Evans did not set out to reconstruct a Bronze Age palace using reinforced concrete. His excavation of the site began in the early spring of 1900. A few short weeks into the dig his workmen uncovered “the oldest throne in Europe,” a carved gypsum chair flanked by frescos. The chair—its back plastered right into the wall behind—could not be moved off-site, and so the following season a bit of scaffolding was run up to support a protective shelter over it. Desiring a more artistic effect, Evans then substituted wood-and-plaster columns for the scaffolding, their downward-tapering shape and red color based on the painting of a building on a fresco fragment. As the dig went on, more squat red columns were constructed to prop up the crumbling walls of other parts of the building. In 1905, work began on the Villa Ariadne, and as soon as Evans saw how quickly its reinforced concrete shell went up, he realized that he had stumbled upon the most practical solution to the problem of protecting and supporting the remains of the ancient palace. Inspired by the plasticity, indestructibility, and relative cheapness of the material, he eventually undertook the wholesale and highly speculative reconstruction of large areas of the building. By the end of 1930, modernist Knossos was complete.
For archaeologists, Evan’s reconstructions and interpretations have always presented a profoundly ambiguous bequest. Although, in most places, the modern fabric of Knossos is easy to spot, the relationship between the forms that the concrete takes, and the shape of any Bronze Age building, is still far from resolved. Not only do the concrete reconstructions cover up the stones of the original buildings, but the paper reconstructions of the palace, in watercolor, pen and ink, and text, do not easily allow a perspective on the problem uncolored by the prejudices of Evans and his team. The aim of this book is the opposite of archaeological. Instead of searching beneath the modern reconstructions in pursuit of the limestone and gypsum temples built by the people of the Bronze Age, the present narrative attempts to understand the temple builders of the age of concrete—the archaeologists, architects, artists, classicists, writers, and poets of the twentieth century A.D. who reconstructed Minoan Crete in modernist materials. Concrete Knossos may be the most eccentric archaeological reconstruction ever to achieve scholarly acceptance. Continue reading from University of Chicago Press
