Bøger af Mark Wasiuta

This book collects thirteen exhibitions that read architecture as a field coordinated by documents with distinct historical, mediatic, and disciplinary registers.

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.

Architecture is a field organized by documents produced within distinct historical, mediatic, and disciplinary registers. Whether in the mode of drawing, design, fabrication, computation, photography, or video, architectural documents are defined by different discursive and institutional exigencies. But architectural archives are hardly stable or uniform. Rather, archives are active processes and systems of coordination, woven into architecture's media, their histories, and their communicative effects.Over the last decade, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation has conducted a sustained experiment in archival exhibitions. Fueled by the recent historicization and theorization of exhibition practices, the gallery has offered a critical alternative to the conventional role of architectural school galleries and exhibitions at major museums and architecture associations. Through a commitment to researching under-examined projects from the postwar period, the Ross Gallery has forged an identity based on the uncovering and display of a wide range of documents that expand and test the contours of architectural practice.This book collects text and documents from fourteen exhibitions that span the past ten years of the Ross Gallery. These exhibitions are accompanied by commentaries by a group of architects, artists, historians, theorists, and curators that examine each exhibition, survey the work of the gallery, and foreground the shifting status of architectural exhibitions more broadly.