DESIGN PROBZ

CBS News:

Taken mostly by anonymous municipal workers, some of the images have appeared in publications but most were accessible only by visiting the archive offices in lower Manhattan over the past few years.

Pyongyang Architecture Festival, 2011

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is best known as an early composer of electronic music.  His treatise Formalized Music (1971) applies stochastic processes to music, which he realizes through computer-generated scores, elaborately drawn schematics, and rigorous mathematical calculations. Less known, but highly relevant to the development of his musical theories, are Xenakis' contributions to architecture as a student of Le Corbusier.

Xenakis emphasized that both architecture and music can be perceived from any direction, but while this notion is fundamental to architectural practice and criticism, music has largely remained limited by conventions of unidirectional orientations in space. Several of Xenakis' compositions involved experimental placements of musicians in relation to the audience, such as circular formations with the audience located in the center (see Terretektorh, 1965; Nomos Gamma, 1967; Persephassa 1969).

The following image shows the relationship between diagrams of the coda to Xenakis' piece Metastasis, 1955, and the Philips Pavillion that he designed for Expo 58, the Brussels World Fair of 1958.

This video uses a marquee to follow the final glissandi illustrated in the score: