I’ve just returned from the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Cincinnati, where I participated in a panel on the 1958 World’s Fair. My paper on the Philips Pavilion, which I am continuing to work on in preparation for publication, argues for a reading of the pavilion based not on the iconography of technological progress that was typical of Expo ‘58 but rather on an oscillation between objective conception and subjective experience achieved through a complex geometrical form which its chief designer, Iannis Xenakis, borrowed from his contemporaneous musical compositions. Here’s an excerpt:
In one sense, Metastasis and the Philips Pavilion seem to disrupt the spatiotemporal norms of their respective formal languages in opposite ways: in a curious reversal, the music is understood as a static acoustical “sculpture” while the architecture of the pavilion implicates the duration of movement. But the experience of both works consists of a journey through a topography whose complex curved forms are objectively static but seem to shift and regenerate with the movement of the individual subject. Both reject linear progress towards an aesthetic object in favor of a subjective experience “generated” by, but not fully comprehending, an objective form….
In the fifties, following the collapse of Enlightenment historical narratives of progress, there was a need for new models allowing the simultaneous temporal realities of the world’s diverse peoples to be conceived as a multiplicity without being subsumed in a linear schema. Xenakis’ structuring of spatial and temporal relations in the Philips Pavilion amounts to one such alternative model of historical time … because it resists formal comprehension through movement and spatial progression. Designed at a moment when many architects still sought to recuperate modernism for postwar Europe, it is a unique representative of the path not taken in the ensuing decades. Its energy comes not from the signifying operation of an icon, but from the subjective sparks of an ontological friction between conception and experience the aesthetic signature of an alternative, non-”progressive” modernity.