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InteriorsVolume 3, Issues 1–2

pp 127–142

Reprints available directly from the publishersPhotocopying permitted by license only© Berg 2012 Printed in the UK

“New Media” and the Obsolescence of Architecture: Exhibition Pavilions by Le Corbusier, Xenakis, Stockhausen, and E.A.T.

Sven Sterken

ABSTRACT Exhibition pavilions have always offered a fertile ground for architectural experimentation. Aimed at a public eager to be bewildered and amply financed by nations or large enterprises competing for attention, the temporary nature of such pavilions invites for daring structural solutions, experimental building materials, and innovative spatial concepts. In the second half of the twentieth century, the role of these structures has shifted from a space of instruction and mass education to a multisensory environment, enhancing mental absorption and emotional involvement, the goal being to make the

Sven Sterken trained in architectural engineering at the

universities of Ghent, Paris, and Pretoria, and obtained a PhD

in architectural history from the University of Ghent with a dissertation on the composer

and architect Iannis Xenakis. He currently teaches at the Sint-Lucas

School of Architecture (Brussels/Ghent) and is associated with the

architecture department of the University of Leuven.

sven.sterken@architectuur.sintlucas.wenk.be

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underlying commercial, political or artistic message pass more easily – sometimes even unnoticed. This article discusses a couple of cases that are illustrative for this evolution, namely the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 and the German and Pepsi Pavilions at EXPO 70 in Osaka. What links these projects is a tendency towards dematerialization, as if the physical aspect of building forms an obstacle in the realization of a fully immersive environment. In this view, media technologies appear as a-tectonic avatars, opposing “real” and “artificial” space as mutually exclusive. However, the case of the Diatope, a multimedia pavilion realized by Iannis Xenakis in 1978, illustrates that, instead of maintaining this rupture, architecture can also act as an interface between real and artificial spaces, thus enabling their simultaneous existence.

KEYWORDS: World Fairs, exhibition pavilions, ephemeral architec-ture, new media, Iannis Xenakis, Polytopes, Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.), Stockhausen

IntroductionExhibition pavilions have always offered fertile ground for architec-tural experimentation.1 Aimed at a public eager for bewilderment and financed amply by nations or large enterprises competing for atten-tion, the temporary nature of such pavilions invites daring structural solutions, experimental building materials, and innovative spatial concepts. The role and significance of these structures has under-gone an important shift in the second half of the twentieth century. Because today information, images, and numbers travel around the globe in the space of seconds, the “live” experience becomes the principal added value of a visit to a World Fair. Thus, entertainment replaces instruction as the principal goal of these fairs. The strate-gies to transmit ideological or commercial messages have changed correspondingly: most of the nations, organizations, or companies with their own pavilions at such fairs communicate indirectly with the audience through immersive environments or interactive displays. Immersing visitors in a certain atmosphere, the aim is to make them forget the outside world or to weaken their sense of reality. Thus, the temporary exhibition pavilion shifts from a space of instruction and mass education to a multisensory environment aimed at producing particular bodily sensations or psychological effects in the audience through images, sonic impulses, and light effects. Such a profusion of media enhances mental absorption and emotional involvement and makes the underlying commercial, political, or artistic message pass more easily – sometimes even unnoticed.

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The capacity to immerse the spectator in environments with an intensified optical, auditory, and even olfactory dimension has been greatly enhanced by the development of automation technology in the second half of the twentieth century, enabling the manipulation of sound, light and movement as immersive and expressive “media.”2 Although the corresponding current of so-called “Kinetic Art” origi-nated in the 1920s with Naum Gabo’s Kinetic Construction, it was only after World War II that electronic circuits became sufficiently affordable and manipulable to experiment with on a large scale. This imbrication of art and technology led to a new aesthetic paradigm, namely that of interaction. Artworks based on a dialog between the art object and the viewer not only find their significance solely in the interpretation of the latter, but also in their physical or psychological reaction to it. The aesthetic dimension of such an artwork is thus no longer a permanent quality that can be passively contemplated but an ephemeral effect to which the visitor has to contribute actively.

This article discusses a couple of cases that are illustrative for this evolution, namely the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, and the German and Pepsi Pavilions at EXPO 70 in Osaka. Apart from their interdisciplinary nature – all these pavilions were real-ized in close collaboration with visual artists and composers – the link between these projects is a tendency towards dematerialization, as if the physical aspect of building forms an obstacle in the realization of a fully immersive environment. In this view, media technologies seem to disassociate spatial experience from its physical delimitation, opposing “real” and “artificial” space as mutually exclusive phenom-ena. The case of the Diatope, a multimedia pavilion realized by the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis in 1978, illustrates, however, that instead of maintaining this rupture, architecture can also act as an interface between the real and the virtual, thus enabling their simultaneous existence.

The Philips, Pepsi, and German PavilionsThe Dutch Company Philips commissioned Le Corbusier to design its pavilion at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, with the aim of illustrat-ing the superior quality of Philips’ products in the field of light and sound equipment (Figure 1).3 It hosted the Poème Electronique, a light and sound show developed together with the French-American composer Edgar Varèse. The Poème Electronique reflected, in seven stages, Le Corbusier’s vision of the history of humankind and his ambivalent attitude towards technological progress. The pavilion’s architecture, drawn by Xenakis – then working as an architect and engineer in Le Corbusier’s office – on the basis of hyperbolic concrete shells, was, in fact, no more than a huge projection screen enfolding the audience. Its purpose was to create a darkened interior space for the Poème Electronique and attract the crowds through its futuristic exterior form. It is interesting to note that, initially, Le Corbusier did not think of the pavilion as a proper building. Upon accepting the

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commission, he wrote to Philips: “I will not make a façade for Philips, but an electronic poem. Everything will happen inside: sound, light, color, rhythm. Perhaps, scaffolding will be the pavilion’s only exterior aspect” (Le Corbusier 1958: 23). Indeed, as his first sketches show, he initially conceived it as a simple tensile covering, quite similar to his Pavilion des temps nouveaux at the Paris Exhibition in 1937. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier’s intentions at Expo ’58 were clear: in-side the Philips Pavilion, floor, ceiling, and walls all had to merge into one another, so that depth and perspective seemed to disappear. This confusion was reinforced during the show by the projection of large images on opposite sides of the room, while a succession of “ambiances” (colored light projections) filled the entire pavilion with tints of red, blue, green, and orange. In the meantime, recorded sounds of bells, voices, and sirens, electronically manipulated by Varèse, traveled along the walls through 300 hidden loudspeak-ers. The interactive aspect of the Poème Electronique lies in the audience’s voluntary participation in this mechanism of perceptive deception. Hundreds of thousands of people lined up to get into the pavilion, thrilled by the idea of taking part in this much talked-about avant-garde experiment.

Figure 1 Le Corbusier/Iannis Xenakis, Philips Pavilion, Brussels World Fair, 1958. Exterior view.

© Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

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Interestingly, Xenakis not only designed the pavilion’s geometry but also composed a two-minute interlude, Concret PH. Contrary to Varèse’s soundtrack, a sonic narrative developing in time and space, Concret PH was more of a static soundscape that seemed to give an aural picture of the tensions within the structure’s pre-stressed outer mesh. Or, as Bart Lootsma observed: “This slightly singing and crackling noise must have given the visitor the feeling that the extraordinarily elegantly constructed, but only 5-centimeter thick shell of pre-stressed concrete was beginning to burst” (Lootsma 1998: 40). Concret PH was not so much music to listen to, but rather a soundscape to be felt – in the sense that it must have made the audience’s skin crawl.

Although the Poème Electronique was hugely successful at the fair, Xenakis criticized its mimetic content as well as its lack of artistic coherence. As he stated in his essay “Notes sur un ‘geste électro-nique’” – a seminal text in his career as it formed the blueprint for the later Polytopes – the current state of electronic media allowed for a more advanced concept of the total work of art. In Xenakis’s vision, such an integration of visual and aural arts had to be abstract in nature. Referring to contemporary developments in Kinetic Art and avant-garde cinema, he observed: “The intentions behind painting and sculpture have already adopted the most recent stages of physical, mathematical and philosophical thought. These are steps toward abstraction. Abstraction, here, is meant in the sense of conscious manipulation of laws and pure ideas, and not of concrete objects.” (Xenakis 2008: 131) Whereas the visual arts had already embraced the temporal dimension through cinematography, it was now music’s turn to conquer the spatial dimension and enrich the classical structural components of sound (duration, timbre, dynam-ics, and pitch) with that of location. Moreover, as Xenakis argued, in this manner, “music may now govern mathematical space and its abstract relations and thus become wonderfully perceptible to the ear without the use of visuals or any physical apparatus of measure-ment” (ibid.: 134). What Xenakis is saying here, is that the ear can provide us with spatial orientation just as much as the eye.

A crucial component in realizing this idea of “audible space” would be a three-dimensional acoustic grid, allowing sounds to emanate from any point in the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. As Xenakis argued further in “Notes sur un ‘geste électronique’,” “these sound points define space in the same manner as geometric points in stereometrics. Everything that can be stated for Euclidian space could be transposed into an acoustic space” (ibid.: 133). In his view, sound was thus no longer only a carrier of musical expression, but also a means to generate ephemeral sonic architectures. Apart from the Philips Pavilion, Xenakis had the opportunity to put this idea into practice only once, namely at the EXPO 70 in Osaka. In the so-called “Space Theatre” (designed by another architect), his electro-acoustic piece Hibiki Hana Ma was broadcast through 800

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loudspeakers according to all sorts of geometrical patterns. This was the closest Xenakis would get to his ideal of an “isotropie sonore”: an environment where the quality of the sound would be exactly the same in all the spots.

Xenakis was not the only composer at EXPO 70 to implement some of his earlier ideas about the composition and diffusion of music in the electronic era. Curated by Karlheinz Stockhausen – then an absolute celebrity in avant-garde music circles – the German Pavilion was entirely dedicated to contemporary music and sound technology (Figure 2). The pavilion’s principal feature was a spheri-cal concert hall with a capacity of 550, designed almost literally

Figure 2 Fritz Bornemann/Karlheinz Stockhausen, German Pavilion, Osaka World Fair, 1970. Interior view of the

Auditorium with Stockhausen at the control desk. © Stockhausen Foundation, Kuërten. www.stockhausen.org

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according to the instructions formulated by Stockhausen 20 years earlier in his essay “Musik im Raum” (1959):

New kinds of concert halls have to be built suited to the require-ments of spatialized music. I propose a spherical space, which is equipped all around with loudspeakers. In the middle of this spherical space a sound-permeable, transparent platform will have to be suspended for the listeners. Thus, they will be able to hear music composed for such standardized spaces coming from above, from below and from all points of the compass.5

Together with the visual artist Otto Piene, Stockhausen con-ceived Hinab-Hinauf, a mixed-media spectacle for the auditorium that was to challenge the standards set by the Poème Electronique (Stockhausen 1971: 154). Stockhausen’s ambition to overcome gravity and geometry as fundamentals of conventional space per-ception was, however, cut short by its excessive cost – the projected budget was even debated in the national parliament (Sigel 1999: 264). In the end, Hinab-Hinauf was reduced to a broadcasting pro-gram alternated with daily live performances of Stockhausen pieces. In the course of the 180-day exhibition, Spiral, for a soloist and short-wave receiver, was played no fewer than 1,300 times. During the performances, the sound was distributed over 650 speakers with the aid of a spherical sensor, while the darkened interior space suggested an endless cosmic space. This impression of infinity was exactly the architect’s aim. Envisioning an architecture that effaced itself before the message it was supposed to transmit, the pavilion’s architect Fritz Bornemann even stated: “I didn’t want to use a build-ing at all. Radar [sic] frozen air would have been better, but we can’t do that yet, so I tried to do the next best thing” (Pawley 1970: 289). This quote is typical for the architectural climate at EXPO 70, with its abundance of inflatable, movable, and expandable pavilions. Never before had architecture been so close to immateriality.6

This tendency towards dematerialization brings up the following question: what role is left for architecture in a context where elec-tronic media are perfectly capable of creating a spatial experience? As the architecture critic Martin Pawley stated in his account of EXPO 70, what is at stake here is a “quantum leap in architectural design,” involving “the substitution of mobile images for static forms – in a way the substitution of the laws of perception for the laws of force, mass and weight as the ultimate governing factors in the design of environment” (Pawley 1970: 289). As Pawley further argues, this calls for a new type of architect:

the design of such environments is going to become de facto providence of systems and media men, electronics and computer experts … Architects who cannot manipulate

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sound and projection systems … will be about as much use as demonologists in a cancer research hospital. (Pawley 1970: 292)

Pawley’s observations apply most strikingly to the Pepsi Pavilion, also at EXPO 70 in Osaka (Figure 3). Although originally intended as a purely promotional device – the pavilion was part of a strategy to introduce the soda drink to the Japanese market – the Pepsi project was “hijacked” by the American artist group E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology).7 Founded in 1966 by Billy Klüver, one of the prin-cipal engineers at Bell Laboratories’ research department, together with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, E.A.T. aimed at bridging the gap between art and science. It offered assistance to artists wishing to work with state-of-the-art technology. Under E.A.T.’s impulse, the Pepsi project evolved into an interactive multisensory experience of light, sound, and movement, where each moment created a unique configuration of changing patterns and images. Contrary to the Philips Pavilion, where the fixed eight-minute projection emphasized the apocalyptic dangers associated with scientific progress, in the Pepsi Pavilion, the visitor was able to compose his own experience and thus discover the expressive and humanizing potential of tech-nology (Dinkla 2000: 111; Klüver and Rose 1972: ix). The pavilion’s dome-shaped interior was covered with an air-pressurized reflecting film that suggested a weightless floating. Hidden behind this spherical

Figure 3 Experiments in Art & Technology, Pepsi Pavilion, Osaka World Fair, 1970. Photo: Shunk-Kender.

© Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

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mirror, thirty-seven speakers arranged in a rhombic grid directed sounds via various spatial trajectories, blurring even more the spatial orientation of the visitor. On top of this, the audience also received a headset that played back a soundscape that changed as a function of where one stood. However, the most talked-about feature of the Pepsi Pavilion was the fog system designed by Fujiko Nakaya: fixed on the exterior shell of the pavilion, 2,520 jet-spray nozzles sprayed 40 tons of water per hour, veiling its appearance in an ever-changing fogbank. Although an autonomous artistic intervention with its own aesthetic and conceptual intentions, the fog installation also had a more prosaic dimension: it served to lead the attention away from the pavilion’s rather weak architectural features, designed long be-fore E.A.T. became involved. Media technologies thus became part of a strategy to blur the material presence of architecture.

Iannis Xenakis’s PolytopesAfter his collaboration with Le Corbusier, in the 1960s and 1970s, Xenakis realized a series of automated audiovisual spectacles, called “Polytopes.” They featured strobe lights, laser beams, and electro-acoustic music, and were installed in existing buildings or archaeo-logical sites.8 In the Polytopes, Xenakis transferred his experience in musical composition and sound diffusion to the realm of vision. In his view, this seemed quite a logical step as musical notions such as continuity, intensity, and repetition keep their meaning when transposed to the domain of light and color. Xenakis’s idea was to occupy a given site with clouds of light. To this end, the first Polytope, presented at the 1967 World Fair in Montreal, featured a set of steel cables suspended in the central void of the French Pavilion. Arranged as the regulating lines of hyperbolic paraboloids, they carried 1,200 strobe lights in different colors. Every hour, for six minutes and changing with a rhythm of twenty-five times per sec-ond, voluminous clouds, spirals, and complicated curves in different colors gradually emerged from the apparent chaos of white light pat-terns, suggesting a continuous movement to the eye. The Polytope’s soundtrack was broadcast from four groups of loudspeakers placed symmetrically at the bottom of the central void and consisted of strings playing vast glissandi whose continuous and uniform aspect notably contrasted with the pointillist lighting effects. Thus, rather than using light, sound, and movement as carriers of content like in the Poème Electronique, Xenakis created a multidimensional work based on their inherent sensory qualities.

Despite the abstract character of the Polytopes, their aesthetics are rooted in deeply personal and sensorial experiences lived earlier by Xenakis. Looking back on his activities as a resistance fighter in the streets of Athens during the Greek revolution from 1941 until 1947, he recalled, for instance, finding a paradoxical beauty in the cruelty and devastation caused by the bombings above the Greek capital:

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Whether you like it or not, simultaneous visual and auditory events that are both specific and extraordinary, without any apparent connections, enter one’s brain when experienced as fighting in the street … I witnessed bombings – those were extraordinary … Not to mention the army searchlights which created a stunning ballet in the sky … All that created a fantastic spectacle, one that can never be seen in times of peace. (Xenakis 2008: 198).

Further, the Polytopes also reflect Xenakis’s lifelong fascination with astrophysics and natural sciences. He strongly believed that one day, through scientific progress and space technology, it would become possible for artists to work on a cosmic scale. He proposed, for instance, to create artificial Northern Lights or to illuminate the dark side of the Moon. Attracted by the idea of “repeating at a lower level what Nature carries out on a grand scale” (Varga 1996: 112), for Xenakis the Polytopes were, despite their scale and cost, in fact, only but a modest crystallization of a far bolder idea.9

The cosmic dimension of the Polytopes became obvious in 1972, when Xenakis filled the ancient Roman baths of the Cluny Museum in Paris with rumbling sounds and stroboscopic light effects on the occasion of the first Festival d’Automne (Figure 4). In addition to flashlights, this Polytope included three laser beams. These beams were still very much a novelty at the time, associated with futuristic space wars rather than domestic apparatus such as CD-players. Xenakis himself had discovered their artistic potential at EXPO 70, where his piece Hibiki Hana Ma was accompanied by a visual display designed by the Japanese artist and laser art pioneer Keiji Usami. The architectural dimension of this new Polytope also became more important. In order to protect the fragile brickwork of the ancient Roman baths, Xenakis had to design a light metal structure folded alongside the vaults and walls. Covered with 600 strobe lights and 400 mirrors to refract the laser beams, it resembled his acoustic grid at EXPO 70, with the difference that it allowed to draw with light instead of sound. Consisting of slowly evolving, low timbres punctu-ated with seemingly random high-pitched pulses, the Polytope’s static and saturated soundscape formed a counterpoint to the more capricious light events. This Polytope captured a particular public interest; running for almost two years, it took more than 100,000 visitors on a cosmic voyage in the heart of Paris.

It becomes clear now why Xenakis coined the Greek neologism “Polytope” for these complex and automated audiovisual spectacles. In the first place, the term points at the specific strategies deployed here for drawing attention. Indeed, as the prefix poly (many, numer-ous) suggests, the central concept is multiplicity: several layers of light and sound are superimposed without apparent conjunction or systematic differentiation. The sonic events, the clouds of light, and the three-dimensional laser constellations each evolve independently

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according to their own rhythm. Xenakis’s goal is not to find or create correspondences or similarities in and between the different ways of artistic expression – in his polytopic conception of space this would even be a contradiction. Stating that “Man is intelligent enough to follow two discourses at once,” Xenakis aims at integrating as much difference and variation as possible in his installations.10 It is up to the audience to make a synthesis of the spectacle’s different strata.

In the second place, the neologism “Polytope” indicates that we are not only dealing with “multimedia” but with an art that fully em-braces the notions of space and location. This aspect reveals a fun-damental difference between Le Corbusier and Stockhausen on the one hand and Xenakis on the other, regarding their understanding of

Figure 4 Iannis Xenakis, Polytope de Cluny, 1972. View of the installation (detail). Photo: Cees & Hond.

Source: Olivier Revault d’Allones, Les Polytopes, Paris: Balland, 1975.

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architecture, space, and media. Where the interiors of the pavilions discussed above want to invoke the illusion of an infinite cosmos, the Polytopes create temporary modulations of an existing site. To this end, each new installation shows a tendency towards greater control over the performance space and stronger immersive impact. In Montreal, for the duration of the spectacle, the central void became the pavilion’s center of gravity, while in Cluny the heavy masonry walls dissolved in white clouds of cosmic dust. As the technical infrastructure and the spatial enclosure of the site now overlapped, the public no longer surrounded the spectacle (as in Montreal), but became entirely part of it. Nevertheless, for Xenakis, this spatial dis-tribution of sound and light events did not constitute a goal in itself. It was a means to articulate the idea of visual and sonic differentiation not only temporally but also spatially.

In the last spectacle of the series, the Diatope (Figure 5), realized for the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou in 1978, Xenakis went even further.11 The juxtaposition of different sensorial subspaces made way here for a more homogenous amalgamation of spatial geometry, acoustic effects and visual display. Moreover, the tech-nical interface became an architectural element in its own right. Consisting of an external, semi-transparent canvas of red fabric and an inner metal net carrying the light sources (1,600 light flashes, 4 laser beams, and 400 refracting mirrors), it delimited the area of

Figure 5 Cover of the program booklet of the Diatope. Sketch by Xenakis, 1978.

© Xenakis Archives, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

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performance. Rather than hiding the light and sound apparatus to mystify the audience, in the Diatope, the technical interface was the spectacle.

Architecture as InterfaceFrom the examples discussed above, we can conclude the follow-ing: when multimedia takes possession of space, it is as if the role of architecture is reduced to that of shelter (blacking out the surround-ings), sign (to attract the audience), or dematerialized infrastructure (as support for the technical equipment). The organization of the interior space is left to all sorts of media, whose aim it is to produce an impression of infinity, as if the interior space had no “outside.” In other words, the perception of the interior space is disassociated from its actual form. Thus, electronic media challenge the classical Vitruvian categories that have structured the architectural discourse since Antiquity. Or, to put it in more dramatic terms:

While most architects still tried to ignore the electronic media and their arts, these had already begun to conquer and cannibalize architecture from within … Information technologies act like viruses in the bodies of architecture with deeper results than any other technical innovation so far. (Thomsen 1994: 81)

Indeed, electronic media seem to make ephemeral what once seemed solid and oblige us to rethink our classical concepts of space and time. This raises two questions: is it possible to concep-tualize technologically mediated space as an extension of physical space (and not as a mere substitute), and what role can architecture play in the creation of such “augmented reality”?

Here, Xenakis’s Diatope might bring a new element to the dis-cussion. While the architecture of the pavilions discussed above principally serves to delimit an interior space and shut out the sur-roundings, the Diatope’s textile covering plays a different role. Given the poor acoustic and thermal isolation and the transparency of the textile shell, light, sound, and cold enter from the outside. During the 46 minutes of the spectacle, information from outside “leaks” into the pavilion. One is thus constantly aware of what is going on outside. Hence the change in prefix in this Polytope’s name: dia signifies “through.” This is also expressed by Xenakis in his sketch of the pavilion: the Diatope is open to the waves that circulate in its environ-ment; its double-layered membrane acts as a filter that delimits an intensified zone within a continuous, variable, and borderless space, composed of several dynamic layers that each develop according to their own rhythm. Thus, the Diatope’s architecture establishes a dynamic equilibrium between the “artificial” space inside and the “real” space outside. In this manner, Xenakis suggests that in a context where our environment is no longer defined by the static elements of architectural grammar, but rather by the perceptive

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laws of dynamic image–text–sound systems, architecture’s primary role becomes that of synchronizing its different strata (Kuhnert and Schnell 2000: 28). Thus, paraphrasing Paul Virilio, we could say that in an era of mediated presence and digitally controlled surroundings, the Polytopes call for a new role for the architect as “the artist of the interface between spaces,” or, in other words, “a man who can change levels of reality” (Thomsen 1994: 81).

Notes1. On the typology of the exhibition pavilion and its relation to new

media, see Schulte (2000).2. On the application of cybernetics in artistic and architectural

environments, see Popper (1997). For a synthetic overview of the different stages in Kinetic Art, see Sterken (2002).

3. On the Philips Pavilion and the Poème Electronique, see Treib (1996) and Sterken (2006).

4. A detailed account of the German participation in the 1970 Osaka World Fair can be found in Sigel (1999).

5. Translation by the author. Original text: “Er müssen neue, den Anforderungen der Raum-Musik angemessene Hörsäle gebaut werden. Meiner Vorstellungen entspräche ein kugelförmiger Raum, der rundum mit Lautsprechern versehen ist. In der Mitte dieses Kugelraumes hinge eine schalldurchlässige, durchsich-tige Plattform für die Hörer. Sie könnten van oben, unten, und von allen Himmelsrichtungen eine für solche genormten Räume komponierte Musik hören.”

6. For a critical account of the 1970 Osaka World Fair, see Van Wesemael (2001: 563–650).

7. On E.A.T., see Lacerte (n.d.).8. For a general situation of the Polytopes within the body of

Xenakis’s work, see Sterken (2001). See also Revault d’Allones (1975) for a more pictorial account, and Oswalt (1991) for an analysis from a more architectural theoretical point of view.

9. Apart from the “indoor” Polytopes discussed here, Xenakis also conceived several spectacles in an outdoor setting, two of which were effectively realized in highly significant historic sites: one in 1971, in the ruins of Persepolis, as part of the controversial celebrations of the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, and another in Mycenae in 1978, celebrating Greece’s reclaimed freedom after the fall of the dictators. In both cases, Xenakis occupied the millennial site with an extremely varied array of means: laser beams, army searchlights, electro-acoustic music, huge camp fires, children’s choirs bearing torches, and even animals. These strange confrontations between technology and archaism followed a precise scenario, established by Xenakis and guided by him during the show, with the help of only a simple walkie-talkie.

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10. Translated by the author. Original quotation: “L’homme est assez intelligent pour suivre deux coursiers à la fois” (Bosseur 1996: 45).

11. On the Diatope, see Solomos and Raczinski (1999).

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Oswalt, P. 1991. “Polytope von Iannis Xenakis.” Arch+ 107 (March): 50–4.

Pawley, M. 1970. “Architecture versus the Movies.” Architectural Design (June): 289–91.

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Schulte, K. 2000. Temporary Buildings: The Trade-fair Stand as a Conceptual Challenge. Hamburg: Gingko Press.

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