The Brooklyn Rail

Frederick Kiesler’s description of the “birth” or invention of “design” in parts three and four of Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing describe the passage “From Animal Housing to Magic Architecture,” an architecture that surpasses mere “shelter” and incorporates human “imagination,” yet has the capacity to unite “vision and fact” by staying in contact with “reality.”

“Is not the ‘architecture’ of the human body an envelope rammed full of ‘attributes’ that DO NOT show their 'implementation' on the outside?”

The “Birth of Magic Design,” states Kiesler in the first chapter of part three (“Awareness of the Miraculous”), describes the moment when “man discovers his capacity to convert his own body into a dream image through painting or make-up.”

“And further, isn’t the sublime singularity of the navel very much like the exact opposite of the twisting, turning, asymmetrical intestines just inside?”

Notably, Kiesler’s references to adornment and design in relation to sexual selection appear in the final chapters of Magic Architecture’s second part on “Animal Architecture” and not the following two parts on the (super)human dimensions of “Magic Design.”

“Yes skin is involved as the predominant material application of these features, but skin is not what predominates the design; our skin is what adapts to the design.”

Following the description of caves, animal dwellings, tools, and the first traces of human design in bodily adornment, Kiesler’s story performs a precipitous turn to the domain of Architecture, with a capital “A.”

“I came to the conclusion that touch is the first sense to have come into being, and that touch/contact was/is indeed the medium by which ‘life’ itself began.”

Often in Kiesler's handwritten manuscripts, we witness the transition from the architecture of human and animal dwelling to the architecture of religious and/or courtly monuments marking a split between private and public realms of building activity.

“Not only did touch exist before tasting, smelling, hearing or seeing, but, most of all, it was the contact of two otherwise lifeless entities that ‘spawned’ animate life.”

The iconography of the unfinished chapters of the fifth section appears to be more or less the same: a gigantic funerary or religious monument towering over a row of low building structures housing the people who have ostensibly constructed the same monuments.

“So what were these two lifeless entities that spawned life through contact with each other?”

The ultimate aim of Magic Architecture was to correct or even reverse the course of twentieth-century (modern/international style) architecture towards a design trajectory informed by Kiesler’s correalist¹ principles, even if finally, the same gesture served to secure a place for the architect's projects in the long genealogy of architectural projects that would never be built.

Essentially, it was something soft and vulnerable that found “security and protection” under something hard and more permanent.

In his first statement, Kiesler boisterously declares: “Magic Architecture is the architecture of exuberant being.”

“Animate life began when the contact between the soft and the hard actually became a bond, and thus too the sense of touch came into being.”

“Magic architecture is the expression of the creativeness of man. It is an architecture of contact; not of separation. It is the emphasis on participation, not on isolation.”

“I see this soft/hard duality as the beginning of two sexes as well.”

Kiesler affirms that Magic Architecture “holds the balance between two (human) extremes,” namely, a “desire for the machine” and “the denial of science.”

“Contrary to common perceptions, it is the female that is hard and the male that is soft.”

Anthologizing is perhaps also Kiesler’s response to his own “dilettantish” status researching and writing in scholarly areas where he had no formal training, from archaeology and anthropology to animal science.

“In simple, undeniable terms, it is woman that enables embryonic development within her own body—women's bodies themselves are hard protective shells (only women corporeally possess and facilitate the human egg that in turn allows embryonic development).”

The text of Magic architecture performs pathology manifested in its fluctuating structure.

“Men, on the other hand, very much do not have that ‘built-in’ protectiveness, hence men make great displays about forever being on the defensive, and indeed it is almost exclusively men that have continually created our planet's foremost industry, if only to create that protective shell that their sex was not born with—the age old military apparatus (shields, armor, war ships, submarines, tanks, stealth bombers, etc. are all ‘man’-made protective shells).”

Kiesler envisions a fourth and final part, which “should account in a short chapter [about] ideas in buildings that are purely imaginary,” and then he writes, “to the point of sheer insanity”—but crosses out this last phrase.

“So what then is architecture? Is it a hard, ‘simple,’ natural’ protective shell that engenders the continuation of life? Or is it a soft formlessness forever (re-)designing an applied shell it doesn't naturally have?”

But perhaps Magic Architecture could never be anything other than a fragment…

… yet Magic Architecture is foremost a highly astute exercise in synthesis, and it gets even better when synthesis begets even more synthesis.