Rodakis House

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The Rodakis house consisted of an Lshaped plan with a rather large courtyard surrounded by a high stone wall. The house was comprised of a series of four rooms, only three of which, apparently multiuse living areas, were connected together. Another Lshaped series of rooms directly adjacent and roughly as large as the main living areas, housed the animals. Cooking was done in a separate outhouse that contained a circular stone oven whose outline extended outwards from the otherwise orthogonal plan. The courtyard also contained its own threshing area (alòni).

Pikionis’s studies of the Rodakis house were complex. At one level, he perceived the house with European eyes, obviously knowledgable of major artistic movements from the North, such as Cubism and Surrealism. For him this house was a “primitive” other – an object trouvè, as fascinating as some of the African masks “discovered” by Picasso and Giacometti in the Parisian flea markets – and Pikionis often used the terms primitive and popular interchangeably indicating how close he felt they were in meaning. Among the black and white photographs included in the book published by his friends the German painter Klaus Vrieslander and the writer and shadowtheater artist Julio Kaimi, are details of mysterious figures on the property wall: a pig, a clock, a snake, and a dove. According to Vrieslander and Kaimi they could symbolize “Luck, Time, Evil and Peace”.8 Other photographs show plaster busts “that look away with a mystical gaze” leaning against the corners of the roof – reminding us, at least in spirit, of other “naïf” eccentric architecture admired by André Breton and Pablo Picasso