The international Association Les Amis de Le Corbusier contacts Xenakis, through a former collaborator of the rue de Sèvres studio, José-Luis Sert, to propose the establishment of a program for a center for research and artistic practice dedicated to the visual arts. Located near Le Corbusier’s birthplace in Switzerland, La Chaux-de-Fonds, the center would serve […]
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For his friend René Schneider, one of the co-founders of the CEMAMU (Centre d’Études de Mathématique et Automatique Musicale) Xenakis restored a sheepfold in Corsica, comprising two ruined buildings, to which he added a small extension. We can fin a Xenakis’ touch, such as the “neumatic” openings of the house of Mâche in Amorgos and […]
The Cité de la Musique in the Parc de la Villette in Paris was part of the “great works” under the presidency of François Mitterrand. In 1983, Xenakis, invited as a member of the jury to participate in the architectural competition for this new cultural complex, turned down the invitation by presenting himself as an […]
Mâkhi Xenakis, the composer’s daughter and his husband David Klatzmann, wanted to extend their house located in Paris 13th arrondissement.Around a garden, Xenakis converted the facades on the ground floor and a studio by setting up “undulatory” glass pans. In the living room of the main part of the house, he also designed a circular […]
Through meetings over the decades at the Xenakis’s Paris apartments, he proposed to design a desert house for the couple composer Roger and artist Karen Reynolds. Appreciating Mâche’s home in Greece designed with the assistance of Greek architect Diamandopouls, they began discussions with him in 1984 to design a vacation home on a newly acquired lot in Borrego Springs, California. […]
The Xenakis family spends all their summer vacations in Corsica. A tent and a kayak are enough to discover the wild beauty of the island, which looks like the native Greece of architect. In the middle of the 1960s, they bought a ruined sheepfold that Xenakis furnished in a Spartan style, to stay there in […]
The matrix of works that combine sound and light stems from Xenakis’s deep longing for abstract art. It happened for the first time in Montreal, in 1967, when Robert Bordaz – curator of the French Pavilion at the World’s Fair – asked Xenakis to compose the music for a slide show on the theme of […]
The abstract art of Xenakis keeps on taking shape. In 1971 happened the fifth edition of the annual festival of Arts of Shiraz-Persepolis. Xenakis is invited to create the opening ceremony. From this invitation, an open-air Polytope will be born. The program: a sound and light show in the ruins of the ancient fortresses of […]
The next step in Xenakis’s sound and light shows was to automate the entire process. He took the opportunity given by Michel Guy during the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1971. The show took place in the Roman baths of the Cluny Museum in Paris, which, being classified as a historical monument, forbade any intervention […]
Being his first work created in Greece, in this high place of the ancient culture, The Polytope of Mycenae will keep a special place in the artist’s universe. Xenakis conceived it after having obtained amnesty, thanks to Constantin Karamanlis, in 1974. It is a return to his native country, after 27 years of exile. A […]