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- Title
L'Utopia urbana negli anni Sessanta. Iannis Xenakis e la Città Cosmica.
- Authors
Giannantonio, Raffaele
- Abstract
Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 to a Greek family in Romania, but after his mother's death returned with his father to Athens, where he spent his youth. In 1946, he earned his degree in engineering, but his political activity during wartime forced him to emigrate to France, where he studied music and began to combine the discipline of music with architectural concepts. His first major projects and his first works of music also date to those years, when he used a computer for the first time. In 1948, he was hired as an engineer in Le Corbusier's studio, sensing the strong bond between music and architecture shared by the Swiss-French master himself, reflected in such works as the new city of Chandigarh or the La Tourette convent. In 1958, for the International Exposition in Brussels, Le Corbusier designed the Philips Pavillion. While Xenakis's contribution was predominant, it was only after bitter argument that the master agreed to recognise him as co-designer. In 1959, Le Corbusier decided to dismiss his entire team of collaborators, and Xenakis began working as an engineer for a construction company, though without renouncing his musical research and mathematical studies. In a text drafted in Berlin in January 1964, he applied the paradigm of hyperbolic paraboloids to the urban scale, through his proposal for a "Cosmic City for Five Million Inhabitants." This was a design conceived in the tradition of utopian urban planning, associated with the idea of the Megastructure, typical of the architecture and urban planning of the 1960s-70s. In formal terms, the Ville Cosmique, set on towers 3,000 to 5,000 metres tall, is the manifesto of volumetric architecture, conceived as an alternative to Le Corbusier's Le Poème de l'angle droit and to the entire paradigm of the straight line adopted by the Modern Movement.
- Subjects
XENAKIS, Iannis, 1922-2001; POLITICAL participation; MODERN movement (Architecture); 20TH century architecture; MATHEMATICS education
- Publication
Opus (2532-7747), 2021, Issue 5, p67
- ISSN
2532-7747
- Publication type
Article