Composing with concrete BERNARD HULSMAN

e Corbusier called the strip windows of his At the exhibition in Amsterdam is also Xenakis' monastery La Tourette, near Lyon, musical design for a Cosmic City. In this he set himself against windows. And indeed, with their rhythmic the town planning ideas of his previous employer. [In pattern and concrete frames, the his view,] cities should not be composed of separate, La Tourette windows seem to be representations of scattered parts for living, working and leisure, as Le music. They are also designed by Iannis Xenakis (1922- Corbusier suggested, but areas for different activities 2001), the Greek composer, who, from 1947 to 1959 should, instead, be brought together. Xenakis' Cosmic worked in Paris at the desk of Le Corbusier. City consists of huge, jagged buildings for thousands The idea of glass between two frames set in of residents who could manage their daily lives concrete was Le Corbusier’s. He had seen these without going out. windows in India, where he went regularly for the Architecture also played a role in the construction of Chandigarh, a city he designed in the performance of Xenakis' music. Or rather: in the fifties. But it was Xenakis who applied the Modulor sixties and seventies Xenakis had a different different measurement system of Le Corbusier, to the windows Gesamtkunstwerke, [consisting] of electronic music of the monastery. For weeks he sat in the daytime and computer controlled spatial, moving studio of Le Corbusier in Paris to compose [the compositions that used laser beams. The pieces were building of] concrete and glass - during the evenings often performed in existing buildings, as in the case of he worked on his musical compositions, such as the Polytope in the Roman Baths of Cluny. But for Achorripsis. He gave the windows rhythms, not only Diatope in 1978, Xenakis designed a portable tent of horizontally, but also vertically, by endlessly varying plastic, closely related to the Philips Pavilion. the size of the glass. The culmination of Xenakis' architectural works, Xenakis came to Paris in 1947. Although he was a the Cité de la Musique in was in Paris. Together with graduate engineer, he wrote that he had never heard two other architects, he designed a gigantic tent of of Le Corbusier, [one of the major] architects of the concrete, steel and glass. Although in 1984 his design twentieth century. He was just in need of work, and Le reached the finals and was presented to the French Corbusier sought someone who knew about concrete president, Mitterrand chose - for political rather than and was good at arithmetic. aesthetic reasons, so Xenakis believed - the design of First, Xenakis worked in Le Corbusier’s office on the Christian Portzamparc. Embittered Xenakis technical calculations of concrete structures, such as decided that he would never design a public building the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles in 1952. In 1960 again. He kept his word and did only one renovation was completed the monastery La Tourette, one of the and [designed] two [other] houses. His last design was first buildings by Le Corbusier which Xenakis not only his own house in Corsica in 1996, a cylinder with a big, worked on as a manufacturer but also as an architect. round 'musical window.' It was the beginning of a small body of completed and Exhibition: Iannis Xenakis: unexecuted architectural designs, which can now be Composer, Architect, Visionary. seen at the exhibition Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Muziekgebouw to "tide, Amsterdam. Architect, Visionary in Amsterdam’s Music Building. 4 t / m 24 June By far the most famous design by Xenakis, the Philips Pavilion, was created for the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The fight with Le Corbusier regarding the authorship of this structure came in 1959, and he finally resigned. A year later, Le Corbusier asked him to come back, but Xenakis did not want to: he preferred to devote himself to music. This did not mean that he wholly abandoned architecture, however. For a friend, he made a cottage on one of the Cyclades in Greece. It consists of a pair of more or less round pavilions with curious hook- shaped slots and windows through which light mysteriously falls inward.