Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing is the first publication of Frederick Kiesler's most ambitious book—a sweeping history of how humans have sheltered themselves, from prehistory to the atomic age, written after the Second World War and then set aside for decades.
About This Book
Kiesler submitted the manuscript to editors in the postwar years, then moved on to exhibitions and other projects, and it was never published in his lifetime. Long known by its title alone, it now appears as a critical edition reassembled from archival material by Spyros Papapetros and Gerd Zillner. Kiesler reads habitation through anthropology, ecology and the life sciences, setting the effects of modern technology against the 'magical' practices he found in cave drawings and the earliest artefacts of human making. The book keeps his original structure: a treatise in ten parts, modelled loosely on Vitruvius, that tells an alternative history and theory of architecture. It is illustrated throughout with more than 70 of Kiesler's composite collage plates—images cut from books and popular science journals, with his own elaborate captions—together with line drawings he made for the project.
Key Features
- First publication of a manuscript long regarded as one of the great unpublished texts of 20th-century architecture
- Critical edition with introductory essays tracing the history of Kiesler's research and its key themes
- More than 70 composite plate illustrations and original line drawings by Kiesler, with 244 figures in total
- Appendixes of further textual and visual material Kiesler gathered for the project, plus annotations tracing its development
What You'll Discover
- Kiesler's account of human housing, from animal dwellings and caves to the age of atomic technology
- How ideas from anthropology, ecology and biology fed his thinking about architecture
- The theory behind the visionary work, such as the Endless House, for which Kiesler is best known
- A collage-based method of argument that sits between art, research and architectural writing
About the Author
Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) was an Austrian-born American architect, artist, set designer and sculptor, celebrated for his exhibition designs and visionary projects, most famously the Endless House. Spyros Papapetros is associate professor of art and architectural theory and historiography at Princeton University and the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic. Gerd Zillner is director of the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation in Vienna, where he has curated numerous exhibitions on Kiesler.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 400
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780262046749
- Publisher: MIT Press
Perfect For: Architectural historians and theorists, readers of the avant-garde, and anyone interested in the deep history of the house and the idea of dwelling.