Iannis Xenakis’s Polytopes

Philipp Oswalt

Iannis Xenakis—composer, engineer, and architect—worked in Le Corbusier's office from 1947

until 1960. In the following decades, based on his musical compositions and the architectural

ideas which he developed together with Le Corbusier, Xenakis created several spatial

compositions of light and sound which he collectively called "polytopes." This term is made up

of the ancient Greek words poly ('many') and topos ('place'). Thus the title is to be understood as a

designation for the staging of space in which spaces of light, color, and architecture overlap in

one site.

Light Space

The Convent of La Tourette (1953–60) is not only the first project by Le Corbusier in which

Xenakis's involvement was considerable. It also represents the synthesis and climax of Le

Corbusier's previous works in the control of light and space.

In 1922, Le Corbusier had already stated that "light and shadow reveal form," (Textes et

dessin pour Ronchamp, Le Corbusier, Swiss 1965) thus appropriating for light a function in the

service of sculptural volumes. With the chapel at Ronchamp (1950–1953), this relationship began

to turn around: the walls serve to modulate light. As Le Corbusier put it, the architectonic "space

becomes intangible." (Das Buch über Ronchamp, Le Corbusier/ Jean Petit, Stuttgart 1957, p. 46)

The impression of space is created in a composition of light, half-shadow, and shadow.

 Iannis Xenakis brought this spatial concept to completion in the design of the side chapel

for La Tourette: he created a dark, intangible space. With so-called "light cannons" he cut funnels

of light from this undefined darkness. The space is no longer defined by the walls surrounding it.

The perceived space is immaterial, and the immaterial spatial qualities take on a concrete quality

themselves.

In designing the visual space of La Tourette, Le Corbusier and Xenakis not only worked

with light volume, they also discovered the projection as a subject of architecture, creating

projection spaces.

Projection Space

The church space which Xenakis and Le Corbusier designed together is a sort of camera obscura:

the room is dark. A small square opening in the ceiling projects the image of the sun on the floor.

The movement of the sun is represented by this wandering spot of light in the interior. Yet that is

not all. The exterior walls of the lower floors of the monastery were designed by Xenakis as

"musical glass walls." Also called "ondulatoires," they are composed of vertical strips of concrete

and strips of glass of different widths. The constantly changing rhythm of open and closed is

projected by the sunlight onto the floor. The floor becomes a projection screen. The walls fade in

our perception. The projection of the rhythmical composition of light and shadow structures the

space. With the movement of the sun, the picture changes.

While these projections of natural light are still reminiscent of the screens in Gothic

cathedrals, artificial lighting and film projectors are employed in the Philips Pavilion (1958). In

this second collaboration between Le Corbusier and Xenakis, the immaterial spatial qualities

become the main subject of the entire design, as Le Corbusier himself states: "I am not building
the Philips Pavilion, but an electronic poem. Everything will take place in the interior—sound,

light, color, and rhythm. Scaffolding will form the exterior of the pavilion." (Jean Petit: Le

Poème Electronique Le Corbusier, Paris, Editions de Minuit 1958)

Slide projectors with movable colored disks project changing spots of light onto the walls.

Hundreds of colored fluorescent tubes and lamps simulate the course of the day—dawn, sunset,

stars, and lightning. Projections of photographic images create spaces of illusion. The moving

images of the four film projectors are dispersed in the space with the help of mirrors. The

simultaneous projection of numerous motifs increases the effectiveness of the illusion. Due to the

curvature of the projection surface, the projection becomes three-dimensional. The curvature

makes portions of the image appear blurred and creates depth. This produces a three-dimensional

space of illusion.

After his collaboration with Le Corbusier, Xenakis continued to develop the spatial

concept of the Philips Pavilion with the polytopes he conceived on his own. In these spatial

stagings, which he created between 1966–78, Xenakis abandoned the projection of figural,

photographic images in favor of abstract compositions of light. He dissolved the projection

screen into innumerable dots of light, like a television. This "light image" is composed of

thousands of incandescent lights which—mounted on a grid—surround the viewer on all sides.

Moving, abstract patterns of waves, lightning, and spirals fill the space. There is also a

three-dimensional projection—a light sculpture of laser beams whose spatial configuration is

constantly altered by the movement of hundreds of mirrors and prisms.

As the abstract light compositions quickly change, the space is transformed at breakneck

speed. It becomes dynamic. Time becomes the fourth spatial dimension.

Sound Space

Sound, like light, changes over time and describes an immaterial space, a bodiless volume. In the

Philips Pavilion, over four hundred loudspeakers created numerous audio paths in which sound

could be carried through the space slowly or quickly, erratically or incessantly.

The dispersal of multiple sound-sources throughout the space does not just make it

possible for a tone to wander through the room. By projecting different sounds in different places

there is an overlapping of many sound spaces. Each listener perceives the music in a different

way according to his or her location at the time. The acoustical space is no longer homogeneous,

but divides itself into different spatial areas. Xenakis developed this concept of spatially

differentiated music for the first time in his orchestral piece Terretektorh (1965–66), written for

an orchestra which is spread out in space. In the following year he used it in his first

light-and-sound installation, the Polytope de Montréal. In this piece, four orchestras, represented

by loudspeakers, make music on the different floors of a multi-storied space.

In addition to this, Xenakis developed in the following years a concept of temporal

diversification of the musical space which is especially noticeable in his piece for percussion,

Psappha (1975): in the temporal space, slow-speed low tones overlap with medium- and

fast-speed high tones. Time is no longer absolute. Several time divisions and different tempi exist

side by side, so that time oscillates.

Xenakis used this same process in the spatial stagings of his polytopes. In Le

Diatope—designed for the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou (Paris) in 1978—the music is

almost static, moving in slow waves, while the flashes of light change at breakneck speed, in

fractions of a second, and the composition of laser beams in turn has its own tempo. Time is no
longer clear-cut. In the same way, the space is differentiated by projections of light and eleven

speakers spread throughout the site.

Architectonic Space

The question must be posed as to which architecture is appropriate for such stagings of space. If

it is not involved in the production, or if it only makes available the technical apparati, then it can

be a simple scaffolding, a "boîte à miracles," as Le Corbusier called it as he had realized for the

first time at the Paris Exhibition Pavilion of 1937.

With the Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier and Xenakis had taken a different approach.

Architecture became a modulator of space. The convex and concave curved surfaces form, as

Xenakis described it, "moveable, confining, receding, and turnable spaces." (Gravesano Review,

No. IX, 1957, p.44) For, in contrast to flat surfaces, curved or folded surfaces reflect the light

with changing intensity and modulate the space. The space becomes dynamic, of changing

intensity, concentrated and expanded. At the same time, its boundaries are removed. Walls and

ceiling flow into one another. There is no defined enclosure on the sides, no defined closure

above. The play of concave and convex curvature forms neither body nor space; it repels and

embraces at the same time. The spatial borders can no longer be perceived by the eye in an

unambiguous way; they disappear, as is also the case when the spaces are darkened. They appear

to become infinite.

As early as 1902, this effect was discovered for the stage by Mariano Fortny. He

developed the spherically curved dome horizon to mark three-dimensionally the back of the

stage, creating the impression of infinity. The canvas envelops the stage without defining the
space. Just like the round horizon which was created slightly later, the dome horizon creates an

abstract stage space which only becomes concrete through light.

Even though Le Corbusier and Xenakis were probably not familiar with these innovations

of the modern stage set, Le Corbusier had worked with similar means of staging space in his

designs for dioramas (1925, 1929, and 1937). In a diorama, the image which has been painted on

a transparent, curved canvas is made to appear by means of changeable lighting from the front

and back. The change of lighting simulates the cycle of the day and movement in space. In order

to be able to simulate wide, infinite exterior spaces, the borders of the closed interior are visually

removed by the curvature of the image walls. In this way, the spatial form of Le Corbusier's

pavilion for two dioramas at the Exposition de l'Esprit Nouveau of 1925 can be seen as a

precursor of the interiors of Ronchamp and of the Philips Pavilion, the borders of which had been

visually removed.

With Le Diatope, Xenakis went one step further: not only to the walls and ceilings

disappear, but so does the floor. Since it is made of reflective glass, the visitor seems to float

halfway up in the middle of the room. At the same time, the space of Diatope is opened toward

the outside. The external shell is a semi-transparent membrane of red plastic which filters and

modulates light, sound, and warmth. This rather passive filtering membrane is completed by an

inner, active membrane—a metal net to which light and sound sources are attached. It is a

building covering which does not delimit the space, but instead modulates it. While in the Philips

Pavilion the covering of the building served to neutralize the surroundings and to mark off the

limits of the interior and darken them, the double-layered membrane of Le Diatope is

semi-transparent and its spatial effect can be controlled. It is a premonition of today's glass

façades in which the permeability for each individual spatial parameter can be controlled

independently for heat, light, and sound. The covering of the building is no longer open or closed.
In-between tones or gray tones are possible. The space is no longer organized in masses and

cavities, but consists of energy fields of different masses which contract and stretch the space.

From the Staged Path to the Scenario

By superimposing light space, projection space, sound space, and architectonic space, a

multi-dimensional creation emerges, a diversified space of changing intensity and density. This

space no longer allows itself to be designed with the traditional means of architectonic

representation—floor plan, elevation, etc. Instead the architect has to devise other methods to be

able to design and describe space, methods which illustrate the transformation of space over time

and the cooperation of its different dimensions.

The first approach to this was developed by Le Corbusier in his design for a pavilion in

the Exposition International Paris in 1937. He designed the space as a path. The actual spatial

experience is set forth in a sketch by the architect which shows the procession of rooms in the

interior of the pavilion through which the visitor has to proceed. The individual staged spaces are

brought together with this design of the path, and the cooperation of the color spaces, projection

spaces, and image spaces is coordinated.

In the Philips Pavilion the problems are much more complex: the space itself changes, and

sound and film projections are added. Le Corbusier designed this "electronic poem" by drawing

scripts. These scenarios have vertical columns for the individual elements of the staging—colored

light, various projections of images, etc.—and horizontal stripes for the temporal division, each

indicating one second. The application of methods of film design makes clear the change in the

understanding of space: instead of rigid bodies there is a changing procession of immaterial

spaces.
 Xenakis designed his polytopes with the help of scores. The individual "voices" of the

score correspond to different spatial parameters. Xenakis divided time into steps of 1/25 seconds,

so that the turning on and off of the countless incandescent lights appears to the eye as continuous

movement. To check this cooperation, Xenakis did not just make sketches of the individual

spatial conditions, he also simulated the process with computers.

The coordination of the different elements of the production and its changes over time

also present problems for their realization. It is no longer possible to manually control the large

number of parameters. For this reason S. L. Bruyn, the engineer of the Philips’ automation

department, was asked to join the design team for the Philips Pavilion. Since modern computers

were not yet available at the time, the program of the scenario, in the form of control commands,

was transferred to a fifteen-track tape which made it possible for 180 switches to be made

simultaneously, put into action with the help of relays and servo-motors. Xenakis perfected this

control technique for Le Diatope. The 1200 light sources and the position of the 400 adjustable

mirrors and prisms could now be changed every 1/25 second.

The projects of Xenakis and Le Corbusier were early pioneer works for a control

technique which by now has been universally established in theater buildings. Theater sets are

now controlled by computer—especially lighting, /scenery, and stage machinery. The script for

all processes controlled by computer are stored on a floppy disk. The software is so flexible that

it is not only permits manual intervention during the performance, but also a different tempo, thus

allowing the play length to be extended or sped up by half an hour.

Open Staging
With his staging of space, Xenakis introduced a new concept of spatial design to modern

architecture. Space is no longer primarily defined by its containing walls (border surfaces), but by

its immaterial qualities of light, sound, and climate. These individual "dimensions of space" are

no longer synchronized, but are instead controlled independently. Light spaces, sound spaces,

color spaces, and projection spaces overlap which are different from and contradictory of one

another; thus, polytopes are created. The space is multidimensional, dynamic, and differentiated

into areas.

Although Xenakis set down the entire process of these spatial “spectacles” as closed

compositions, in his musical works he was nevertheless concerned, on occasion, with the design

of open structures. These compositions offer the perspective of open, interactive presentations

which use the possibilities of today's technology of "intelligent control" with flexible programs

and scenarios to allow for reaction to the environment and the behavior of the user and to permit

manual intervention. For such an open system Xenakis developed a concept of "elastic borders,”

which define the basic global conditions and within these conditions allows relatively wide

flexibility in execution. Xenakis unambiguously demarcated this process of the domination of

order over disorder from the concept of the total flexibility of musical expression and

architectonic design: "I do not believe in mobile systems, in an infinitely adjustable frame

structure. [...] That liberty, that neutrality must be handled in such a way that the diversity created

will be interesting. [...] Mobile architecture is nothing but garbage, because no one is able to

replace an architect of worth. [...] One must create a space which is strong, rigid, but which

nevertheless allows for a richness in arrangement, in the permutation of things and events."
Text translated by Tas Skorupa, Frist published in: Perspectives of New Music, Volume 25,

Summer 1987