Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary
The Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street, New York
Through April 8
As an undergraduate student, I studied in a self-designed program of engineering and art history. This was my way of crafting my own course of study to follow in the footsteps of the people I most admired in architecture; one of them was Iannis Xenakis. My undergraduate thesis compared the works of Xenakis, Le Corbusier, and the 17th-century monk, architect, and mathematician Guarno Guarini.
Though best-known as a composer, Xenakis trained as a civil engineer in Greece and travelled to Paris in 1947, where he ended up working in the studio of Le Corbusier. His most famous building design was the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. In this work, Xenakis was able to fully explore the mathematics of hyperbolic paraboloids, and how music could be applied to built form.
Visiting the Drawing Center’s show, curated by Sharon Kanach and Carey Lovelace, one is able to grasp the extent of Xenakis’ vision. This is a man who studied complex mathematical forms, engineered some of Le Corbusier’s most famous buildings, and designed and oversaw the construction of the Philips Pavilion, one of the seminal works of modern architecture. The Drawing Center’s installation captures and showcases Xenakis’ genius. He was a world-class engineer, mathematician, architect, and composer—and excelled in all four. The installation intelligently shows us the effect of all this cross-pollination. It displays several of Xenakis’ sketches, allowing us to see into his thinking process.
Xenakis moved deftly between disciplines and increased his command and control by using each to critique the other. For any serious student of architecture who enjoys music, this show is a fantastic reinforcement of the idea that “architecture is frozen music.” The curators walk us through the intense yet beautiful working process of a brilliant mind dedicated to showing exactly how music is both architecture and mathematics—and how they are all, ultimately, about space.
The image that stuck out for me was a photograph of Xenakis’ Polytope (literally, many sites) designed and installed at the 1967 Montréal Expo. The piece is amazingly fresh, and looks as if it could have been installed today. The project is a series of steel cables that create intersecting virtual conoids and hyperboloids. In effect, it is a three-dimensional drawing, with 1,200 lights along the cables that flashed whenever Xenakis’ accompanying piece for orchestra was played through speakers in the space.
Be sure to sit in one of the exhibition’s listening booths to hear Xenakis’ music. His compositions are an important aspect of the overall experience of this intelligently curated and conceived show, which is the first and only show of the composer-engineer’s work mounted in the United States. I recommend purchasing the Drawing Center’s catalogue for the show, as well as the book Music and Architecture (Pendragon Press, 2008), a collection of Xenakis’ texts edited by show co-curator Kanach, for students of architecture, sound, and mathematics who wish they could take the show home with them.
Of Xenakis’ musical works, I recommend Iannis Xenakis: Chamber Music, 1955–90, by the Arditti Quartet. The music is fantastic, and the liner notes provide amazing fodder for architects who enjoy playing with—and hearing—set theory, game theory, and probability theory. For me, it’s all very inspiring stuff, as much so today as it was when I left undergraduate school back in the ’70s.
A version of this article appeared in AN 02_02.03.2010.
This is the second piece of a new weekly feature. Every Friday, AN posts a review from a recent issue. Read them all here.