Elastic Spaces for Life and Theatre

The architect and stage designer Friedrich Kiesler

Bühnentechnische Rundschau

As part of the Berliner Festspiele festival, the Berlin museum Martin-Gropius-Bau recently showed an exhibition on the life and work of the architect, set designer and scholar Friedrich Kiesler (1890-1965). His experimental approach broke down boundaries between disciplines in the arts. In theatre, he aimed to bring audience and performers together, and devised the concept of an infinitely flowing space. While the ideas of this Austro-American artist seemed fantastic at the time, they are now becoming feasible as technology progresses.

Today, he is considered one of the great visionaries of the 20th century.

“Function follows the vision. The vision follows reality” was Friedrich Kiesler’s credo as far back as the 1920s. A universal artist, spatial conceptualist, designer and scholar, he devised entire galaxies as well as an “endless theatre”. Holistic thinking characterized his ideas, which were both progressive and sustainable, and are still so fresh today that they continue to inspire. More than 50 years after his death, the Berliner Festspiele festival dedicated a major exhibition in Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau museum to this seminal artist. Several of the key exhibits were provided by the Austrian foundation Friedrich und Lillian Kiesler-Privatstiftung. This was founded in 1997 when the Republic of Austria and the city of Vienna, along with many private donors, acquired Friedrich Kiesler’s estate. In 2012, an exhibition on his work for the stage was mounted in Vienna’s Theatermuseum (see BTR 6/2012).

Early days: focus on people

Friedrich Kiesler was born in 1890 in Czernowitz, now Ukraine. After moving to Vienna, he scraped along as best he could. In 1908 he started studying architecture at Vienna’s Technische Universität and art at the Academy, without gaining any graduation certificates. Nevertheless, Kiesler’s vision is rooted in the Vienna of the early 20th century; his concepts grew from fin-de-siècle utopias and the idea of a synthesis of the arts. This was a time when artists of all disciplines sought to unite the different areas of human life. Relocating to Berlin, where the young avant-garde was assembling, including Bauhaus members, Russian constructivists, Walter Gropius and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Kiesler continued to develop his sense for innovation.

It was in Berlin, in 1923, that this widely active artist made his first revolutionary strike: He equipped the stage of the Theater am Kurfürstendamm with an “electro-mechanic backdrop” for the utopist robot drama “W.U.R.” by Karel Čapek. Premiered on 29 March 1923, the piece featured a spectacular set by Kiesler, using projections and a small peep-box which he called a “telemuseum”. He wrote about it: “One day people will sit at home and call up all the images in the world on to their wall,” anticipating the concept of television.

In 1926, Kiesler was invited to curate and design the International Theatre Exposition. In January that year, he and his wife Stefi set off on their Atlantic crossing with big plans for realizing his architectonic visions in the “land of opportunity”.

The exhibition: Stage space and endless theatre

In the exhibition, a panorama of Kiesler’s work is spread out chronologically across several white rooms. For the international exhibition of new theatre technology in Vienna’s Konzerthaus in 1924, as well as posters and the exhibition layout, Kiesler devised the “Railway Theater” which is on display here in table size, and for which he invented freestanding partition walls. The spiral-shaped construction filled the auditorium of the Konzerthaus’ Mozart hall, and the audience watched the action from the gallery. In contrast with the traditional proscenium theatre, where audience and actors are separated, Kiesler connected the two worlds in one space, realizing his dreams of social interaction.

From 1925 on, Kiesler took his concept of the stage space further in his monumental plans for an “endless theatre”: A self-supporting spheroid shell construction made of glass, housing an unsupported, flexible space in which audience and actors move continuously on spirally-arranged ramps and platforms.  
In the following decades, Kiesler adapted this idea several times:  for a dual theatre for Brooklyn Heights (1926), for the Woodstock Theater (1931) and for The Universal (1959-61). The large-scale plans in the exhibition testify to the artist’s obsession with architectural detail.

In the New World

1933’s “Space House” marked Kiesler’s final break with the angular design principles of functionalism. He wanted to design buildings that stood apart from the old Europe; buildings for a new world. He championed the self-supporting, mobile shell shape and also developed a biomorphic vocabulary for furniture. Both originals and copies were on display in the exhibition, which visitors were welcome to try out and sit on. The futuristic look that Kiesler designed in the 1930s for his clients Mr and Mrs Mergentime has an almost exuberant feel. Droplet-shaped lamps, cantilever chairs and a lounge with “room for a whole party” made up a universe of innovative furniture in one apartment. Many of his key themes find expression here, especially the concept of space-time architecture.

Theatre in uterus-form

When Peggy Guggenheim commissioned him to design a gallery for her art collection in 1942, Kiesler proposed a revolutionary system: He detached the pictures from the wall to allow the visitor to literally submerge himself in the artworks, floating freely in the space. After 1950, Kiesler designed a house as an “epidermis for the human body”, a model of which is on display in the exhibition, and in 1959 he came up with a theatre in the form of a uterus, which he interpreted in the Freudian sense:  It allows the visitor to returns to the mother’s womb. The only building he designed that was actually built, with architect Armand Bartos in Israel in 1960, was the “Shrine of the Book”, a place to keep ancient scrolls found in a cave in the West Bank in 1956. The exhibition shows plans and photos of the structure, which added a religious note to his late work. The ancient scrolls are thought to be the oldest surviving Bible texts in the world. With this half-underground museum, Kiesler created a worthy shelter for the sacred find.

Kiesler worked on his lifework concept of an “endless house” until his death in New York in 1965. With its self-supporting shell construction and overflowing surfaces, which refract and multiply the incident light, it became a blueprint for visionary architecture of the 20th century. Like most of his designs, it was never realized, but a series of iconic models and blow-up photographs of the interior were presented in New York’s MoMA in 1960.
Meanwhile, computer technology and modern building materials could make it possible to realize his flowing design idiom, similar to themes seen in buildings by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito, and most recently the Elbphilharmonie. “Kiesler anticipated many themes of the 21st century: urban planning, new technologies, man and machine,” says Hani Rashid, architect and chairman of the Friedrich Kiesler Foundation in Vienna: “That makes him so relevant”. Friedrich Kiesler died in New York in 1965, the year that the Shrine of the Book was opened in Jerusalem. His contemporary relevance not only came across in the exhibition but also in an accompanying talk on “the theatre of his dreams”. The question is: What kind of theatre do we want and need? Kiesler’s visions are a stimulus for thinking about theatres that make things possible.


BTR Ausgabe 3 2017
Rubrik: English texts, Seite 102
von Irmgard Berner

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