Across several kinds of space
Frederick Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, theatre designer, artist and theorist. His work included stage designs in Europe, the Film Guild Cinema in New York and the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, designed with Armand Phillip Bartos.
Projects and proposals
Kiesler directed Columbia University’s Laboratory for Design Correlation from 1937 to 1943. His work for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery included biomorphic furniture. The Endless House remained a proposal, presented in model form at the Museum of Modern Art in 1958–59.
A comparison to make
Compare an exhibition interior with the Endless House model. Ask how each organizes relationships between a person, an object and surrounding space. Keep the difference between a built environment and a proposal visible: they provide different kinds of evidence about use. Kiesler is especially rewarding to study across these formats, where a recurring spatial question can be examined without collapsing distinct projects into one style.