Planners: Oracles at Delos

The work of the city planner is highly technical, complex and occasionally grubby. It is also exciting, full of heady schemes and grandiose concepts. Among the most grandiose are those advanced by Constantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, 56, inventor and prophet of "ekistics," meaning the science of human settlements. His planning and design firms employ more than a thousand people in Athens, Washington and 17 other cities. His smallest projects these days are complete university campuses, his largest embrace thousands of square miles, such as the River Plate Basin Development Program, involving new towns and transportation in five South American countries. A better stimulator of ideas than he is a designer, he is also a tireless preacher of the notion that ekistics must include many different disciplines.

For the past six years, Doxiadis has invited 30 or so distinguished architects, businessmen, politicians and academics to a week-long superseminar on environment problems aboard a chartered Aegean cruise ship. Most expenses are paid by Doxiadis—who may or may not be a millionaire—and assorted wealthy friends. The trip always ends at the island of Delos, sacred to the ancient Greeks as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, where a formal summation of the results is read in the ancient theater. The event suggests that growing numbers of what might be called glamour intellectuals are drawn to the idea of city planning—although they are finding its problems difficult to articulate. A few days ago, TIME Correspondent Horace ludson was aboard for the seventh symposium. His report:

The chief characteristics of the symposium are the sea and air and sun, and endless talk. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, who has been on all but one of the trips, says that the symposium is the closest thing she knows to the great English country house parties at the turn of the century, and the comparison is just.

Athens Apex. The talk starts smoothly at the reception Doxiadis gives on the evening before embarkation. His triplex apartment is on the highest rooftop on the highest street in Athens. His guests look out on painfully appropriate urban contrasts: from marble-and-plate-glass luxury across the charmless sprawl of the modern city to the ruined perfection of the floodlit Parthenon. This year former Democratic Senator William Benton was holding court on a huge sofa, playing the part he loves: the crusty old American millionaire. Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, now a consultant on conservation, silently contemplated a Boeotian vase. Buckminster Fuller, a chunky little figure in black tie and white jacket, bald head shining, talked to Dr. Thomas Lambo, a towering blue-black Nigerian psychiatrist in flowing tribal robes. The guests ranged from British Economist Austin Robinson and French Geographer Jean Gottmann to American urbanists like Robert Wood of M.I.T. and Martin Meyerson, president of the University of Buffalo. Mingling easily among them all was Dox-iadis, a silvery fox of a man—academic, politician, humanitarian, man of influence.