“A serious plane crash”. Le Corbusier’s and Xenakis’ Philips Pavillon at Brussels Expo 58

Although not always considered the absolute masterpiece by Le Corbusier, even scornfully received by a journalistic critique such as “a serious plane crash”, the Philips Pavilion (1958) is instead a very complex and significant work, because of the pivotal role it plays, not only along Le Corbusier’s production, but also as the fulcrum of several relevant issues. The paper, basing upon archive sources, does not reconstruct the events of the pavilion, already published and faced by extensive bibliography, but it focuses on the disciplinary approach that the protagonists of this story gradually adopt in the phases of the project. Methodologically, the paper aims to place the existing documentation on the Pavilion, which tends to be focused on “howit is done”, in relation to its production and location context, that is, “what it represents”. Following some considerations on the general sense of Architecture, especially in the context of the Brussels Expo, many other issues arise from the confluence of different technical and artistic involved disciplines: graphics, technical-scientific disciplines, music and visual arts. The different role played by the protagonists can be strictly related to the consequent methodological solutions: a multidisciplinary approach, advanced by the client, Philips, reference industry in the advance of the post-warworld progress; the interdisciplinary approach, ofwhich the composer and architect IannisXenakis takes on the pivotal role; and finally, Le Corbusier’s transdisciplinary expansion, able to extend the mere functional data to much more open outcomes. Starting from a transversal reading of the Philips Pavilion, the paper tends to show how this work can be considered a forerunner of some design trends, current even nowadays, able to offer a prophetic vision of its role in the future of architecture.