Iannis Xenakis and the Philips Pavilion

Abstract

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 friction 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.