To understand European architecture, we must go back in time. Not to Vitruvius or the Parthenon, but further -  before the days of Socrates. In Socrates’ Ancestors, Indra Kagis McEwen reveals that the foundation of our thinking - about space, form, and meaning - lies in a time when philosophy had not yet been separated from the body, the earth, the myth. A time when speaking, building, and knowing were tightly interwoven.

The book reads like an archaeological excavation of the European mind. McEwen shows how the Greek notions of space - chora, topos, logos - did not emerge from abstraction, but from rituals, landscapes, voices, and gestures. Thinking was not an activity of the head, but of the entire being. Architecture was not a discipline, but an act of creation in the world. And it is here that Daedalus appears: the craftsman, the inventor, the storyteller. Not a marginal mythological figure, but the primordial father of architecture.

Daedalus built the labyrinth, designed mechanical figures that could move, and created spaces where truth and illusion merged. He stands as a symbol of a way of building that is magical, technical, and morally ambivalent. The Daedalian architect doesn’t think in diagrams, but in transformations. He knows the power of form - and its dangers. His inventions can liberate or deceive. In Daedalus, we see the two-sided soul of the architect: creator and colonizer of the landscape, servant of order and master of the maze.

McEwen’s great merit is that she neither psychologizes nor historicizes these layers, but makes them palpable. She shows how these early notions of space live on in our language, our symbols, our buildings. Often unconsciously, but all the more. As if Daedalus is still drawing, shaping, dreaming, and building through us. Because even though we now think and build in straight lines, the primordial resonance of the labyrinth still echoes in the heart of our craft.

For those who see architecture as more than form and function — as an expression of cosmology, ritual, and existence — this book is essential. Not easy, but profound. It offers no ready-made theory, but a shift in perspective. And perhaps that is precisely what we need in an age where everything is measurable and nothing magical.

“Daedalus is the architect of both the labyrinth and the illusion. He is the invisible ancestor of every building that wants to be more than a box of functions.”
- Indra Kagis McEwen