Diakopès: historicizing continuum in the work of Iannis Xenakis Colloque International : De Xenakis à nos jours : Le Continuum et son développement en musique et en architecture 0 1

Résumé 0

A later work (1966), the holiday house Xenakis designed for a musician, his friend F.B. Mâche, the only work realized in Greece (Xenakis and...Plato’s homeland), does not seem to exhibit the Pavilion's formal continuity: arranged in five independent volumes, each one of which is perforated by a series of enigmatic, pretty narrow, openings, it does not even allow any sort of visual continuity. It is a house in diakopés (the Greek word for vacations, literary meaning interruptions, disruptions in continuity). Yet in the midst of these discontinuities, another kind of continuity emerges (a rather 'virtual' continuity, as Colin Rowe once described a certain state of transparency; Rowe & Slutzky, 1992): as one is approaching the house, there are various points from which the volumes seem as a uniform mass; the openings are suggesting a continuous filming of the landscape; each volume is a continuous, topological, transformation of the others and, on the archetypical form of each volume, there is to be found a synécheia (the Greek word for continuity, also meaning the coherence). In these archetypes is expressed a pre-hellenism, an archaism (Grumbach, 2001: 195-199) which is yet poorly studied in terms of Xenakis' oeuvre and the continnum. Based on a longstanding, original and still unpublished, archival research (2005 onwards), on witnesses from the persons involved and on thorough analyses on the mathematics of forms, this paper aims to investigate the continuities/discontinuities in the house of Amorgos, towards a historicization and reassessing of continuum.