Frederick Kiesler

Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines explores the work of Austrian architect, theater designer, and theorist Frederick Kiesler (1890 1965), with a special focus on his 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 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, highlighting his projects at the Design Correlation Laboratory, including the Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine. The Vision Machine was imagined as a device to visualize human sight from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and hallucinations while the Mobile Home Library was conceived as a dynamic, modular object combining device and furniture, with rotating, spinning movements enabling variable interactions with readers. Though these projects appear distinct, together they exemplify Kiesler s correalism, blending his biotechnique design aimed at fostering human health and techno-oneiric surrealism. Published alongside an exhibition at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in Fall 2024, this stand-alone volume presents Wasiuta s research, numerous photographs, drawings, documents, film stills, pedagogical experiments from Kiesler s laboratory, and images of the Mobile Home Library s (re)construction. Kiesler, born in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine) in 1890 and deceased in New York in 1965, was briefly a member of De Stijl, partnered with Adolf Loos in the 1920s, and associated with avant-garde artists including Man Ray and Fernand Leger.