F. Kiesler English

Oktober 24, 2017 by admin Uncategorized 0 comments

Perhaps because of the integrative and cross-disciplinary character of his work, very few consider FriederichKiesler as just an architect. Designer, theatre designer, typographer, theoretician..we are interested in classifiying him as artist in the current sense of the word.

Kiesler was a visionary regarding our contemporaneity and his work is often described as “utopian” because it privileges research above results. His material legacy –an enormous quantity of maquettes, drawings, scenarios and writings-, continue to inspire new generations of architects and artists. His most famous work, the

Endless House was never built; instead it was the result of a complex research about architectural space and includes different discipline, from anthropology and psychology to biology.

Born in 1890 in Chrnovtsy, in current Ukraine, but then it was Austro-Hungarian territory, at a very young age Kiesler established contact with the Bauhaus and other avant-garde such as the Dutch neoplasticism, who like him are intereste in the plastic possibilities of geometrics. Although at the end of his life, the work of Kieslerreache proposals completely different to those of the above, as shown by the organic forms of Endless House. In short, the research for “continuum” in architectural space was what marked all of his work.

In 1924 he presented in Paris a large maquette suspended in the air, “Raumstadt” (City in space), made from wooden boards that formed a building-scenario where each element worked as an autonomous unit at the same time as in correlation with other elements. It was suspended architectural-scenery body, extendible and expandable all round, in an expansion of interrelated forces and counterforces. Kiesler, in his documents written in those years, spoke of the need for creating open spaces without fixed walls that would correspond to the forms of life of society in the future.

A short time later, he began, commissioned by a Berlin theatre, the scenography design of the drama work Emperor Jonesby Eugene O’Neil. Jones, main character of the work, is fleeing hounded by the spectres of fear he creates by himself. Kiesler conceived a scenario for this theatre piece that reflected the constant flight of the main character. Sloping floors and ceilings, passageways that open, funnel-shaped walls, and semi-transparent walls that allow the projection of shadows in movement. The character on the scenario is constantly hounded by the shadows he creates. This constantly changing scenography reflects the fundamental points that would mark the dynamic conception of Kieslerian space: flexible, interchangeable spaces…It was the start of what would become the Endless House.

Many years later, after becoming established in the United States, where he lived until the end of his days, FriederichKiesler started to integrate curved lines and organic shapes into his works in an interesting relationship with the tendencies derived from the surrealist language so popular then. Then he conceived Space House (1933), a prototype of single-family residence without any foundations and elevated with pilars, where walls, windows, ceilings and floor form a type of flattened sphere. That way producing a radical rupture with the Euclidean geometric principle base on terms of lines and straight angles, with walls that act like enclosures and define limits. The flattened sphere of the Space House allows a single internal space with maximum flexibility of its configuration. It is during this period that the contents of the so-called Manifeste du Corréalisme take shape, and which would be considered in the most complete compendium of the theoretical work of FriederichKiesler (although the complete manifes would not be published until 1949, in Paris).

In spite of the “total art” idea being in the mind of the artist when he conceived the Raumstadt in the twenties (the artist then referred to the same as “architecture, a sculpture and a picture at the same time”), it was not until these years in the United States when he materialised this idea in the design of four galleries as spaces for seeing and experimenting art, the Art of This Century project, designed for Patty Guggenheim (New York, 1942). In one of these spaces, the painting are mounted on a type of frames that the spectator can regulate or incline to see the works more comfortably. Another of the galleries has mobile seats that are transportable around the entire space. These are original pieces of furniture with fantastic rounded shapes, the multifunctionality of which correspond, according to Kiesler, to the continuous mutations that architectural space should procure for ll its interrelated elements. Another of the spaces, where Kiesler centres on illumination, indirect lighting, is individually regulated by the spectator in order for a better observation of each piece.

It could be said that all the projects, of which we have taken the mentioned ones as examples, as well as those not realised, converge in the Endless House (1949), the most well known of his works. Seen from outside, the Endless House sems to be a prehistoric cave, but also the futuristic living space of a science-fiction film. Its interior has the shapes and textures of a living body and its configuration resembles the maternal refuge. Floor, walls and ceiling merge into one unit. Inside there are spaces than can serve as autonomous units but that are also considered as interrelated elements, just like cells that reproduce forming part of the same organism that responds to the same principle that Kiesler followed during his initial central European constructive period: each geometric element formed an autonomous unit and at the same time functioned in correlation with the other elements. Likewise, proving the coherence of Kiesler, there is a continuity regarding the idea of flexibility and continuous modification of architectural space, a concept that he had experimented in the scenography he designed in Berlin during the twenties. Depending on its function (collective or private), the Endless Housespaces are on different height levels and include flexible separation elements that eventually allow and individual isolation or converts them into only one space, being freely expanded or withdrawing into intimacy according to the needs of whoever inhabits them. This is an architectural principle that, beyond the “machine à habiter” of Le Corbusier, responds above all the vital and psychical needs of the individual.

Philip Jones defined FriederichKiesler as “the best architect without any buildings of our time”. The difficulties caused by carrying out many of his projects undoubtedly –among other reasons- are that these are too ahead for their time. Nowadays the Kieslerian principles of flexibility, adaptability or unfolding are fundamental concepts for understanding the route of contemporary architecture.

Revista Lápiz 278, may 2013

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