The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis

The Delos Symposia, which ran from 1963 to 1975, were a groundbreaking series of events dedicated to rethinking and reshaping the built environment to solve the planet's environmental and demographic problems. Choreographed around the charismatic Greek architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis, and generating an entirely new "science of human settlements" called "Ekistics", this ambitious endeavor was run according to ancient Greek practices of the "sympósion", with banquets, dancing and fancy dress parties taking place aboard cruise ships in the Aegean Sea. Each symposium concluded at the island-city of Delos, where influential figures as diverse as Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee, Siegfried Giedion, Buckminster Fuller, Barbara Ward, Jean Gottmann, Kenzō Tange, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Marshall McLuhan would formally proceed to the ancient amphitheater and participate in ceremonial declarations on world issues.

The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis offers the first comprehensive appraisal of the history and legacy of the Delos Symposia not only as a global humanitarian network, but also as an intellectual theater and publicity machine. It explores their ideals, commitments and fights, the way they fed into the colossal urban planning projects that Doxiadis was implementing across the world, and the lessons they might offer for contemporary thinking on sustainable development.

Mantha Zarmakoupi is the Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman architecture in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published widely on Roman luxury villas, including monographs Designing for Luxury on the Bay of Naples (c. 100 BCE – 79 CE) (Oxford 2014) and Shaping Roman landscape (Getty 2023), and edited volume The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (De Gruyter 2010), as well as on the architecture, harbor infrastructure and urban development of late Hellenistic Delos. She also co-directs two archaeological fieldwork projects in Greece (Delos, 2014-; Levitha, 2019-) and one in Turkey (Teos, 2022-).

Simon Richards is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in Architectural History and Theory in the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University, UK. His research areas are modern through to contemporary architecture, comparative philosophical aesthetics, and discourses of tradition and heritage, and his publications include Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self (Yale 2003) and Architect Knows Best: Environmental Determinism in Architecture Culture (Routledge 2016).