Prologue

Ah! We experienced very beautiful moments with George since we discovered each for his own reasons and with his own tools of inquiry, the beauty and wisdom of this nameless architecture.

I, impelled by the ravenous and misleading for my friends pursuit of new sources of inspiration, and George, I think, under the spell of a revelation, a godsend help, which granted him documented support for some of his views on architecture. Thankfully he saw these erratic structures as a photographer. He also saw them as autonomous images, capable of defending their existence on their own. Thus he benefited doubly. At least I gather this much by reading what he writes and by looking at the pictures he chose.

Although these structures seemed to me only some kind of incidental Land Art –realized years before the coining of the term– as modest but imaginative works of art, executed with the cheapest of materials and out of use objects, so I felt exulted by viewing them, George made out of them a book, a lesson and a viewpoint. He tried to speak through them, to demonstrate, to formulate them into systems, and with these as a tool to support a statement or a challenge...

I hope that, in his future projects, utilizes what he saw, what he recorded, what he understood, what he thought, what he said; and that his work is consistent with the beliefs he puts forward in this book-album. This, of course, does not put him under any obligation. No-one is entitled to charge him one day with possible inconsistencies. Life moves on and, thankfully, sweeps us and our ideas along.

But I think this book will ultimately remain as an unquestionable object of art, even if its message may be challenged.

It offers to those who would hold it in their hands, first a visual and tactile pleasure and then a lesson or at least some information.

And so, I say, it should be.

For once you offer a picture as testimony for your views, the word, often unnecessary or wrong, while apparently wants to promote the image, in essence contends with it and often, out of stubbornness or inability, degrades it, turning it from an independent and self-reliant event to a material or a tool.

What a pity we can not trust the intelligence of our fellow human beings but to have to explain to them the obvious each and every time!

Costas Tsoclis

08.09.2009

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