Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines

An in-depth exploration of the work of Frederick Kiesler, the visionary architect, with a special focus on his Mobile Home Library.

Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines explores the work of Austrian architect, theater designer, and theorist Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965). The book’s centerpiece is a close examination of Kiesler’s 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 Kiesler’s visionary, even obsessive interest in sight, dreams, looking, and reading, the book covers Kiesler’s research and teaching at Columbia University’s 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 object—part device, part furniture—whose 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 Kiesler’s 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 Wasiuta’s substantial research and thinking on Kiesler, a wealth of photographs, drawings, documents, film stills, and pedagogical experiments from Kiesler’s laboratory, as well as photographs of the exhibition’s 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 Léger.