Promotional Information

With this book the MIT Press continues its support for architectural thought at a time when both print books and the authority of thought are under attack. Certainly an English-language monograph on Kiesler is long overdue, especially today when the avant-garde seemingly consists of random facade shape-making. Kiesler is one of the few people since Alberti to compare the design of an individual house to the scale and space of the city. His work on the City in Space, a De Stijl-like composition that could be read at either scale, showed a full range of design and theoretical potential. Kiesler exemplified what it meant to be an architect who wrote, thought, and designed in the cultural medium of space. -- Peter Eisenman, architect Kiesler went from applied arts in Austria to applying every technology within reach in New York, moving from experiments in perception, theater, and robotics to a single-minded obsession with elastic space and its endless iterations. Phillips has discovered in him the half-forgotten originator of so much recent architecture whose allure comes from fluid shapes and swiftly changing surfaces. This is a revelation, as there was only one Kiesler with the ability to wing it in the old and in the new world, leaving a trail of ideas and conundrums that seem forever just over the horizon and tantalizingly out of reach. -- Kurt W. Forster, Hon FRIBA, Visiting Professor, Yale School of Architecture Frederick Kiesler's avant-garde production stands at the threshold of modernism with a set of intuitions, ideas, and experiments that appear retrospectively as key milestones on the path leading to contemporary digital architecture. In this brilliant book, Stephen Phillips reveals the relevance of the 'greatest non-building architect' for whoever attempts to rethink today the relations between the body and the built environment. -- Antoine Picon, Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Design; author of Digital Culture in Architecture and Smart Cities Frederick Kiesler is an immensely important influence in contemporary design thinking. His visionary redefinition of architecture's scope -- and its relationship to technology, research, and interdisciplinarity -- modeled the notion of 'alternative practice' and continues to shape the discipline today. Stephen Phillips thoughtfully charts the development of that redefinition with new and provocative connections to contemporaneous thinkers and movements. As the mechanisms of controlling subjectivity evolve to become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, this nuanced revisiting of Kiesler's concepts of embodied freedom and 'elasticity' is absolutely critical. -- Thom Mayne, FAIA, Design Director, Morphosis

About the Author

Stephen J. Phillips is Professor of Architecture at California Polytechnic State University, Founding Director of the Cal Poly Los Angeles Metropolitan Program in Architecture and Urban Design, and Principal Architect at the firm Stephen Phillips Architects (SPARCHS).

Reviews

In Elastic Architecture, Stephen J. Phillips persuasively unites Kiesler's diverse designs under one coherent philosophy: elasticity. This philosophy embraces 'flexible environmental systems that... modulate in response to everyday actions, human desires, and bodily needs'... Elasticity recuperates Kiesler for contemporary design by recontextualizing his work as a lifelong exploration of the sensory qualities of space.—Sophie Duvernoy, Los Angeles Review of Books

Kiesler was a visionary, a surrealist working at liminal extremities, and Phillips's wonderfully detailed and knowledgable book gives us a full picture of how he worked out his ideas. This is a great book on a fascinating guy.—3:AM Magazine

Phillips has convincingly demonstrated the intellectual coherence of an exceptional character who, through his remarkable work, laid the conceptual foundations for contemporary design.—JSAH

...demonstrates the ways in which Kiesler's work... established new contextual horizons for what architecture and design could be under industrial and postindustrial capitalism.—Journal of Architectural Education