Definition Series: Resilience
Thursday, Apr 13, 20177 PM - 9 PMEDT
| Storefront for Art and Architecture / 97 Kenmare Street
New York, NY, USRelated
The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City
Thursday April 13th 7:00pm-9:00pm
Definition Series: Resilience
Presentations, Panel Discussion, and Book Launch
With:
Beatriz Colomina (Professor, Director of Ph.D. Graduate Studies, SOA, Princeton University)
Daniel Fernández Pascual (Cooking Sections; Faculty, Royal College of London)
Mark Linder (Professor, Syracuse University)
Laura McGuire (Assistant Professor, University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Carrie Norman (Norman Kelly; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Columbia University)
William O’Brien Jr. (WOJR; Associate Professor, Architecture, MIT)
Stephen Phillips (SPARCHS; Professor, Director CPLA_Metro, Cal Poly)
Alon Schwabe (Cooking Sections; Faculty, Royal College of London)
Rafi Segal (Rafi Segal; Associate Professor, Architecture and Urbanism, MIT)
Description:
In his Manifesto on Tensionism (1925), Frederick Kiesler declared we must have "NO MORE WALLS," promoting instead "organic" architecture with an “elasticity of building adequate to the elasticity of living.” Seeking to break down physical and social boundaries in our everyday lives through a wide-variety of media (art, architecture, animation, furniture, exhibition, and theater design), Kiesler aimed to challenge the static forms of modern construction by creating more open and inclusive resilient building structures and practices. While ‘Resilience’ has been appropriated from different fields, ranging from sustainability and environmental studies to urban design, Definition Series: Resilience takes Kiesler’s work as a point of departure to reflect on architecture’s possibilities to spring back into multiple shapes in facing cultural and political changing realities. Definition Series: Resilience invites historians, theorists, and practitioners to present a definition of ‘resilience’ as a point of departure for discussing Kiesler's proposals for a more resistant and liberatory "elastic architecture.”
Hosted by the Storefront for Art and Architecture inCollaboration with the Cal Poly LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design with it’s founding director architect, historian, and theorist Dr. Stephen J. Phillips, author of the new book Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture (MIT Press) -- the panel will present and discuss ideas surrounding Kiesler's visionary approach to innovative design research.
Event Sponsored by: HMC Architects, Morphosis Architects, ARC Reprographics, CSDA Design Group, and Theatre DNA
The Book:
Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture
This new publication on Kiesler is the first scholarly book on his architecture. It is a canonical study of 384 pages, with 155 color and blk/wt images. The book is being sold in hardback ($39.95 trade) and has been funded through grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, Graham Foundation, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Museums Quartier, and Barr Ferree Foundation (Princeton University) among several other organizations.
For more on Elastic Architecture:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elastic-architecture
Also available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Elastic-Architecture-Frederick-Kiesler-Research/dp/0262035731
Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture will be available for purchase and signing at the event:
Endorsements:
“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 façade 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
“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
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