[Extract …]

All these three areas [the natural, the agricultural, and the urban] taken together will form the universal city—its home its backyard and its natural garden. —C.A. Doxiadis, 19671

In greeting cards sent to clients, associates, and friends in the early 1970s, the international firm Doxiadis Associates featured its founder, Constantinos A. Doxiadis—already famous as a “busy remodeler of the world”—pointing at a large drawing of a methodically structured urban fabric that promised to provide adequate housing and community facilities to people of all classes and backgrounds.2 The image illustrated Doxiadis’s vision of “entopia.” Coined from the Greek en topos as a term opposite to utopia, entopia was meant to be a plausible reality for the future. It held onto the modernist optimism for the architect-planner as an agent of socioeconomic reform, while simultaneously rejecting earlier modernism’s excesses of individualism and rationalism. Entopia also promised to accommodate the forces of industrialization and modernization while minimizing their dehumanizing impact by reclaiming physical qualities of past settlements that had achieved a balance between nature and society. To this end, entopia eradicated high densities and tall structures—for which Doxiadis had always professed disdain—and placed high-speed roads and industrial establishments underground, so as to keep the intrusions of mechanization out of sight and out of mind. Entopia also reintroduced green areas in and around the metropolis so as to nurture a harmonious coexistence between nature and the city.

• 1. C.A. Doxiadis, “Water and Human Environment” (paper presented at the International Conference on Water for Peace, Washington, DC, 23 May 1967), F4, articles-papers 2878, Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Athens. The archives are hereinafter cited as Doxiadis Archives.
• 2. Doxiadis was described like this in an illustrated article on him in Life magazine. “Busy Remodeler of the World,” Life, 7 October 1966. Doxiadis was also the recipient of the Aspen Award in 1966. For a more extensive overview of Doxiadis Associates activities and fame at the time, see Christopher Rand, “The Ekistic World,” The New Yorker, 11 May 1963, 49–87