Between the Visionary and the Archaic: Iannis Xenakis's Cosmic City

Almost parallel with his groundbreaking theoretical work Musiques formelles (Xenakis, 1963), the late composer and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) published “The Cosmic City” (Xenakis, 1965). In this urban proposal, 5 million inhabitants are housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3000 meters high and 50 meters wide. This form is inspired by Xenakis’s concept of “volumetric architecture”, as exemplified in the famous Philips Pavilion in 1958. Totally independent from climatic conditions and topography, the Cosmic City includes homes, places of work, schools and other facilities, while the distribution of the population in the urban fabric is organized according to the same statistical laws and stochastic principles that form the basis of Xenakis’s musical composition. Apart from situating the Cosmic City in Xenakis’s oeuvre, this paper will offer a critical reading and an investigation of its reception in the writings of Françoise Choay and Louis Marin. Both authors have conceptualised the notion of utopia and discussed Xenakis’s project in that context. For Choay, speaking from an anthropologic viewpoint, the Cosmic City is not only a perfect example of “Technotopia”, i.e., a sort of “reduced” utopia (Choay, 1965), but also, despite its visionary intentions, archaic and even irrelevant today (Choay, 2000). However, Marin places Xenakis’s project in a long literary and semiotic tradition. For him, the Cosmic City is a projection of More’s utopia of the New World into the Space Age (Marin, 1973). This paper considers the Cosmic City as a case study of avant-garde urbanism in France in the 1960s, and discusses the opposite appreciation by Choay and Marin as exemplary of its ambiguous reception.status: publishe

Travailler chez Le Corbusier ; le cas de Iannis Xenakis

status: publishe

Dios viaja en autobús: La campaña de camiones-capilla de la Organización de Socorro a Sacerdotes Orientales, 1950-1970

In the aftermath of World War II, twelve million Germans were forced to seek refuge elsewhere in their country. Their sort attracted the attention of Catholic charities such as the Eastern Priests Relief Organization, which provided material and spiritual assistance through a fleet of mobile chapels. This paper claims that this action was a genuinely ‘modern’ form of missionary work in the sense that both its method and message were a child of its time: dwelling on a culture of generalized mobility and mass communication, it spread the word of a triumphalist church claiming moral superiority over other world views, in particular communism. Moreover, the chapel trucks anticipated a fundamental paradigm shift in pastoral care, bringing the church to the people rather than the other way around.Como consecuencia de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, doce millones de alemanes se vieron obligados a buscar refugio en otro lugar en su país. Su suerte atrajo la atención de organizaciones caritativas católicas, como la Organización de Socorro a Sacerdotes Orientales, que les proporcionó ayuda material y espiritual a través de una flota de capillas móviles. En este artícu- lo se afirma que esta acción fue una forma genuinamente moderna del trabajo misionero, en el sentido de que tanto su méto- do como mensaje fueron hijos de su tiempo: viviendo en una cultura de la movilidad generalizada y de comunicación de masas, la palabra de una iglesia triunfalista se extendió reclamando su superioridad moral sobre otras visiones del mundo, en particu- lar sobre el comunismo. Por otra parte, los camiones capilla anticiparon un cambio de paradigma fundamental en el cuidado pastoral, llevando la iglesia a las personas en contra de lo que sucedía habitualmente

Architecture and the Ideology of Productivity: Four Public Housing Projects by Groupe Structures in Brussels (1950-65)

The field of public housing in Belgium formed the backdrop for two crucial phenomena in the shaping of the welfare state: first, the general compartmentalization along ideological lines of all aspects of society, including housing policy and town planning; second, the adaptation of the nation’s industry, and the building trade in particular, to postwar economic conditions. In the study of welfare state housing policies in Belgium, the latter aspect has so far been overlooked. This paper therefore proposes to look into a couple of public housing projects by Groupe Structures, the largest architectural firm in the country in the postwar period. As it will be argued, the stylistic and typological evolution of these schemes reveals the growing impact of a ‘productivist ideology’ on public housing in the 1950s. Paralyzed by the steeply rising building costs, the central buzzwords became standardization, industrialization and prefabrication. However, as the paper argues, the productivity doctrine failed to live up to its expectations as the sector’s turnover remained too marginal to put sufficient pressure on the construction industry

Carlotta Darò, Avant-gardes sonores en architecture

Dans la lutte contre la pollution sonore qu’il a menée depuis le début des années 1970, le compositeur canadien Robert Murray Schafer a souvent reproché aux architectes un manque chronique de sensibilité acoustique. Il est vrai que dans leur formation, les futurs architectes n’étudient le son que pour ce qui intéresse sa réduction – à la différence du passé, où, selon Robert Murray Schafer, on construisait avec l’oreille aussi bien qu’avec l’œil. Dans Avant-gardes sonores en architecture, Car..