Commissioned by electronics manufacturer Philips and designed by the office of Le Corbusier, it was built to house a multimedia spectacle that celebrated postwar technological progress.

Because Le Corbusier was busy with the planning of Chandigarh, much of the project management was assigned to Iannis Xenakis, who was also an experimental composer and was influenced in the design by his composition Metastaseis.

The reinforced concrete pavilion is a cluster of nine hyperbolic paraboloids in which Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique was spatialized by sound projectionists using telephone dials.

Varèse drew up a detailed spatialization scheme for the entire piece, which made great use of the pavilion's physical layout, especially its height.

The European Union funded a virtual recreation of the Philips Pavilion, which was chaired by Vincenzo Lombardi from the University of Turin.