Yannis (Iannis) Xenakis
«La Tourette»

La Tourette is a Dominican monastery built by Le Corbusier from 1957 to 1960. It is situated on open ground in Eveux-sur-Arbresle close to Lyon, France. The complex includes a church, the monastery itself, 100 sleeping rooms, a room for work and another for recreation, study halls, a library and a refectory. The basic form is a rectangle formed by four wings. The architecture has a very rigid, stark appearance because of its shape—a place of solitude and prayer. The box-like shape of the church is interrupted by the introduction of light on both sides, which creates a special interplay of light and shade inside.
Xenakis, a multi-facetted artist who studied architecture in Athens, is mostly known as a musician and composer. However, he became an important figure in architectural history thanks to the major role he played in Le Corbusier’s workshop during the 1950s. Xenakis was not only the project director for the La Tourette monastery in Eveux (1955–59), he also designed the vertical windows of the main façade and the cloister.
Another high point of the collaboration between Xenakis and Le Corbusier was to be seen in the Philips Pavillon of the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958, which Xenakis designed as a tent-like music-space sculpture.

Pans de Verre Ondulatoires
The «Pans de Verre Ondulatoires» are located in the hallways of the La Tourette monastery complex. These glass surfaces were set directly in the concrete; the distances between them vary in accordance with rhythmical criteria determined by the avant garde composer Xenakis.