
Art, and above all, music has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression.
Xenakis
I often listen to Xenakis’s music for percussion when I design and build. Its staccato insistence and limited tonal range are appropriate for construction, which develops by extended repetition without the contrasts of tonal color or the arc of drama. Yet it has its own surprises. The music is a distraction, a diversion from silence, where I can’t think what to do next, but also a call for patterns and yet at the same time a break away from standard patterning. It encourages me to open up, think of other things, to think beyond set ways of thinking, beyond what I think I know.

The percussive variations approach randomness without falling into chaos or noise, which themselves have their own possibilities. If nothing else, it pushes me to keep going without worrying about what I’m doing or where I’m headed. Listening provides a way to persist when there seems no direct course, nothing at all to do. I would like activities in the building to follow a similar course.
And a building can suggest sound, even music, even thought.

Xenakis designed the windows for Le Corbusier’s Tourette monastery, based on theories of mathematics and avant-garde music.
In order to avoid a monotonous repetition of standard elements in the immense façade of the building, Le Corbusier asked Xenakis to develop a principle for windows that he had caught sight of during the Chandigarh construction. . . . The resulting window configurations are very vivid. Xenakis developed the dimensions of the glass panels according to the blue and red series of the Modulor. Thanks to the resulting effect of dilatation and contraction, the façade seems to become a dynamic membrane. The principle finds its most virtuoso application in the Tourette monastery, a project that Xenakis worked on as of 1954, with the western façade conceived as a great architectural counterpoint.
From the Xenakis site, along with the drawing.

Photograph by Fernando Schapo, from dezeen.
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