“New Media” and the Obsolescence of Architecture: Exhibition Pavilions by Le Corbusier, Xenakis, Stockhausen, and E.A.T.

ABSTRACT

Exhibition pavilions have always offered a fertile ground for architectural experimentation. Aimed at a public eager to be bewildered and amply financed by nations or large enterprises competing for attention, the temporary nature of such pavilions invites for daring structural solutions, experimental building materials, and innovative spatial concepts. In the second half of the twentieth century, the role of these structures has shifted from a space of instruction and mass education to a multisensory environment, enhancing mental absorption and emotional involvement, the goal being to make the underlying commercial, political or artistic message pass more easily–sometimes even unnoticed. This article discusses a couple of cases that are illustrative for this evolution, namely the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 and the German and Pepsi Pavilions at EXPO 70 in Osaka. What links these projects is a tendency towards dematerialization, as if the physical aspect of building forms an obstacle in the realization of a fully immersive environment. In this view, media technologies appear as a-tectonic avatars, opposing “real” and “artificial” space as mutually exclusive. However, the case of the Diatope, a multimedia pavilion realized by Iannis Xenakis in 1978, illustrates that, instead of maintaining this rupture, architecture can also act as an interface between real and artificial spaces, thus enabling their simultaneous existence.

KEYWORDS:

• World Fairs
• exhibition pavilions
• ephemeral architecture
• new media
• Iannis Xenakis
• Polytopes
• Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.)
• Stockhausen