50 Years Later: Poème électronique
Poème électronique, housed in the groundbreaking Philips Pavilion, was created for the 1958 World's Fair, held in Brussels. It was the collaborative effort of Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, and Edgard Varèse.
This video has been posted elsewhere, but it's great to get a glimpse of what this seminal work must have been like 50 summers ago. Now just imagine walking through Xenakis's futuristic stomach-shaped pavilion, with 425 speakers arranged throughout the walls, projections and stills, and a giant model of an atom hanging from the ceiling. Really the first immersive installation (that I know of). It was immensely popular - nearly 2 million people experienced it before it was dismantled at the end of the fair.
Le Corbusier conceived of the project and created the visuals, which included "color ambiences, a movie, three small images around the screen, a sun and a moon, clouds, lightning, stars, and two 3D objects hanging from the ceiling." (quote from documentary below). Xenakis designed the building (and created a musique concrète piece, Concret PH, which was played as a kind of interlude between performances of Poème électronique). Varèse, of course, created the electroacoustic score. Together the work depicts the history of humankind in eight minutes. It's worth noting that Le Corbusier and Varèse worked on the visuals and music independently.
The intro text, translated, is:
Philips have created an automatic apparatus that inaugurates a new art with unlimited possibilities, via a synthesis of light, colour, picture, speech and music displayed in space.
The "Electronic Poem," wrought by Le Corbusier, his collaborator Iannis Xenakis and the composer Edgard Varèse aims at showing how our increasingly mechanized civilization is striving towards a new harmony in the future.
The scenario consists of the following sequences:
- Genesis
- Spirit and Matter
- From Darkness to Dawn
- Man-made Gods
- How time moulds civilization
- Harmony
- To all mankind
Also worth checking out is this documentary about a virtual reality project that reconstructs the Pavilion:
