Word: kiesler
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...design; blueprints and bricks come later. Even such a titan as the late Frank Lloyd Wright had to wait years to see his "impossible" ideas bear fruit. And the more adventurous the pioneer, the longer the wait. One of the most adventurous of all is Manhattan's Frederick Kiesler, who at 62 has originated more ideas and seen fewer of them built than almost any other architect of his time...
...Scrolls, a Fountain. Coming to the U.S. from his native Vienna in 1926, Kiesler took up teaching at Columbia in the 1930s, amazed his students with suggestions that they develop spiral buildings, semicircular projection screens, "floating cities" wrapped in cocoonlike weather protectors, and "horizontal skyscrapers" suspended like bridges. In the 1940s he built great open sculptures and clusters of pictures "to relax inside" and designed striking stage sets for No exit and The Magic Flute...
Small, spry, tough, intense, Kiesler got few commissions for his missionary work and asked for no favors. His credo, stated in the College Art Journal: "The artist must learn only one thing in order to be creative: not to resist himself, but to resist without exception every human, technical, social, economical factor that prevents him from being himself." Recently, a former student of Kiesler, Armand Bartos, asked him to become a partner while remaining strictly Kiesler. Their collaboration resulted first in Manhattan's strange and elegant World House Galleries (TIME, Feb. 4, 1957). Now ground is being broken...
Back in 1923 Kiesler proposed the first actual shell house in history. The Pantheon in Rome is half a shell. Kiesler modeled a true shell, an egglike construction balanced on stilts and tensile all around-not just at the top and sides. Last year, 35 years after he proposed it, Kiesler was commissioned by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art to carry out his still-revolutionary idea in model form. He secluded himself in his Greenwich Village loft, spent month after month brooding, sketching, constructing. The end result is bound to surprise even those who know him. Anchored...
While visitors flowed through the new gallery. Architect Kiesler beamed: "Look, and you can see the principle everywhere, continuous flow and continuous tension. This is not a marketplace. It is not a forbidding museum. It is a place where the paintings and sculpture invite the visitors to come to see them-'At home from...