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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Events, NYC | Iannis Xenakis, the Philips Pavillion, Poeme Electronique



On January 15 the mythical Judson Memorial Church ---venue of numerous avantguarde performances in the past five decades--- hosted a virtual recreation of the Philips Pavilion.
The original pavilion was erected in 1958 in the grounds of the Brussels World Fair; the building was commissioned to Le Corbusier, but designed by Iannis Xenakis, who was at that time working for Le Corbusier architectural office. The pavilion was shaped as the geometric quadric surface hyperbolic paraboloid; it illustrates Xenakis passion for geometry informed design, much ahead of his time, as the multimedia projection on the pavilion walls. Two musical compositions were played by four hundred speakers: Xenakis "Concrete PH" and Edgar Varese's "Poeme Electronic".

The recent event at the Judson Church consisted of a presentation of an interactive animation of a computer generated model realized by Vincenzo Lombardi, from the University of Turin.