Xenakis; The Architect

Plan of Xenakis's Amorgos Villa, via Amorgos Island Magazine.

If you follow Centre Iannis Xenakis on Facebook then you'll occasionally see posts from them with links to articles and features about 'Mr X's' architecture . Now of course we all know about the 1958 Phillips Pavillion and the sections of La Tourette Monastery he designed but there's more.

So if you're not already Facebook friends with Le Centre here's a couple of choice examples to be going along with.

Firstly the 'Amorgos Villa' designed between 1966 and 1977 is worth a look...

The vacational house on Amorgos he designed for his daughter and their husband and composer Francois-Bernard Mache. The building complex is located on the slope of a hill, overlooking the northern coast of the Tirokomos gulf, near Lefkes. The nearest settlement stands 200 m higher: it is Aghia Thekla, typical of the traditional Cycladic nineteenth century architecture.

Link to article..(includes video, which is nice).

Second, the (currently unrealised) house Xenakis designed for composer Roger Reynolds which was recently 3d printed as a model by LMNts.


The 'Reynolds house', link to article here.

Finally, this discussion from 1992 about 'computer music' between Reynolds, Paul Lansky, Xenakis and François-Bernard Mâche is probably worthy of your attention.

Quotation For Early July

Ferneyhough, Cage, and Reynolds (image courtesy of The Library of Congress.)

'What I have against the term "serial" is certainly partially dictated by the cliche which the word has become. In a sense, it means all and nothing. Music is in every case a more or less ordered object; whether the methods employed call for some form of pre-ordering or emerge only in the course of actual composition by so-called intuitive processes is scarcely very interesting.'

Brian Ferneyhough, Interview with Andrew Clements, taken from Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop. Available in the UK here, US here.

TinyURL link for this post.. http://tinyurl.com/kuks3s