arkitrave :: log

Shaun, among others, tells me I should:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

In December Xenakis and his comrades began to see results they had been fighting for in social measures: ELAS published the ‘Code of Self-Government’ to implant democratic principles in the countryside; local government, law courts, education for peasants and public utilities were organized.

from Xenakis, a biography of Iannis Xenakis by Nouritza Matossian.

I’m doing a paper on the Philips Pavilion, a collaboration between Le Corbusier, Xenakis (as architect, not musician) and Edgard Varese. It was a sound pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, designed to be an ‘electronic poem’, as Corbu put it. Rather than exhibiting products from the Philips corporation, as is customary in exhibitions, the pavilion was designed to be an experience using the technology of the company. Varese composed an esoteric piece of modern music, there was a lightshow with projections everywhere inside the structure, and the building was a series of concrete hyperbolic paraboloids. The paper is due tomorrow morning.