Iannis Xenakis Arche-tekton

Abstract

Engineer, composer, architect, theorist, mathematician and even astronomer, in all these hypostases Iannis Xenakis seems to be an arche-tekton in the first meaning of this Greek word - the (old) one who knows the secrets of making a Construction, be it music, architectural object, structure and/or idea, living the “dream of life” in the context of the only arts that do not make mimesis, architecture and music. Without presenting in itself the projects in which he has left its mark, the paper explores “the symphony of the dream of life” as Iannis Xenakis crystallized it through the filter of architecture. The symbolic participation in this “concert” brings to light an Iannis Xenakis in a constant attempt to rewrite in modernity and avant-garde, in mathematical key, the architecture, the music and the philosophy belonging of its Greek cultural matrix, exploring the halo of meanings of the triad kosmos-polis-oikos and their re-semantizations as he understood it in his times. The “symphony of the dream of life” as crystallized by Iannis Xenakis may reveal us that the Road is an infinitely more important goal than the finality in the journeys of architecture, music, and man on the scale of history and at the scale of a human life, as is the story of any arche-tekton, semper inter mundos, constantly questioning the boundaries of the kosmos, in any of the “real” realities or virtual realities would he and it coexist.