ABSTRACT
This chapter follows the use Xenakis makes of three ways of allowing incident light to play on the interior walls: waving glass, fenestrations, and “light canons.”
The discussion of ILLUMINATION is intriguing in ways similar to the earlier explorations in Chapter 3 regarding foundations. Here again, Xenakis displays a striking interest not only in the function of lighting and the visual dimensionality of providing for it (the appearance of waving glass arrays or fenestrations), but also to its potentially performative impact.
Particularly in desert contexts, the intensity of the light is a year-around given. The bounded surface area of figures incised into otherwise blank walls allows the shaping they provide to incident light to project related figurations that move across the inner surfaces of the structure as the day progresses. The “light canon” concept originated with La Tourette and allowed shafts of natural light to penetrate deep into that structure. The discussion in this chapter moves from a primal instance in the walls of a stone hut to the complex and disconcerting pictographic friezes proposed in Xenakis’s final comprehensive revision of 1991.
