Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines explores the work of the visionary Austrian architect, theater designer, and theorist Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965). Through an examination of Kiesler’s research and teaching at Columbia University School of Architecture in the late 1930s and 1940s, the book features the main projects he developed through the Laboratory for Design Correlation—the Vision Machine and the Mobile Home Library. 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 object—part device, part furniture—whose repertoire of rotating, spinning movements allowed variable forms of interaction with readers and users. This iconic piece was unrealized until it was fabricated and photographed for this publication. At first glance these two projects barely resemble each other. Yet together they illustrate the strange and astonishing scope of Kiesler’s correalism, which spanned and confused his biotechnique (a biologically-oriented design process aimed at fostering human health) and his techno-oneiric surrealism. With a speculative essay by Mark Wasiuta that traces Kiesler’s visionary, even obsessive, interest in sight, dreams, looking, and reading, this publication presents an innovative overview of Kiesler’s work through the close study of his Vision Machine and the Mobile Home Library.

Frederick John Kiesler was born into a Jewish family in present-day Ukraine in 1890. He first studied printmaking and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts but would later gain a venerable reputation as an inventive and dynamic theater set designer. In 1923, Kiesler joined de Stijl on the invitation of Theo van Doesburg, making him the group’s youngest member. After immigrating to the United States and settling in New York City in 1926, among other projects, Kiesler designed store windows for Saks Fifth Avenue, the Guild Cinema, and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. He was also appointed as the director of scenic design at the Juilliard School of Music as well as director of his laboratory at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. In contrast to other European émigrés who reshaped American architecture by introducing European modernist building to America, Kiesler is perhaps best known for not building. Kiesler did of course build, most notably exhibition spaces and the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. Yet he did not normalize his experimental work by positioning it as preparatory studies for future buildings; his myriad non-building projects were emphatically architectural experiments and architectural declarations.

Mark Wasiuta is senior lecturer in architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and codirector of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program. Wasiuta is recipient of recent grants from the Onassis Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, NYSCA, and the Graham Foundation, where he was an inaugural Graham Foundation Fellow. His research exhibition practice focuses on architecture’s media, politics, and environments through under-examined projects of the postwar period. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Graham Foundation, LAXArt, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Sharjah Architecture Triennale, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, MAXXI, the Deste Foundation, the Luma Foundation, Moderna Museet, and elsewhere. Recent Exhibitions include Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines at the Jewish Museum in New York City and The Machine at the Heart of Man: Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism at the Onassis Foundation in Athens, Greece. Wasiuta is coauthor and coeditor of Rifat Chadirj: Building Index (Arab Image Foundation, 2018); Dan Graham’s New Jersey (Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), and author of numerous articles.

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