Iannis Xenakis and the Philips Pavilion

Iannis Xenakis and the PhilipsPavilion

Joseph Clarke Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

The Philips Pavilion, design by Le Corbusier’s office for the 1958 World’s Fair, brought the

architectural plan, the optical effects of movement and the ideology of progress into a

more intense discursive relationship than virtually any project since his Purist houses of

the 1920s. While the Pavilion has long been recognised as a seminal work, scholars have

tended to overlook the aesthetic intentions of its chief designer, the composer Iannis

Xenakis, often simplistically characterising the building as an architectural ‘translation’ of

music. This paper closely examines several of Xenakis’s wireframe axonometric sketches

along with new diagrammatic renderings to analyse the formal disconnect between the

Pavilion’s plan and the experience of walking around and through it. The professional fric-

tion between its two designers yielded a new variation on the promenade architecturale; its

principal tension is not between multiple formal readings but rather between the smooth

exterior, whose complex form offers a continuous variation of contours, and the ‘narrative’

experience of the interior, with its multimedia account of human history.

Introduction

The programme of the Philips Pavilion, designed by Le

Corbusier’s office for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brus-

sels, was simple: Visitors would traverse a short

entrance corridor, enter a darkened interior to

witness an eight-minute multimedia montage

about human history, and exit out the other side.

But while the seemingly straightforward ‘theatricali-

ty’of this scheme was evocatively expressed in the

floor plan (Fig. 1) as a stomach shape—an organic

S-curve with a large central chamber—it was resisted

by the Pavilion’s three-dimensional form. The con-

tours of its nine large concrete hyperbolic paraboloids

(saddle-curved surfaces) seemed to shift when seen

from different angles without offering a sequential

progression of readings to visitors moving around

or through the building (figs 2, 3, 4); moreover, the

Pavilion’s geometry referenced neither the scale of

the human body as Le Corbusier had recently

systematised it in the Modulor nor the mystical

formal vocabulary he evolved in other late projects.

The intricate, abstract system of surfaces was

almost entirely the vision of Iannis Xenakis, the

young Greek engineer who had worked in the

office since the late 1940s while simultaneously

embarking on a career as an experimental compo-

ser. To date, the most comprehensive English-

language study of the Philips Pavilion is Marc

Treib’s Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavi-

lion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varese, which meticu-

lously chronicles the building’s commission and

realisation.1 As Xenakis’s absence from the title

suggests, however, the book devotes little attention

to his conceptual intentions for the project. Discern-

ing the specific contributions of a single architec-

tural employee is difficult, and historians are

generally content to accept the professional fiction

of firm principals as authors, but this approach will

213

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

# 2012 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2012.678641

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

not do in the case of the Philips Pavilion, for which

even Le Corbusier uncharacteristically agreed to

share credit.2 Xenakis’s interdisciplinary creative

work has been illuminated recently by musical per-

formances around the world, a major exhibition of

his graphic works, and a series of international sym-

posia.3 His claim to be seeking a ‘general mor-

phology’ beyond the disciplinary boundaries of

music or architecture4 suggests that the Philips Pavi-

lion ought to be analysed not only as a point on Le

Corbusier’s design trajectory but as an intersection

with that of Xenakis. The fortuitous genesis of its

geometrical system in the two designers’ conflicting

approaches to form, movement and temporality

highlight some of the key anxieties of Western

Europe in the 1950s.

1. In the stomach of history

The circumstances of the project’s genesis are well

documented. Le Corbusier was approached in

1956 by Louis Christiaan Kalff, an erstwhile indus-

trial designer who had risen through the marketing

department of the Philips electronics corporation

to become the firm’s General Art Director and

was eager not only to showcase the company’s

audiovisual technologies but also to burnish its cul-

214

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Figure 1. Site plan of

the Philips Pavilion, 19th

June, 1957 (Fondation

Le Corbusier #28598.

# 2012 Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York

/ ADAGP, Paris / FLC).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

tural credentials. Le Corbusier had little interest in

the architectural challenge of the project—he had

already designed pavilions for the Paris expositions

of 1925 and 1937—but seized the opportunity

to envision a Poeme electronique that would

combine architecture, music, projected images

and coloured light to express the essential proble-

matics of the age in a provocative mass experience.

In architects’ campaigns to sell the image of the

modern, a World’s Fair pavilion was a chance to

215

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Figure 2. Entrance view

of the Philips Pavilion

(photograph by Hans de

Boer; courtesy Philips

Electronics).

Figure 3. Exit view of

the Philips Pavilion

(photograph courtesy

Royal BAM Group nv,

Bunnik, The

Netherlands).

Figure 4. Side view of

the Philips Pavilion

(photograph by Hans de

Boer; # 2012 Artists

Rights Society (ARS),

New York / ADAGP,

Paris / FLC).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

articulate the place of technological and aesthetic

innovations in the sweep of human civilisation.5

The synthesis of artistic media had been an

aspiration for Le Corbusier since, as a young

designer in Vienna, he had been enraptured by

Wagnerian operas in which music, drama, physical

movement and stage design were conceived as

unified gestures. He was also well aware of the

Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk’s megalomaniacal

tendencies, and deliberately mandated a more

pluralistic working method. The photographs to

be projected on the Pavilion’s darkened interior

were selected and composed by Le Corbusier

himself, the editor and graphic designer Jean

Petit, and the cinematographer Philippe Agostini

into a fragmented history of humanity.6 Steeped

in Nietzschean philosophy as a young man, Le Cor-

busier continued to believe in both the continual

recurrence of spiritual themes such as tragedy,

heroism and purification as well as the relentless

march of modernisation, bringing irreversible

changes to human society.7 The Poeme’s narrative

illustrates the evolution of the human species, artis-

tic expressions of faith, the devastation of war and

the desire for redemption. Photomontage had long

been one of his preferred rhetorical tools, as was

apparent in Towards an Architecture’s famous jux-

tapositions of Greek temples with modern motor

cars. Here, though, technology is cast in a more

ambivalent light, as both cause of and solution to

the world’s problems. The Poeme’s most persistent

motif, the affirmation of a common humanity, was

a trope of atomic-era culture also found, for

example, in Edward Steichen’s 1955 photography

exhibition The Family of Man. A utopian climax in

images of Le Corbusier’s own buildings emphasises

architects’ mission to bring harmony to social chaos

(fig 5, 6).8

216

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Figures 5–6. Scenes

from the Poeme

electronique (Courtesy

Philips Electronics).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

Accompanying the visual montage was an eight-

minute electronic work by the controversial compo-

ser Edgard Varese, in which samples of instrumental

and other sounds were played on hundreds of

speakers distributed throughout the interior, along

with a two-minute interlude composed by

Xenakis. Working closely with Philips technicians,

Varese created a site-specific work in which

sounds seemed to take wing and zoom around visi-

tors’ heads in the Pavilion’s immersive darkness. The

original intention was that after the spectacle, visi-

tors should exit through a short corridor in which a

window to the control room would reveal the

Philips technology that had made the experience

possible. Apparently Le Corbusier did not believe

that this baring of the electronic device depended,

for its effect, on occurring after the production,

because when last-minute changes to the neigh-

bouring structures required that the entrance

queue be moved to the opposite side, he had no

reservations about reversing the flow of circulation

through the design.9 In the Pavilion as built, visitors

saw the machinery just before entering.

Le Corbusier’s initial architectural concept accords

with his conception of the Pavilion as, fundamen-

tally, a mere container for this spectacle. At first he

suggested that the exterior be nothing more than

scaffolding, a total negation of architectural form,

possibly with a fabric membrane like his Pavillon

des Temps Nouveaux of 1937.10 He soon aban-

doned this idea, which would have afforded

inadequate acoustical isolation, and instead pro-

posed a curved plan designed to conduct masses

of people efficiently in and out, as through a

stomach (Fig. 7). Visitors were to be ingested,

violently churned and decomposed by the digestive

enzyme of the Poeme, and excreted back to the

fairground. His early sketches (Fig. 8) depict a

free-form, vaguely organic building with convex

walls and a cylindrical protrusion.11 This scheme

would have fulfilled the formal intention of the

stomach plan, had Le Corbusier sufficient time to

develop it. He was spending several months each

year in India to supervise the construction of Chan-

digarh, however, and was therefore obliged to limit

his Pavilion-related work to composing images for

the Poeme. Instead, he charged Xenakis with devel-

oping the plan into a suitable building, an unusually

significant responsibility for a young engineer with

no formal architectural training. It seems Le Corbu-

sier was willing effectively to abdicate architectural

direction to his assistant because of the unique

experiential disconnect between the interior and

exterior of the Pavilion, one of his only fully

opaque structures. From outside, Xenakis’s curving

forms would give no hint of what lay within, while

217

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Figure 7. I. Xenakis,

drawing of Le

Corbusier’s ‘stomach’

plan: originally

published in Philips

Technical Review, 20:1

(1958/1959); (courtesy

Philips Electronics).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

the darkened interior, illuminated only by Le Corbu-

sier’s projections, would not permit a clear view of

the building’s form.

The two designers’ initial drawings for the Pavilion

reveal distinct forms of architectural thinking. While

Le Corbusier sought to evoke the appearance of

mathematical complexity (‘Mettez-moi un peu de

maths la-dedans’, he instructed Xenakis airily), his

assistant aimed to make calculation part of the

design process.12 Alternating laboriously between

physical manipulation of a study model, compu-

tation of the resulting surface geometries and

production of sketches, Xenakis slowly developed

the pavilion’s unconventional form.13 Sven Sterken

describes Xenakis’s approach as more ‘pragmatic’

than that of Le Corbusier, but this characterisation

218

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Figure 8. Le Corbusier,

design sketches for the

Philips Pavilion,

September–October,

1956 (# 2012 Artists

Rights Society (ARS),

New York / ADAGP,

Paris / FLC).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

does not do justice to his sculptural sensibility.

Hyperbolic paraboloids did make more sense acous-

tically than Le Corbusier’s early idea for an entirely

convex envelope, which would have focused

sound instead of distributing it throughout the

space, but the design can hardly be described as

function-driven. It would be more accurate to

regard Xenakis’s method as an ancestor of

present-day parametric design: the composer

adopted the stomach plan as a pre-given constraint,

established an architectural grammar of ruled sur-

faces, and then iteratively optimised the form

using structural, acoustic and aesthetic criteria.

The algorithm was not made explicit, of course,

and before the advent of three-dimensional model-

ing software, such an approach could only be

attempted by an engineer with an innate math-

ematical capacity.

Eventually Xenakis settled on a cluster of nine

hyperbolic paraboloids, to be constructed in pre-

stressed concrete. Instead of distinct volumes,

these elements read as spliced surfaces, with

three ‘peaks’ protruding from their intersections:

one each over the entrance and exit, and a third

jutting from the central chamber. Xenakis’s solution

was an astonishing departure not only from the

organic analogy of the stomach concept but, more

fundamentally, from his employer’s formal method.

In his Purist period in the 1920s, Le Corbusier had

elevated the significance of the plan to nothing

less than an ideological belief, describing it as archi-

tecture’s ‘generator’ and suggesting that it held an

exceptional status as an instrument of human pro-

gress. ‘The great problems of tomorrow, dictated

by collective needs, pose the question of the plan

anew’, he declared in Towards an Architecture,

‘Modern life demands, awaits a new plan for the

house and for the city.’14 It was the plan that first

registered a designer’s intentions, determining

spatial hierarchies that would then give rise to a

cogent sequence of experiences; moreover, the

plan’s causal role figured the crucial role of architec-

ture in propelling civilisation forward.15 Le Corbusier

began to explore alternative bases for design after

the Second World War, perhaps most famously in

the chapel of Notre Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp

(1954), which was almost immediately recognised

as deriving more from semantic play than from inno-

vative planning, but even it had not made the plan

generateur an object of such explicit and sophisti-

cated critique.16

Xenakis records his geometrical thinking in a

series of small paraline drawings illustrating the con-

struction of a single hyperbolic paraboloid, which

establish how he intended the form to be read.

The first (Fig. 9) depicts two non-coplanar line seg-

ments, one above and one below the horizontal

plane at elevation 0 (also shown are the projections

of these segments on the horizontal and vertical

reference planes). In a subsequent image (Fig. 10;

the view is rotated and inverted from the first),

the two segments are connected by additional

straight lines to describe a twisted surface in

wireframe. When this surface intersects with the

horizontal plane, which Xenakis now identifies as

‘le terrain de l’exposition’, it is registered as an

inscribed curve, a ‘trace’ of the hyperbolic

paraboloid.

Xenakis envisioned the Pavilion’s geometry as a

virtual cluster of paraboloid surfaces floating in

219

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

space, to be sliced off by the horizontal ground

plane when actualised as a buildable form. He com-

posed the surfaces so that the outline of this slice—

in other words, the horizontal section cut through

the cluster at ground level—is none other than the

stomach shape, which, though it was created

chronologically earlier than the Pavilion’s three-

dimensional system of forms, now appears as an

effect of this system rather than its cause (figs 11,

12). His biographer Nouritza Matossian points out

that because he was not trained as a composer, he

lacked familiarity with many standard musical tech-

niques and was forced to feel his own way into

radical conceptual innovations.17 The same is true

of his architectural work. Of course, as he pursued

his own innovations in the Philips Pavilion, Xenakis

still needed to be able to represent the design as a

development of Le Corbusier’s initial idea. He

could honestly say that he adhered faithfully to Le

Corbusier’s sketch for the plan, which is essential

in establishing the Pavilion’s basic circulation

pattern even as it is questioned by a seemingly

prior three-dimensional form of which it is merely

a ‘trace’ or end product.

2. Nondirected linearity

Subverting a formal reading of the Pavilion in terms

of the plan as generator reflected Xenakis’s

ongoing interest in complex, abstract forms

capable of reorganising first principles such as

logic and probability, necessity and indeterminacy,

continuity and fragmentation into catalysts for

powerful experiences.18 Never one to retreat from

grandiloquence, he wrote retrospectively about

the project: ‘Since ancient times, architecture has

not really been a spatial, volumetric phenomenon.

It is essentially based on two dimensions. . . . One

enters the third dimension only by a parallel trans-

lation following the direction of the plumb line.’19

In his mind, the extrusion of an architectural plan

vertically into three dimensions—an operation he

imputed to all pre-Philips Pavilion buildings!—

220

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Figures 9–10. I.

Xenakis, drawings

illustrating geometric

construction of a virtual

hyperbolic paraboloid:

originally published in

Philips Technical

Review, 20:1 (1958/

1959); (courtesy Philips

Electronics).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

reflected an excessively causal model of artistic

creation. Xenakis’s architectural views aligned

with his musical experimentation. In 1955, he had

published a polemical article in the experimental

music journal Gravesaner Blatter accusing

contemporary twelve-tone or serial composers of

excessively ‘linear’ thinking. Although all music is

experienced along a temporal axis, he wrote, it

should be possible to conceive it both diachronically

as a succession of sensory events and, at the same

time, synchronically as surfaces or masses, using

geometric or statistical operations to structure

complex musical processes.20

He began to implement this aesthetic agenda in

Metastaseis, his breakout composition premiered

the same year, whose title means ‘transformations’.

Much of this work was conceived graphically in a

two-dimensional Cartesian space. His well-known

drawing of the last few measures (which renders

pitch as the y-axis and time as the x-axis) depicts sim-

ultaneous glissandi, or smooth slides between pitches,

as line segments collectively forming curved webs

(Fig. 13). In his later writings, Xenakis characterised

the design process of the Pavilion as a kind of trans-

lation of music into architecture, boasting of having

found an ‘intimate connection’ between the two

arts.21 While this assertion has often been taken to

refer to the apparent resemblance between the

graph of Metastaseis and the form of the Pavilion,

the likeness should not be overemphasised. Although

the curved graph was an important step in Xenakis’s

compositional process, he maintained elsewhere

that the quiddity of music lay in the sound of the per-

formance rather than the notated materials used to

conceive or produce it.22 Ruled surfaces, which had

appeared in European buildings for decades, were a

standard feature of the Expo’s ‘style 58’ architecture.

Xenakis explicitly credits the engineer Bernard Lafaille

for inspiring their use in the Philips Pavilion.23 If there is

an ‘intimate connection’ between it and Metastaseis,

it lies more in their particular way of resolving concept

and formation, using geometry to structure relations

of succession and simultaneity, than in a specific

visual vocabulary.

221

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Figures 11–12.

‘Stomach’ plan

produced by

intersection with

ground plane (# 2012

Joseph Clarke).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

It is here that one can distinguish Xenakis’s

approach from that of his employer. Music, for Le

Corbusier, was a model for the perception of

modern architecture through movement. His

brother Albert Jeanneret had studied with Emile

Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss music pedagogue with

an innovative system of mapping rhythm onto

space through bodily gestures, and later taught a

rhythmic gymnastics course in Paris in which the

architect was a student.24 Shaped by these influ-

ences, he regarded musical temporality as an

archetype of the promenade architecturale. As

early as 1921, he asserted in L’Esprit nouveau

under a pseudonym: ‘Arranging the volumes that

appear in succession to a spectator moving from

room to room is the same as what a composer

does when ordering the successive parts of a

musical composition.’25 He returned to this

analogy in The Modulor, describing the experience

of modern architecture as ‘pictures adding them-

selves one to the other, following each other in

time and space, like music.’26

222

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Figure 13. I. Xenakis,

graph of measures

309–314 from

Metastaseis.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

Le Corbusier’s citation of musical structure as a

model for the time-dependence of architecture

was naıf by the standards of twentieth-century com-

position, however. Just as he was looking to music

as a figure of ‘successive’ aesthetic experience,

experimental composers were starting to critique

directed linearity by proposing various ‘spatialisa-

tions’ of musical form. Eighteenth- and nine-

teenth-century Western music had generally

followed what might be termed a narrative tem-

poral schema in which a work began with the intro-

duction of sonic ideas which were gradually

developed and, in the end, resolved; it thus not

only occupied time, but also used internal melodic

and harmonic progressions to portray directed tem-

poral experience.27 During the first half of the twen-

tieth century, new compositional structures began

to emerge in which musical events did not ‘follow

from’ earlier ones in a causal succession.28 In the

1960s, Gyorgy Ligeti looked back on Anton

Webern’s compositions as having ‘brought about

the projection of the time flow into an imaginary

space by means of the interchangeability of tem-

poral directions provoked by the constant reciprocity

of the motivic shapes and their retrogrades’. In

Ligeti’s account, Webern’s musical structures do

not proceed in linear fashion from beginning to

end, but rather ‘circle continuously in their illusory

space’.29

Xenakis’s compositions owe much to this tradition

of experimentation. In the first and last sections of

Metastaseis, the contiguity that links one instant

to the next lacks the causality of a classical

progression, in which movement is implied by the

setting-up of expectations which are then either ful-

filled or subverted (the middle part is composed

in an older serial idiom which he would soon

abandon). Metastaseis is not nonlinear, and its tem-

poral unfolding may even be an harmonic process

on some level,30 but it exhibits what the music the-

orist Jonathan Kramer calls ‘non-directed linearity’.

This kind of music ‘carries us along its continuum,

but we do not really know where we are going in

each phrase or section until we get there’.31

In the light of Xenakis’s musical research into time

and perception, the Pavilion’s disruption of the

promenade architecturale as Le Corbusier had

theorised it is especially significant. Its smooth sur-

faces refused to cohere for the moving observer

into discrete snapshots which might suggest a

clear architectural progression.32 Xenakis intended

for the building to overwhelm the body’s conven-

tional methods of apprehending architecture:

Plastic materials of the future will shape the fertile

river of forms and volumes that are concealed not

only in biological beings, but above all, within

the most abstract mathematics. The referential

system for the human body will no longer be

the right angle and flat surfaces that are horizon-

tal and vertical. Its sensibility will be shaped by

curved surfaces. From the psycho-physiological

point of view, this is a new and enormous enrich-

ment, with yet unforeseeable consequences.

When someone is in the Philips Pavilion, he

doesn’t consider its geometry, but succumbs to

the influence of its curves.33

Architects and landscape designers had begun to

pay special attention to the optical effects of move-

ment sequences in the middle of the eighteenth

century.34 In French aesthetic theory, such effects

223

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

were often conceived in relation to the aesthetic cat-

egory of le pittoresque. Jan Kenneth Birksted writes

that while the picturesque of eighteenth-century

English gardens was backward-looking, typically

featuring classical allusions and nostalgic ruins, the

distinct French concept of pittoresque was more

often invoked to celebrate urban modernity,

emphasising ‘radical change, innovation, and pro-

gress’.35 Le Corbusier embraced this tradition

while insisting that the coherence provided by a

stable plan was essential to preventing ‘that

sensation, unbearable to man, of formlessness, of

something mean, disordered, arbitrary’.36 In the

Philips Pavilion, plan and three-dimensional geome-

try were locked in an un-decidable relationship; its

critical operation was to discipline the phenomenal

‘formlessness’ of shifting optical impressions not

with a generating plan but through the formal

economy of repeating a single surface in nine

variations.

3. Atomic fusion

‘Art, and above all, music has a fundamental func-

tion, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it

can bring about through all means of expression.

It must aim through fixations which are landmarks

to draw towards a total exaltation in which the indi-

vidual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth

immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect.’ With this

concise manifesto, Xenakis begins his magnum

opus Formalized Music.37 His fascination with the

sublime is closely connected with his efforts to

manipulate the experience of time in architecture

and music. Whether we think of the postmodern

sublime as Jean-Francois Lyotard theorised it in the

1970s—an intentionally conflicted stance with

respect to the possibility of discourse as an

ongoing process38—or consider Jonathan Kramer’s

claim that challenges to musical causality reflect a

culture ‘disaffected with the ultimate causal succes-

sion: progress’,39 artistic experiments with tempor-

ality in the decades following the Second World

War tracked European anxieties about civilisation

and the forward movement of history.

Of course, World’s Fairs are, almost by nature, cel-

ebrations of progress. The 1958 Expo was the first

Fair held after the War, and its centrepiece was the

Atomium, an heroic model of a metal crystal mol-

ecule meant to remind visitors of the peacetime

applications of atomic energy. Nearby, a 35-metre

cantilevered concrete arrow functioned as a literal

and symbolic expression of civil engineering pro-

gress. Around them, boomerang curves, victorious

‘V’ shapes and hyperbolic paraboloids were

emblems of a middle-class lifestyle transformed by

technology and the promise of the good life. The

optimism of the era was summed up by the Fair’s

official theme, ‘Bilan du monde pour un monde

plus humain’ (‘Taking a global snapshot for a more

humane world’).40

Beneath this hopeful veneer, there lingered con-

cerns about the possibility of nuclear annihilation,

which artists addressed with varying degrees of lit-

eralness. The barrage of imagery in Le Corbusier’s

Poeme electronique jolted visitors with its unex-

pected sequences: without a hint of sentimentality,

mushroom clouds gave way to smiling babies, and

the universality of human experience was affirmed.

This was a disjointed but still teleologically struc-

tured story of humanity’s development. Xenakis,

224

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

on the other hand, believed that the challenges of

the age could be confronted artistically through

abstract forms alone. Metastaseis had been hailed

as ‘atomic music’ by Heinrich Strobel, who con-

ducted its premiere in 1955;41 its swelling sonic

webs seemed to evoke Minkowski’s and Einstein’s

descriptions of space-time as a smooth manifold,

which had made atomic technology possible in the

first place. The Philips Pavilion, too, seemed like a

non-humanistic irruption from a world of math-

ematical transformations, which destabilised figura-

tion itself as visitors passed through its slippery

outlines. A final note of iconicity was reintroduced

by Le Corbusier, who commanded that two

hanging objects—one a female human figure and

the other a wireframe geometric form symbolising

mathematics—dangle over visitors’ heads during

the production.

In the 1950s, these divergent approaches could

still be synthesised into an aesthetically coherent

whole. But if the Pavilion’s two competing formal

tendencies held one another carefully in check, the

professional friction between Le Corbusier and

Xenakis soon reached a breaking point. In June of

1957, Xenakis expressed his frustrations in a letter

to a friend:

Le Corbusier is a miser, an egoist, an opportunist

who is capable of trampling upon the corpses of

his own friends. Not only did I do the project,

which Le Corbusier would be incapable of imagin-

ing for he has remained twenty years behind the

times, because he knows nothing of mathematics

and is a conservative (see Chandigarh and

Ronchamp) but also because [sic] I followed the

project to its realization to such a point that

while I was in Munich for the concert, Le Corbu-

sier phoned Philips to say that he could do

nothing without me and he had to wait for me

in order to continue.42

It cannot have been a great surprise when Xenakis

returned from his summer holiday in 1959, follow-

ing the Pavilion’s demolition earlier that year, to dis-

cover that the locks had been changed at Le

Corbusier’s atelier. While Xenakis saw the Philips

Pavilion optimistically as ‘the dawn of a new archi-

tecture’, such possibilities had nothing to contribute

to Modernism as Le Corbusier understood it.

‘Modern architecture triumphs in France; it has

been adopted’, he told Xenakis in an unctuous dis-

missal letter. ‘Today you may find a field of appli-

cation for everything which you have acquired by

yourself as well as through your work with me. I

believe you have the benefit of being able to seize

all opportunities which may present themselves to

you.’43 He later relented and tried to entice

Xenakis to return to the atelier, but the latter

would devote himself to composition.44 The few

small architectural projects he subsequently under-

took tended to recycle the two formal elements

for which he claimed credit, hyperbolic paraboloids

and the ‘undulating’ glass panes employed most

famously at La Tourette; it seems that despite his

frustration with Le Corbusier, Xenakis had benefited

as a designer from the tension in the studio.45

In retrospect, Le Corbusier and Xenakis were the

most unlikely of partners in such a collaborative

design: the former an aging master whose late

style was dominated by mystical figurations of frag-

mentation and reunification, the latter a young

‘artist-conceptor’: Xenakis’s term for a creative

225

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

genius whose abstract imagination could operate

across many art forms.46 Yet the design of the

Philips Pavilion brought the architectural plan, the

optical effects of movement and the ideology of

progress into a more intense discursive engagement

than any project since Le Corbusier’s houses of the

1920s. Treib’s argument that the Pavilion is an

early manifestation of the poststructuralist enthu-

siasm for multiplicity suggests that it is all the

more important to acknowledge Xenakis’s unique

role in the project.47 After all, if the building

succeeds in indexing the anxieties and temporalities

of post-war Western Europe, this is precisely

because Xenakis, impatient with what he saw as

conservatism in Le Corbusier’s late work, engaged

in the same sort of intense struggle with core prin-

ciples of architectural formation that had originally

led to the Purist breakthrough.

General note

Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the

2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural

Historians and the October, 2010, Symposium

‘Xenakis: Arts/Sciences’ at McGill University,

Montreal, Canada.

Notes and references1. M. Treib, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavi-

lion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varese (Princeton, New

Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1996).

2. After vociferous protest by Xenakis, Le Corbusier con-

ceded to credit the building jointly to both of

them:. N. Matossian, Xenakis (London, Kahn &

Averill, 1986), p. 121.

3. See, for example, the exhibition’s catalogue, S. Kanach,

C. Lovelace, eds, Drawing Papers 88: Iannis Xenakis:

Composer, Architect, Visionary (New York, Drawing

Center, 2010) and I. Xenakis, S. Kanach, Music and

Architecture: Architectural Projects, Texts, and Realiz-

ations (Hillsdale, New York, Pendragon Press, 2008).

Kanach, who assisted and collaborated with Xenakis

prior to his death in 2001, has been an energetic

impresario of the Xenakis revival.

4. I. Xenakis, Keleutha: Ecrits (Paris, Arche, 1994),

pp. 136–138.

5. See S. von Moos, ‘Art, Spectacle and Permanence’, in,

A. von Vegesack, M. Kries, eds, Le Corbusier: The Art

of Architecture (Weil am Rhein, Germany, Vitra

Design Museum, 2007), pp. 66–71.

6. The rough video of the Poeme electronique available

on YouTube hardly replicates the experience of the

original, but at least conveys the sequencing of

images: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQKyY

mU2tPg.

7. S. Von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis

(Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1982), p. 11.

8. The utopian leanings of Le Corbusier’s Poeme electro-

nique are especially clear in an early text he wrote to be

spoken during the spectacle (but eventually cut from

the production, on the advice of Varese) envisioning

‘a new civilisation’ inhabiting an earth that is ‘accessi-

ble, productive, and maternal’. See A. Stimson, ‘The

Script for Poeme Electronique’, Proceedings of the

International Computer Music Conference (1991),

p. 309.

9. Le Corbusier, letter to Louis Kalff, June 11th, 1957:

Getty Research Institute 870438-9.

10. L. Kalff, letter to Le Corbusier, November 29th, 1956:

Getty Research Institute 870438-5.

11. Karen Michels identifies the protrusion as a symbolic

figure which, in Le Corbusier’s mystical language of

forms, was probably meant to evoke sun worship:

226

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

K. Michels, ‘Le Corbusier: Poeme Electronique’, Idea:

Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle (1985:IV),

p. 151.

12. S. Sterken, ‘Travailler chez Le Corbusier: Le cas de

Iannis Xenakis’, Massilia: anuario de estudios lecorbu-

sierianos (2003), pp. 209, 214.

13. The Philips Corporation’s official record describes this

process: ‘The Architectural Design of Le Corbusier

and Xenakis’, Philips Technical Review, v. 20 n. 1

(1958/1959), p. 4.

14. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trs., John

Goodman (Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2007),

p. 116.

15. Cf. R. Panchasi, Future Tense: The Culture of

Anticipation in France Between the Wars

(Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2009),

p. 63.

16. For example: J. Stirling, ‘Ronchamp: Le Corbusier’s

Chapel and the Crisis of Rationalism’, The Architec-

tural Review, 119 (March, 1956). Notably, Stirling

detects in this building a hesitant attitude towards

technology and a post-war refutation of what he

called ‘the myth of progress’.

17. N. Matossian, op. cit., p. 73.

18. See, for example, his opening comments in ‘La

musique stochastique: Elements sur les procedes prob-

abilistes de composition musicale’, Revue d’Esthe-

tique, 14:4-5 (1961), pp. 294–318, key passages of

which are repeated in the first chapter of I. Xenakis,

Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in

Music, revised edition (Stuyvesant, New York, Pendra-

gon Press, 1992).

19. I. Xenakis, ‘The Philips Pavilion at the Dawn of a New

Architecture’, originally published in I. Xenakis, Musi-

que.Architecture (Tournai, Belgium, Casterman,

1971) based on earlier notes and publications: trans-

lated by S. Kanach in I. Xenakis, Kanach, Music and

Architecture, op. cit., p. 110.

20. I. Xenakis, ‘La crise de la musique serielle’, Gravesaner

Blatter, n. 1 (July, 1955), pp. 2–4.

21. I. Xenakis, Formalized Music, op. cit., p. 10.

22. As he later wrote, ‘Nothing visual, no action, nor

psychological considerations should take away from

the absolute intrinsic quality of the sound [. . .] If the

music itself can not stand on its own, then we’ve lost

the battle.’: I. Xenakis, ‘Lieu’, undated text probably

written c. 1970–71; reprinted as ‘Topoi’ in I. Xenakis,

S. Kanach, Music and Architecture, op. cit., p. 145.

23. I. Xenakis, ‘Le Corbusier’s “Electronic Poem”—the

Philips Pavilion (Brussels World Exposition 1958)’,

Gravesaner Blatter, 9 (1957), p. 52. Ruled surfaces

were also used in the 1950s by engineer-architects

such as Felix Candela and Pier Luigi Nervi in daring

expressions of structural bravado. Le Corbusier uses

them memorably in the roof at Ronchamp and the

tower atop Chandigarh’s General Assembly building.

They were plentiful at the 1958 World’s Fair, mostly

as symbols of social and technological progress, such

as the hyperbolic paraboloid roof of Guillaume

Gillet’s French Pavilion. See P. Loze, ‘Architecture 58’,

in, D. Pasamonik, ed., Le Style atome (Brussels,

MAGIC-STRIP, 1983).

24. See J. Clarke, ‘Acoustique Plastique’, forthcoming in

Center: Volume 18 - Music is Architecture is Music

(Austin, Texas, Center for American Architecture and

Design, 2012).

25. J. Caron, ‘Une villa de Le Corbusier 1916’, L’Esprit

nouveau, 6 (March, 1921), p. 682.

26. Le Corbusier, The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to

the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architec-

ture and Mechanics, P. de Francia, A. Bostock, trs

(1948; Basel, Birkhauser, 2004), p. 73.

27. For example, Susanne Langer wrote in 1953: ‘Musical

duration is an image of what might be termed “lived”

or “experienced” time—the passage of life that we

feel as expectations become “now”, and “now”

227

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

turns into unalterable fact. . .. The semblance of this

vital, experiential time is the primary illusion of

music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in

which its sonorous forms move in relation to each

other.’: S. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art

(New York, Scribner, 1953), pp. 104–119.

28. As early as the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, a young

Claude Debussy was transfixed by the layered rhythmic

patterns of gamelan music performed at the model

Javanese village, inspiring ostinato passages in the com-

poser’s subsequent work that frequently ignore the

rules of functional harmony: J. Kramer, The Time of

Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listen-

ing Strategies (New York, Schirmer Books, 1988), p. 44.

29. G. Ligeti, ‘Metamorphosis of Musical Form’, Die Reihe 7:

Form-Space, C. Cardew, trs. (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania,

Theodore Presser, 1965), p. 16; for more background,

see C. F. Hasty, ‘On the Problem of Succession and

Continuity in Twentieth-Century Music’, Music Theory

Spectrum, vol. 8 (Spring, 1986), pp. 58–74.

30. In his analysis of Metastaseis, Ronald Squibbs argues

that Xenakis was still evolving from the more goal-

oriented approach of serialism to the ‘spatial’ sense

of his later, fully stochastic music: R. Squibbs,

‘Aspects of Compositional Realization in Xenakis’s

Pre-Stochastic and Early Stochastic Music’, Proceed-

ings of the Xenakis International Symposium (April

1–3, 2011), available online at http://www.gold.ac.

uk/media/03.1%20Ron%20Squibbs.pdf.

31. J. Kramer explicitly assigns Xenakis’s Syrmos (1959) to

this category: op. cit., pp. 39–40.

32. Treib notes how dramatically the design’s contours

shift when it is viewed from different angles, compar-

ing it to work by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner,

whose abstract wire sculptures created a sense of

‘movement or unfolding over time’ as they appeared

to transform before the viewer’s eyes: M. Treib,

op. cit., p. 33. At one point Le Corbusier considered

commissioning a Pevsner sculpture to be placed

outside the Pavilion: L. Kalff, notes from meeting

with Le Corbusier, Getty Research Institute 870438-8.

33. I. Xenakis, ‘The Philips Pavilion at the Dawn of a New

Architecture’, op. cit., p. 118.

34. Y.-A. Bois, ‘A Picturesque Stroll around “Clara-Clara” ‘,

J. Shepley, trs., October, 29 (Summer, 1984). According

to Reinhart Koselleck, the concept of movement as a

metaphor for social and political change is an ‘unmistak-

able’ semantic component of modernity, as Westerners

began to conceive time not as a transcendent container

whose flow could be taken for granted but as immanent

in the currents of a world history. The Enlightenment

political understanding of time as history first prompted

the adoption of spatial terminology to describe one’s

situation in it. R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Seman-

tics of Historical Time, K. Tribe, trs. (1979; New York,

Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 246–248; 254.

Also see P. Eisenman, ‘The Time of Serra’s Space: Tor-

quing Vision’, in ANY, 21 (1997), pp. 59–60.

35. J. K. Birksted, Le Corbusier and the Occult (Cambridge,

Mass., The MIT Press, 2009), p. 91.

36. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, op. cit., p. 118.

37. I. Xenakis, Formalized Music, op. cit., p. 1: the

statement first appears in ‘La musique stochastique’,

op. cit., p. 295.

38. In contrast to the beautiful, which is calm, and thus

assumes the orderly progress of art towards ever-

more-perfect forms, Lyotard’s sublime expresses a per-

ceived threat to art’s temporality. The sublime amounts

to a noncorrespondence between a representation

and an absolute, he wrote, and the ultimate absolute

is ‘the threat of nothing further happening’. J.-F.

Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, in The

Inhuman: Reflections on Time, G. Bennington,

R. Bowlby, trs (Stanford, California, Stanford University

Press, 1992), pp. 99–104.

39. J. Kramer, op. cit., p. 164.

228

Iannis Xenakis and the

Philips Pavilion

Joseph Clarke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012

40. P. Loze, op. cit., pp. 8, 16.

41. Quoted in J. Harley, Xenakis: His Life in Music

(New York, Routledge, 2004), p. 10.

42. I. Xenakis, June 25th, 1957, letter to H. Scherchen:

appears in translation in N. Matossian, op. cit., p. 120.

43. Le Corbusier to Xenakis, 13th August, 1959: quoted in

N. Matossian, op. cit., p. 132.

44. M. Treib, op. cit., p. 89.

45. On Xenakis’s later architectural work, see S. Sterken,

Iannis Xenakis: Ingenieur et architecte (Doctoral disser-

tation, University of Ghent, 2004).

46. I. Xenakis, Arts/Sciences: Alloys, S. Kanach, trs.

(New York, Pendragon Press, 1985), p. 3.

47. M. Treib, op. cit., p. 174.

229

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 17

Number 2

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Yal

e U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

], [

Jose

ph C

lark

e] a

t 02:

27 2

5 A

pril

2012