Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines

This exhibition is a concise yet rich examination of Frederick John Kiesler’s (1890-1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. 

Two of Kiesler’s most essential and ambitious projects developed at the Laboratory are explored in this exhibition: the Mobile Home Library, a device proposed to radically alter domestic space, and the Vision Machine, an ambitious apparatus intended to visualize human sight—from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and dream images. A selection of approximately 100 drawings, photographs, and research studies of these projects, as well as the never before realized construction of Kiesler’s Mobile Home Library, will illuminate his remarkable attempts to grasp human vision, record dreams, and to correlate libraries, information, images, and consciousness.

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—a reputation affirmed by the American architect Philip Johnson with his 1960 assertion that Kiesler was the “greatest non-building architect of our time.” 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.