Philips Pavilion
Laeken, Belgium
No longer standing
Demolished or destroyed.
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The Philips Pavilion was a modernist structure built in Brussels for Expo 58, designed by Le Corbusier's office with substantial creative input from Iannis Xenakis, an experimental composer who managed much of the project while Le Corbusier focused on Chandigarh. Xenakis shaped the pavilion's distinctive form—a cluster of nine hyperbolic paraboloids clad in prefabricated concrete panels and cables, inspired by his own composition *Metastaseis*—around Le Corbusier's unusual floor plan, which resembled a stomach with two narrow end entrances. The structure housed an ambitious multimedia spectacle: Edgard Varèse's *Poème électronique* was spatially distributed across 325 loudspeakers embedded in asbestos-coated walls, creating a cavernous acoustic, while Xenakis's *Concret PH* accompanied visitors entering and exiting. Intended as temporary from conception, the pavilion was demolished in January 1959, though it later inspired other architectural works and was eventually recreated virtually.
Architect
Movement
- Built
- Type
- building
- Place
- Laeken, Belgium
This building on
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