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.

Events | NYC, Marrying Space with Time: Iannis Xenakis

New York will host several initiatives presenting the work of Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), celebrating the unique projects integrating space and time with images and sounds. The first event was the exhibition at the Drawing Center: "Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary will explore the fundamental role of drawing in the work of Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis . A leading figure in twentieth century music, Xenakis was trained as a civil engineer, then became an architect and developed revolutionary designs while working with Le Corbusier. Comprised of over 60 documents created between 1953 and 1984, this will be the first North American exhibition dedicated to Xenakis’s original works on paper. Included will be rarely-seen hand-rendered scores, architectural drawings, conceptual renderings, pre-compositional sketches, and graphic scores."