Space calculated in seconds

The pavilion designed by Le Corbusier for the Philips Company at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair showcased a spectacle that remains a landmark in multimedia production. The pavilion's nearly two million visitors encountered no typical display of consumer products; instead they witnessed a dazzling demonstration of cutting-edge technology in the service of the arts.

This totally automated bombardment of color, voice, sound, and images was broadcast within a space of warped concrete shells, orchestrated by Le Corbusier and his colleagues into a cohesive 480-second program. The talents and efforts that went into this project, and the interaction of the personalities behind it, make a fascinating tale that bridges architecture, music, and marketing - one that has never been told, perhaps because the building was dismantled after the fair.

In this book, Marc Treib looks at both this remarkable collaboration and the significance of the Philips project, which can be viewed as a pioneering quest into the production of postmodern art, or even as a prototype of virtual reality.

This wide-ranging investigation into the Philips project also examines the role of rhythm, cinematic montage, spatialized sound, and the composition of Varese's music. The result is an engaging exploration of artistic collaboration in the 1950s, set against the political and cultural context of a world exposition, and of the realization of ambitious architectural ideas.