Constantinos A. Doxiadis and his Entopia: Promises of a moderate utopia and a humanized modernism

Abstract

This essay summarizes the history and politics of Constantinos Doxiadis’s urban vision which flourished internationally after the Second World War, reinventing architects planners as scientists, technocrats, and development experts, while renegotiating modernism’s rationalism and individualism. Focusing on “entopia,” Doxiadis’s vision of an ideal urban fabric, the essay exposes the social and formal ambitions of Doxiadis’s theory of Ekistics, and analyses his firm Doxiadis Associates’ alignments with new postwar discourses on international socioeconomic development and environmental management. Entopia provides the basis for a critical reflection on Doxiadis’s version of modernism, his emphasis on multi-disciplinarity, and his conceptions of global “harmony,” all of which resonate with current socio-political, urban and environmental predicaments.

Keywords

• doxiadis
• entopia
• utopia