Philips Pavilion

The Philips Pavilion was a World's Fair pavilion designed for Expo '58 in Brussels by the office of Le Corbusier. The principal designer was Iannis Xenakis, who was also an experimental composer.

Commissioned by Philips, an electronics company based in the Netherlands, the pavilion was designed to house a multimedia spectacle that celebrated postwar technological progress. Le Corbusier's vision was a Poème électronique ("electronic poem") consisting of an innovative musical score by Edgard Varèse and a photomontage combining images of primitive art with scenes of nuclear war and urban rebirth. The plan of the pavilion was conceived as a "stomach": visitors would enter through curved corridor, stand in a central chamber for the eight-minute presentation, and exit out the other side.

Because the interior of the Philips Pavilion was experienced in the dark, its architectural form is principally understood from the exterior. The pavilion is a cluster of nine hyperbolic paraboloids, composed asymmetrically to create dynamically-angled contours and constructed out of prestressed concrete. Steel tension cables on the exterior give the pavilion its signature reticulated appearance. According to Xenakis, the idea of using curved surfaces composed of straight lines was inspired by his composition Metastasis, premiered in 1955.

References

* Marc Treib, "Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse," Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996
* James Harley, "Xenakis: his life in music," London: Taylor & Francis Books, 2004
* "The Architectural Design of Le Corbusier and Xenakis" in "Philips Technical Review" v. 20 n. 1 (1958/1959)