of Isotype was not merely a commissioned work; rather, Neurath's idea of visualizing social and material conditions corresponded to his own artistic goals. In 1930, he wrote in the organ of the “Group of Progressive Artists”: "Today, painters are employed in society as assistants to rationalization, and their position is shifting ever more clearly from ‘embellishers of everyday life’ to creators of greater smoothness in business and intellectual life. but the more clearly a thing is worked out, the clearer it becomes that in the end it only has meaning in its application for the general public, and the more openly this meaning becomes through its good form, the more it pushes for a revolution in its position in today's life.“ (”a bis z," issue 8)

Neurath's participation in the CIAM architects' conference in Athens was therefore neither an exotic decision nor a coincidence; rather, the objectives, as formulated by Arntz, for example, were the same: standardization, rationalization, and functionalization. When Neurath gave his lecture at the Technical University of Athens in August 1933, Kōnstantinos Apostolou Doxiadēs was studying architecture there. But Doxiadēs was not the only one to use Isotype to illustrate the consequences of war. As early as 1943, Rudolf Modley published “A History of the War in Maps, Pictographs, in Words,” referring explicitly to Neurath. A year earlier, José Luis Sert published “Can Our Cities Survive?” In it, he published maps and diagrams that Neurath had created immediately after the fourth CIAM Congress in 1933, but which had never been published before. But Sert doesn't mention Neurath's name either.

However, Doxiadēs' texts on architecture and urban planning theory make it clear that he shared not only Neurath's pictorial-statistical methodology, but also his scientism. Doxiadēs believed that planning should be based on the empirical findings. This led him to establish the interdisciplinary scientific field of “ekistics,” which deals with human settlements, including regional, city, community planning, and dwelling design. Knowledge from economics, social sciences, technical and cultural disciplines was to be brought together in this field. The visual method played an essential role in the development of this discipline. Ekistics worked on a schematic organization, an information mapping of the various relationships between humans and their natural and cultural environment. This interest in statistics on the part of urban planning and architecture had already been propagated by Le Corbusier in the magazine “Urbanisme.” Doxiadēs believed that the more empirical and statistical knowledge about population developments, resources, economic developments, geography, etc. was taken into account, the more precisely the “city of the future” could be planned.

Price: €3,500.00

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