critical reflections
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critical reflections

Jacques Lemercier: Richelieu, Indre-et-Loire, 1631 engraving by Adam Perelle
Two Renaissance Towns: Two Seasons
2024

Granary, Grimentz, Valais, Switzerland, 16th century © Thomas Deckker 2023
Was Vitruvius Right?
2024

Aurelio Galfetti: Castelgrande, Bellinzona 1986 © Thomas Deckker 1996
Two Castles in Switzerland
2023

Nouveau plan de la ville de Paris 1828 © David Rumsey Maps
The Arcades Project
2023

Derelict Building, Kings Cross photo © Thomas Deckker 1988
Henri Labrouste and the construction of mills
2023

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Barrière St Martin, Paris (1785-1790) from Daniel Ramée: C.N. Ledoux, l'architecture (Paris 1847)
The Barrière de la Villette: the Sublime and the Beautiful
2022

Vauban: Neuf Brisach
Neuf Brisach: The Art of War
2022

Lucio Costa: Competition sketch for the Esplanada dos Minstérios, Brasília 1956
Did Lucio Costa know the Queen Mother?
2022

Vaux-le-Vicomte, Entrance Court, engraving by Israel Sylvestre
Vaux-le-Vicomte: Architecture and Astronomy
2022

Edzell Castle, Ground Floor Plan, from MacGibbon and Ross: The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland
Edzell Castle: Architecture and Treatises in Late 16th Century Scotland
2022

Capability Brown: Plan for Petworth Park from Dorothy Stroud: Capabilty Brown
The Upperton Monument, Petworth
2022

Isamu Noguchi: maquette for Riverside Drive c. 1961
Isamu Noguchi: useless architecture
2022

Jürgen Joedicke: Architecture since 1945: sources and directions (London: Pall Mall Press 1969)
Gottfried Böhm: master of concrete
2021

Thomas Deckker Architect: temporary truck stop, M20
Lorry Drivers are human, too
2021

Marc-Antoine Laugier: Essai sur l'Architecture
John Onians: ‘Architecture, Metaphor and the Mind’
2021

Sir John Vanbrugh: Seaton Delaval, Northumberland (1720–28) from Colen Campbell: Vitruvius Britannicus vol 3 (1725)
Seaton Delaval: the aesthetic castle
2021

Jules Hardouin-Mansart: Les Invalides, Paris (1676) Section showing the double dome
The Temple of Apollo at Stourhead: Architecture and Astronomy
2021

Eric de Maré: Fishermen’s huts, Hastings (1956) © Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection
Eric de Maré: The Extraordinary Aesthetics of the Ordinary
2021

Iannis Xenakis: score for Syrmos, for string orchestra (1959) © Editions Salabert E. A. S. 17516
Iannis Xenakis: Music, Architecture and War
2021

United Visual Artists: Etymologies 2017 © United Visual Artists
United Visual Artists
2020

Margaret Howell: Campaign 2020 © Margaret Howell
Margaret Howell
2020

Palaces of Darius and Xerxes, Persepolis, Iran
The Plans of Antiquity
2020

Cristobal Balenciaga: Skirt Suit, 1964 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Cristobal Balenciaga
2020

Mathias Goeritz: La serpiente de El Eco, 1953 © Sothebys
Mathias Goeritz: 'Emotional Architecture'
2020

Richard Serra: Weight and Measure 1992 © Richard Serra
Weight and Measure
2020

Tony Smith: Playround, 1962 © Tony Smith Estate
Tony Smith: Art and Experience
2020

Highway Construction © Caterpillar Archives
Landscape and Infrastructure
2020

Frank Gohlke: Lightning Flash, Lamesa, Texas © Frank Gohlke
Grain Elevators
2020

Iannis Xenakis: score for Syrmos, for string orchestra (1959) © Editions Salabert E. A. S. 17516
Iannis Xenakis: score for Syrmos, for string orchestra (1959)
© Editions Salabert E. A. S. 17516

Iannis Xenakis: Music, Architecture and War

Out of the self-indulgent and self-obsessed chaos of ‘serious’ music in the 1950s and 1960s the composer, engineer and architect Iannis Xenakis stands out as a rational and approachable composer. Xenakis was the founder and principal exponent of stochastic music: combinations of musical patterns that are generated by mathematical processes but whose outcomes cannot be predicted. Xenakis applied these theories in both music and architecture: strangely war was, in many ways, an epiphany in his intellectual development.

Xenakis was born in Romania of a Greek family, and studied engineering in Athens before WWII. During the war Xenakis was in the Greek resistance, and then and during the ensuing civil war encountered war at first hand. After fleeing Greece because of his communist sympathies, Xenakis settled in Paris and began work with Le Corbusier, initially as an engineer. He did not have, at this time, any idea of pursing a career in music or architecture.

Xenakis developed his theories of stochastic composition in Le Corbusier's studio. He recalled the chanting of crowds in demonstrations that he had witnessed in Athens and volleys of gunfire as examples of found stochastic sounds. Somewhere I heard him tell a story that, during one battle, he escaped from the German guns though a pass in the mountains, but paused and turned back in the pass, at great risk to his life, captivated by the patterns of tracer fire in the valley below. The story that it was here that he lost his eye is apocryphal, however. I like to think of this experience as his first epiphany.

Xenakis's meeting with Le Corbusier was a second epiphany; it made him realise his own desire for and capabilities in design and composition. His first role was as engineer, and then architect, for the Couvent de la Tourette, the Benedictine teaching monastery designed and built between 1953-60. He introduced what Le Corbusier called ondulatoires, a mullion wall based on stochastic patterns - a varying sequence of larger and smaller window panes - the major mullions in concrete, the minor transoms in steel - that defined the public spaces, in contrast to the fixed sizes of windows in the individual monks cells.
Le Corbusier: Couvent de la Tourette; passage showing ondulatoires, photo © Thomas Deckker 1996
Le Corbusier: Couvent de la Tourette; passage showing ondulatoires,
photo © Thomas Deckker 1996
The Couvent de la Tourette functioned for only 8 years, until it was abandoned by students monks following les événements of 1968. It has been possible since then to stay as a guest in the Couvent, which gives an opportunity to experience a Le Corbusiser building intimately.

Xenakis's second work for Le Corbusier was as project architect for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Expo in 1958. The pavilion was composed of a series of hyperbolic paraboloids creating fluid and shifting spaces, known as ruled surfaces. The pavilion contained a music and light show, Poème électronique, by Edgard Varèse, one of the originators of electric music. The design was apparently inspired by Xenakis’s composition Metastaseis, written in 1953–54. It's easy to see, in hindsight, the similarities between tracer fire and ruled surfaces.
Tracer Fire from ships supporting D-Day © IWM A 24427
Tracer Fire from ships supporting D-Day
photo © IWM A 24427
The Pavilion has been reconstructed virtually by Vincenzo Lombardo, Associate professor of Informatics at the Università degli Studi di Torino.

Stochastic music can be seen as a precursor of minimal music by composers such as Steve Reich and John Luther Adams, in two aspects in particular: a sound world made of percussive instruments and repeated patterns of sounds (such as Xenakis's Pleïades for 6 percussionists of 1978 and Reich's Six Marimbas of 1986) and the sense of a composition developing over time according to unfathomable rules.

Thoms Deckker proposed an exhibition of mathematical models as a Geddes Fellow at the University of Dundee.
Thomas Deckker
London 2020