Overview
Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines explores the work of Austrian architect, theater designer, and theorist Frederick Kiesler (1890ā1965). The bookās centerpiece is a close examination of Kieslerās iconic but unrealized Mobile Home Library, which will be fabricated for the first time and photographed for the publication. Built around a speculative essay by Mark Wasiuta, tracing Kieslerās visionary, even obsessive interest in sight, dreams, looking, and reading, the book covers Kieslerās research and teaching at Columbia Universityās School of Architecture in the late 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the main projects he developed at his Design Correlation Laboratory, the Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine.
The Vision Machine was imagined as an ambitious device intended to visualize human sight, from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and hallucinations. The Mobile Home Library was conceived as a dynamic, modular objectāpart device, part furnitureāwhose repertoire of rotating, spinning movements allowed variable forms of interaction with readers and users. At first glance these two projects barely resemble each other. Yet together they illustrate the strange and astonishing scope of Kieslerās correalism, which spanned and confused his biotechnique (a biologically-oriented design process aimed at fostering human health) and his techno-oneiric surrealism.
The book is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in Fall 2024, but is a stand-alone volume. It presents Wasiutaās substantial research and thinking on Kiesler, a wealth of photographs, drawings, documents, film stills, and pedagogical experiments from Kieslerās laboratory, as well as photographs of the exhibitionās centerpiece, the (re)construction of the never-built Mobile Home Library.
Frederick Kiesler was born in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine) in 1890 and died in New York in 1965. For a short time, he was a member of De Stijl, he briefly partnered with Adolf Loos in the 1920s, and he was an associate of many avant-garde artists, including Man Ray and Fernand LĆ©ger.
This book title, Frederick Kiesler (Vision Machines), ISBN: 9780262049269, by Mark Wasiuta, published by MIT Press (January 21, 2025) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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