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Roger Redgate, Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House. Roger Reynolds and Karen Reynolds, Music and Letters, Volume 106, Issue 1, February 2025, Pages 153–155, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcae105
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In 1984, almost as an aside, the composer/architect Iannis Xenakis suggested designing a house for his long-standing musician friends Roger and Karen Reynolds, having worked on a similar project for the French composer Françoise-Bernard Mâche. What subsequently unfolded was the design of the Reynolds Desert House, to be built in Southern California’s Anzo-Borrego desert, a project that forms the underlying thread throughout this book. The gradual development of the design, documented in detail here, forms a valuable insight into Xenakis’s creative thought processes in respect both to his music and his architecture, which are authoritatively aligned throughout. To date the house has yet to be realized due to excessive costs beyond what was initially predicted.
Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) was one of the most innovative and original composers of his generation. Resistant to the current trends of the day such as the serial music of the Darmstadt School, which he rejected as a dead end, his compositional processes were informed by his unique background as an engineer and architect involving mathematical approaches such as set-theory, stochastic processes, and game theory. It is well known that in 1947 he was appointed as assistant to the architect Le Corbusier (initially as an engineer), with whom he collaborated on numerous projects, the most famous perhaps being the monastery Sainte-Marie de La Tourette at Eveux, near Lyon (1953–61). Furthermore, many of Xenakis’s compositions were conceived for specific architectural environments such as the electronic work Concret PH (1958) for the Brussels Expo58 World Fair, Phillips Pavillion, and his sequence of Polytope works combining music, space, and light.
