Isabel Fox Undergraduate Dissertation _ Newcastle University School of Architecture by isabelfox

Designing for Robots in Twentieth Century Architecture

Isabel Fox Undergraduate Dissertation 2018/19

Collaged image: Villiers de I’sle-Adam’s The Future Eve, and Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theatre Plan.

DESIGNING FOR ROBOTS A Study of Automatism in Architecture through Frederick Kiesler and Twentieth-Century Theatre Designers Undergraduate Dissertation Isabel Fox 160098455 Newcastle University 2018/2019

Shop window of the Gotham Book Mart for the presentation of NEON, 1948, BW photo; Gelatin silver print on baryta paper, New York. In Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Barbel Vischer, Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten: Architectur – Kunst – Design = Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions: Architecture – Art – Design, (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), p.6.

Contents

Acknowledgements Abstract

p.7 p.9 pp.10-13

Preface: Introduction to “Automatism” I. Technological Determinism in Modernity: Dreams of I. “Progress” in ‘Robotic Culture’ Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965) Autonomies of the Twentieth-century: Fears of “CyborgI. Colonisation” The Key to Continuation: Preservation of the “Self” II. ‘Automatons’ Moved ‘Along Spiral Ramps’(I): The Theatre as a II. Training Ground for ‘Automatist’ Action III. Actor-less Stages: The Modern Mannequin as both Intimate and III. Alien IV. Kiesler’s “Electromechanical” Sets: Finding a “Living III. Architecture” for Man in Animation of the Inanimate V. Space Stage - ‘Automatons’ Moved ‘Along Spiral Ramps’(II): V. Rollercoasters and Circuses VI. Bretonian Surrealism: Fundamental Problems with the III. ‘Autonomic’ that led to the ‘Vital’ Verging on a New World Culture: “Vital–” rather than III. “Robotic–” VII. Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’: The subject in its Singularity VIII. Conclusions Drawn from the ‘Universal Theatre’: “Multiplicity III. as a New Spatial Order” Elastic Space as a Prototype for Future Automatist Design Endnotes Bibliography

pp.14-21 pp.22-24 pp.25-27 pp.28-29 pp.30-33 pp.34-39 pp.40-47 pp.48-57 pp.58-64 pp.65-69 pp.70-81 pp.82-89 pp.90-91 pp.94-103 pp.104-106

Aknowledgements

Thank you to my tutor, Mathew Ozga-Lawn, for reviewing my work and assisting me throughout the writing of this dissertation. Also, thank you to James Craig for directing me to study Kiesler through the subject of automatism. I had no idea how interesting I would find this.

Abstract With technology changing and reproducing itself ever more rapidly and with increasing accuracy and efficiency, this dissertation endeavours to re-examine the work of architect Frederick Kiesler as I believe his use of automatist technique holds unique actuality in architectural discussion today. The proviso to “re-examine” here, marks the nature of my analysis as something that is not brand new but which emphasises my own understanding of automatism from readings on Kiesler and around the subject of “technological determinism.” This writing interrogates relationships held between the animate and the inanimate and how the study of automation in the twentieth century can relate to political, social, and ethical issues in the use of technology in modern building practice. It rethinks cultural fears toward the collusion of humanity and machines acquired throughout the modern era, in progression to a more open relationship with technology. It studies technology as a powerful agent that is both autonomous and deterministic in its ability to effect society. Ultimately, it evaluates through an in-depth study of various projects by Kiesler the arguably ‘liberating’ or ‘controlling’ psycho-functions of automatist design projects, and therefore, whether the increasingly mechanical way in which we experience the world is reasonable. 9

Photograph by Topical Press Agenecy. R.U.R/Eric the Robot, 1928, London. Constructed by Captain William H. Richards, to characterise the concept of robot inspired by Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.).

Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.28.

Preface

Introduction to "Automatism" ‘Automatism’: the word is borrowed from psychiatry and designates involuntary, unconscious psychic-poetic happenings; but, … this word also contain[s] the passion mixed with anguish of human beings in their relationship with machines that seem always to be on the point of liberating themselves from their creators and leading an autonomous existence.”1 Having appeared intermittently throughout history, technological advancement, and now technological reproducibility,2 have preoccupied human consciousness with increasing intensity. Since antiquity, the interpenetration of art and science has spawned curious offspring – da Vinci’s armoured android knight,3 circa 1495, and Jacques de Vaucanson’s ‘digesting duck’, 1739 – and by the early twentieth-century, an obsession in replicas, copies and reproduced doubles had chilled society. What are the possibilities, or inevitabilities, of technology? In Mumford’s dreams of biotechnic futures, where humans and machines merge completely, does the inorganic breathe and become self-motile? And, how should we reconsider design methodologies in light of new “hybrid” relations? 11

Preface

This writing endeavours to provide answers to these questions through the looking at examples of work by Frederick Kiesler. It argues the efficacy of Kiesler’s use of the ‘autonomic’ in relation to other twentieth-century designers through a selective analysis of architectural projects, interrogating his interpretation of automatism through each. The nature of this dissertation is theoretical, although it takes on ethical, social and political views, chronicling Kiesler’s work in successive order to demonstrate the development of a process of ideas. It aims to determine if Kiesler’s practices ultimately led to the notion of a ‘freeing,’ or more adversely, ‘authoritarian’ and ‘controlling’ architecture, and create feedback that has direct relevance to the present. Within it, I allude to the inefficiencies or suitability in certain uses of the “psycho-functions” of architecture and their inevitable influence on human autonomy. Such an analysis cannot be explored rigorously without omitting several stages of Kiesler’s architecture; thus, this writing will explain his exploration of automatism through designs for theatres and film houses and excludes detail of his projects for shop fronts, department stores, galleries, religious building and homes. Writings on these are more widely accessible than those mentioned in this text and I encourage the reader to read about them as each are illuminating on the subject of automatism. Biographies such as Stephen J. Phillips’ Elastic Architecture, and Lisa Phillips’ Frederick Kiesler, are key sources of specific information related to Kiesler’s life and intellectual practice. This writing is split into eight parts. Following its introduction, I introduce the context in which I am writing: the increasingly autonomous nature of technology which has created fear of its progress and integration with humanity in the twentieth-, and into the twenty-first, -century.

Introduction to ‘Automatism’

Part II explains how technology has been introduced within theatre architecture and how this frames the trajectory of Kiesler’s exploration into automation. In Part III, I debate the interchangeability of man for machine and its uncanny effects, in order to then discuss the relationship to technological environment explored in two stage proposals by Kiesler’s in Parts IV, and V. Part VI summarises the fundamental problems expressed in ‘Surreal,’ or ‘psychic,’ automatism, the threat this poses to us as spiritual beings experiencing the world ‘autonomously,’ and the inherent inefficiencies of machines in their distinction from humans. I use writings by André Breton and Herni Bergson to frame this. In Part VII, I show how the consequences of mechanical autonomy can be mediated in the preservation of ‘the self’ in an example of Kiesler’s architecture. Finally I use Kiesler’s last theatre project, the ‘Universal,’ to conclude whether space can actually be “liberatory” within a highly technological, and controlled, society.

Gast, John. American Progress. 1872. Oil on Canvas. Photograph courtesy of Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, Los Angeles.

In Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p.12.

Part I

Technological Determinism in Modernity: Dreams of “Progress” in ‘Robotic Culture’ It seems that people in modernity “have become habituated to the seeming power of advancing technology.” A “self-evident feature,” an omnipresent condition of modern life “that calls for no more comment than the human penchant for breathing.” In complicit awareness of its power to shape us, technology has always acted as a crucial, and increasingly independent, agent in the culture of living. “The automobiles created suburbia.” “The robots put the riveters out of work.” These statements appear to carry with them “implications that the social consequences of technical ingenuity are far-reaching, cumulative, mutually reinforcing, and irreversible.” Once in place, technological invention takes on “a life of its own.” As its implementation in institutions becomes wide-spread, society becomes increasingly dependent on its “large, intricately interrelated … systems,” and must therefore “reconfigure [its] operations to comport with the new capacities and constraints it creates.”1 15

Part I

“If “determinism” sounds “cold and mathematical,” … then “technological determinism” surely sounds even more forbidding.”2 In a world where we have “technologized” to an apex, “for better or worse,” we have allowed technology to become autonomous and “permit [us] few alternatives to [its] dictates.”3 Unlike more abstract determinative forces such as, the ‘political’, ‘cultural’, ‘socioeconomic’ and ‘ideological’, technology, or more specifically the mechanical device, has a tangibility that gives credence to its autonomy from humanity,4 and at the same time threatens the self-determinability of its creator. We can approach technology with “hard” or “soft” determinism.5 In the former, agency is imputed to “technology” itself, whereas “soft determinists locate it [within] various and complex social, economic, and cultural matrix.”6 From one point of view, this determinisation upon human life is the totalitarian grip of “necessity’s iron hand,” or else the happy outcome of “free choices” which have led to “the realisation of the dream of progress.” After all, “the history of technology is the history of human actions,” – human autonomy serves above that of the machine. This remains true while we presume that no technological output, “no matter how ingenious and powerful,” can initiate action not predetermined by a human being.7 That is, until now. The imminent capacity of “artificial intelligence” with power to compile cars, aeroplanes and railways, has already entered architectural discussion. Just as Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us,” this is also true of technology. “Technological innovation comes to answer the challenges of the human intellect” and is embedded in the social politics that underlie our behaviour and way of being in the world.8 The situation is paradoxical, inescapable – the arrival of new technology and digital tools brings about ideas of “progress” but also the ethical dilemma of “men [becoming] tools of their tools.”9 –“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”10 16

Technological Determinism in Modernity

“Certainly, the [present] process of building is … wholly technological, as is the society in which buildings are … conceived, financed, and evaluated.”11 Production of space has become infused in automated functions of the artificial. But through technology we can also be empowered, our bodies and minds extended. We can measure the performance of buildings in conjunction with technology as liberating forces, by the ways in which they facilitate our needs and desires. “For most architects the word technology still means the different means and methods of building, however, in recent decades, the term has become synonymous with computers and the whole apparatus of networked information flow.”12 In today’s digital era, Walter Benjamin’s description of machine age ‘reality’ is particularly pervasive: “The equipment-free aspect of reality has … become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality [indistinguishable] in the land of technology.”13 William Braham elicits in Rethinking Technology, that it is now up to “the architects of the contemporary epoch [to dare] … to state [the] problem, and announce [its] answer.” To give “the world an architectural system which is the resultant spirit,” of a new technological era.14 Here we ask, in robotic climate, how far is it reasonable for the “disembodied,” “quasi-metaphysical entity”15 that is technology to determine human activity? And, how does technological progress threaten aspects of social and spiritual existence? “People seem all too willing to believe that [technological] innovations … embody humanity’s choice of its future.” 16 Whether that choice is an expression of freedom, or control remains to be answered. 17

Part I

The term “robotic” invokes the discussion of technological determinism in its motivation of societal “progress” “toward a new ideal in the face of new industry,”17 but ultimately, “rethinking technology and architecture in the age of systems [actually] means rethinking the practical and ethical dimensions of [such] change.”18 Nowadays, the mass-collection of data has made decisionmaking slower, less certain and more complex. I propose that we may therefore glean better sense of solution and understanding of the implications of use of new media and technologies in architecture, from looking back to the era in which the impacts of technological innovation were first encountered. Braham agrees: “To rethink technology at the beginning of the twenty-first-century means reconsidering the strong claims made about technology—utopian and dystopian— by the modernist and postmodernist architects … of the twentieth-century.”19

Technological Determinism in Modernity

Part I

Technological Determinism in Modernity

Graphic Arts Service, MIT. Popular Mechanics. 1952. Crane Companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s centennnial advertisemnet..

In Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), pp.24, 25.

Part I

Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965)20 Austrian architect and theatre designer, Frederick Kiesler, professed to be a hybrid of “Renaissance man,” and “space-age prophet,”21 hypothesised that just as “to find [the] bridge between nature and man [had] become the grand quest of science,” … similarly, finding the bridge between man and artificial, man-built, technological environment must become the … quest of future building design.”22 As visualised by “soft” determinists, he saw the agency of technology, not as independent but as “deeply embedded in … larger social structure and culture,”23 and sought to divest authoritarian control in the production of “open, and liberating,” space that performed “in correlation with [the] ever-changing demands” of humanity in order to better interact with technology.24 “A conflation of the body and machine comes to bear on his understanding and development of new building forms that engage … [readily] with … robotic culture [and its] automated mobile and flexible structures.”25 Fascinated by the relationship between the animate and inanimate, Kiesler embraced the potential for optic and haptic sensation in architecture that mimicked work of early twentieth-century Constructivists who utilised technology to hone human behaviour – aconscious – unconscious – responses to the environment. “Through the twentieth-century,” this relationship was highly debated, “leading in recent decades to a more nuanced, view [of] interaction and … degree to which technology … “socially constructs.””26 Kiesler, by these standards, was technically and imaginatively ahead of his time. He endeavoured to synthesise humanity, technology, and the environment, by “systematically [questioning] and [challenging] the status of modern living,” and create “more socially conscious … building environments that might ensure the ease and fluidity of human interactions with their evolving technological surroundings,” “by instrumentalising the automations of everyday life.”27 23

Part I

The relationship of the body and contemporary world is sensual and spiritual, yet increasingly harsh and mechanical. Kiesler opposed the idea that mechanical technologies alone had the power to forward design and saw that ‘life driven by machine’ was a notion at odds with ‘Neotechnic’ and ‘Biotechnic’ philosophies installed by Geddes.28 Instead, he prioritised adaptability, flexibility, and interactivity, toward greater multiplicity, inclusivity and free will within a highly structured and controlling society.29 Kiesler’s designs merged the field of architecture with automatist fantasies of science-fiction and “proved paradigmatic of new aesthetic and biopolitical practices emerging in the arts and sciences throughout the twentieth-century.”30 Especially impactful on body culture in relation to machines, this is how he becomes the lens through which this writing examines automatist practices of the previous and present century.

< Burckhart, Ruby. Frederick Kiesler in the

8-piece Galaxy in his studio, 1952, BW photo; Gelatin Silver print on baryta paper, New York. In Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Barbel Vischer, Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten: Architectur – Kunst – Design = Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions: Architecture – Art – Design, (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), p.5.

Autonomies of the Twentieth-century: Fears of “Cyborg-Colonisation” In the early twentieth-century, the android, or living machine, came to reflect society’s obsession with industry – culminating in an uncanny interest in robots. The combining of man and machine into a “single circuit of interactivity”31 was its defining challenge, “more important … than international conflict, national politics, the maldistribution of wealth, and differences of class and gender.”32 Quarrels between Modernists and Surrealists masked resolution to dilemmas in automation, Breton infamously denouncing modernist functionalism as “the most unhappy dream of the collective unconscious,” calling it a “solidification of desire in a most violent and cruel automatism.”33 Phillips portrays the challenges that faced humanity as “[involving] fears and fantasies of the inorganic versus the organic. The relationship between humans and their doubles, between the animate and the inanimate.”34 But what is there to reasonably fear in mechanisation? That which withers in the age of technological determinism is ‘human autonomy’ and the ‘aura,’ – “The whole sphere of authenticity eludes [that of the] technological.”35 Concern for autonomy of the individual in the twentiethcentury, and even through the twilight of the nineteenth,36 can be ‘rehabilitated’ in the context of the twenty-first due to its extraordinary actuality in describing our relationship to the “artificially intelligent.” “Made manifest in organic analogies,” such as in the “use of terms like process, flow, and emergence,”37 conflict between humanity and the technological realm of mechanisation is rooted in instinct to pit man against its impersonal, or dispassionate, machines. Fear of advancement in robotics stems from our apprehension of human beings becoming machines or vice versa. It thrives on difficulty distinguishing the subject from the object, the organic from inorganic, the original and its copy, the self and the other: 25

Part I

“The line between nature and machine … seemed crystal clear… Now, the boundaries between organic and inorganic, blurred by cybernetic and bio-technologies, seem less sharp; the body, itself invaded and reshaped by technology.”38 The concept of an “all-embracing and controlling reality and utopia” of “late capitalist technology,” as described by Donna Haraway, opens abominable mistrust for industry and technology, yet holds us in intense intrigue: “Modern production seems … like a dream of cyborg colonisation of work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic.”39 Fear of the machine and its inevitable autonomy is latent in literature, stretching back to the science fiction of Theo Von Harbou’s Metropolis, and Villiers de I’sleAdam’s The Future Eve: “The Android … has all the elasticity of the real thing, its human movement to the life … (… both resistant and flexible) that graceful yielding quality, that firm undulation … which is so seductive.”40 We are seduced by the automaton because it is so like us, and at times we perform so like it when we are entered into a state of ‘a-consciousness.’ Disinterested and distracted, Bergson writes that the “dreaming self is a relaxed self. It welcomes most readily incidental … resemblances not characterised by effort.”41 Walking shells, we become an accessory of our environments and at times, it controls us completely when we “stop willing.”42 “Liquidated” of conscious thought, we are reduced only to our reflexes and are “free” to live out as automatons.43 The potential of the architect to choreograph human behaviour when we are voided from responsibility for self-animation is both alarming and exciting. But, does architecture that renders us in this way liberate, or rather compel, and what becomes of free will? 26

Technological Determinism in Modernity

As Vidler concurs, “This complex and impure system of existence, … offers neither the luminous promise of technological utopia nor the dark hell of its opposite.”44 Whether our actions are genuine or the result of manipulation implies a “disintegration of personality.”45 As Phillips determines: “We are ever more convinced that we are individuals making our own conscious choices, and yet in this media-induced virtual state … attention has become so well entrained we may have lost sight of the habits of our actions.”45

Part I

The Key to Continuation: Preservation of the “Self” In the early 1950s Mumford prophesised: “With this new ‘mega-technics’ [architects] will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetry structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions … will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalised, collective organisations.”46 A new cultural epoch absolved of anxiety toward automation is one in which ‘personal autonomy’ is preserved within technological reality. In other words, it retains a high level of individual-determination while automated technologies are employed around us. Opposition to personal ‘determination’ and freedom is “objective chance,”47 that we experience in the extremes of ‘pure’ automatism. Rather than regard individual freedom and mechanical predetermination as opposing forces, we can suggest a radical restructuring of the paradigms present to modern thinking. Instead of technological automation creating a sense of mechanical alienation – or psychological feeling of suspension from the self – multi-media techniques could be used within a new porous, ‘liberatory,’ architecture to increase individual-control and sense of freedom. With this clarification, I will now examine the ways in which Kiesler’s architecture introduces automatist techniques.

< Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Science Fiction Poster, 1927, Berlin.

Phillips, Lisa. Space Stage, “International Exhibition of New Theatre Tevhniques,” 1924. BW Photo. Konzerthaus, Vienna. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.38.

Part II

Automatons’ Moved ‘Along Spiral Ramps’(I): The Theatre as a Training Ground for ‘Automatist’ Action Ideas of automatism dominated European theatre architecture in the 1900s. Loos, Meyerhold, and Prampolini agreed it as the training ground for experiments in automatist conditions with the aim of training the masses through ““psychological assimilation”1 to the speed, quality and intensity,” of contemporary life.2 As emphasised by Bertolt Brecht in the rules for an ‘epic theatre,’ the theatre should seek “an audience which is relaxed,”3 wherein these seductive techniques would be best received. The rapt attention of a theatre-goer is differentiated from the pleasure of someone who sits alone at home and reads. Their individual autonomy is compromised by their participation as part of a collective, the audience. Their limited engagement with thinking allows for every fibre of their being to be absorbed into the performance. 31

Part II

Enveloped in illusory atmosphere, the audience’s movements, emotions, and perceptions could be mediated by an onslaught of automated visual and haptic techniques to achieve an authoritarian control. In this study of human conditioning through technological means, Kiesler saw opportunity to invent spatial contiguities enmeshed in these modern tactics of mass-manipulation that correlated the body to the stage. This, for Kiesler, was “to mitigate the … complex socio-political forces acting upon everyday human habits and actions among a new world of machines.”4 “The Theatre is Dead!”5 Kiesler proclaimed. In its Cartesian state, it remains optically rigid, inflexible, fixed. “Is American Stage Scenery Obsolete?”6 If yes, it is rendered so by technology, that shatters tradition, and, according to Benjamin, its “most powerful agent is film.”7 Kiesler, like the architects aforementioned, called for dramatic movement from the proscenium stage towards an “elastic space,” that promoted “open play.”8 Benjamin alludes that this style, “the prototype … that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective,”9 offered humanity “an adaption to the dangers threatening it,”10 – the shock of modern technology and industry. Kiesler made a peculiar habit of developing these techniques of mass-persuasion through his designs for theatres, utilising advances in technology. He conflated space with “distractive haptic techniques discovered in modern film.”11 This was in response “to a shift in the … power structures [of] the everyday life of the twentieth-century city dweller,”12 distinct from that of the ‘first machine age’ in which Le Corbusier had called the house a “machine for living in.” In this ‘secondary age,’13 “a world of … the image, of the technological,”14 it was discerned by Expressionists and Surrealists that architecture should be at once a “prosthesis,” – attached to the body, and “prophylactic,” – regenerative.15

The Theatre as an Automist Training Ground

“The stylistic metaphor … as suspect as the functional solution, … exactly calibrated interrelations of body and … subjected [it] to dispassionate scrutiny.”16 Kiesler, a part of this experimental and provocative progression, directed importance onto relation of the body in space. Prompted by modernist technique: “the system of the object, of the body, of the optical,”17 yet, uninclined to its codified formality, Kiesler experimented with technocratic approach to produce projects that aimed to organise spaces of control, purportedly in “liberation of the inhabitant.” Their exterior and interior surfaces meant to exceed the limits of the architectural body, “as if a skin modulating interior life,”18 with the purpose of habituating man ‘relaxed,’ and ‘unconsciously.’ These motives are most prevalent in his designs for Endless Theatres and cinemas, around which the study of this dissertation is based. Bergson’s call for situations of pure automatism and Brecht’s definition of ‘epic theatre,’ would allow Kiesler and other early twentieth-century designers to consider the audience as a “mechanomorphic” group and therefore experiment in the extremes of human autonomy and perception.

Depero, Fortunato. Ballet plastic, 1918. Little Review on the International Theatre Exposition, Winter Review 1926. Marionettes as automatons replacing actors. Courtesy of the California Institue of the Arts Library. In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.75.

Part III

Actor-less Stages: The Modern Mannequin as both Intimate and Alien “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.”1 – Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

Fathers of the modern theatre,2 Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, shared an interest in the autonomic fantasy and its synthetic potential for use in theatre. The former created stages that relied on abstract plastic forms, anonymous objects, to which the actors would have to engage and respond while also coordinating their movements to the rhythms of lighting effects that dictated the scenic atmosphere. Appia opposed the convention of “actors,” demanding autocratically for their exact elimination, reducing him/her to an “object,” or a “spot of colour.”3 He hoped to replace with marionettes and automatons so that the stage could become actor-less and, in light of technological advancement, a “living machine” of mechanically motile parts. “Architecture came to life as the body became automated.”4 In this action, ‘human autonomy’ had been lost and automatist ambition stamped with horror. 35

Part III

In 1932, Rudolf Arnheim stated that often in the case of the stage and screen, “the best effects are almost always achieved by ‘acting’ as little as possible” and “the development [should be towards] using the actor as one of the ‘props.’”5 However, does this notion only serve to promote the de-spiriting modernist paradigm of worker-become-machine, and exacerbate cultural fear toward the conflation of humanity with technology? To my mind, it rings more of Corbusian ideals for modular men coded to environment, or represents a cog in well-oiled assemblage reflective of Fordism, than resonate with Kiesler’s standpoint on architecture as a “living machine” for the benefits of man. The uncanny6 effects of “usurpation of the subject [for] a sign” or symbol – in the use of figurine for actor – evokes an uneasiness and paralysis in the viewer’s readiness to express empathy.7 In his study of “The Marionette in Theatre,” Remo Bufano deemed proposals by Craig and Appia as too extreme to influence mass affection from an audience, as it could not relate to an automaton’s complete lack of emotion.8 The interchangeability of the body and mechanical replacement cannot be fully realised. The mannequin is intimate, but “there is no facsimile of the aura.”9 In talking about the difference between audience and actor relations in film and on stage, Pirandello hits upon the crisis of automation: “The aura which surrounds Macbeth on stage cannot be divorced from the aura which, for the living spectators, surrounds the actor who plays him. What distinguishes the shot in the film, … is that the camera is substituted for the audience. As a result the aura surrounding the actor is dispelled …, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor … the audience’s empathy … is really an empathy with the camera.”10

Actor-less Stages

This demands a rethink of the current relationships we hold with machines and, in the case of the theatre, is appropriated to the supplanting of the actor for a prop, an action which results in dramatic alienation of the individual. Kiesler explored this relationship more sensitively, correlating architectural surface to the body11 and in doing so relieved societal anxiety for its conflation with technology in the realisation of automatist architecture.

Part III

Phillips, Lisa. Set for George Antheil’s Helen Retires. The Julliard School of Music. Constructed by Kiesler. 1934. BW Photo. New York. Phillips, Lisa. Set for Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The Julliard School of Music. Constructed by Kiesler, 1949. BW Photo. New York. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.100.

Actor-less Stages

Phillips, Lisa. Set for John Seymour’s In the Pascha’s Garden. The Julliard School of Music. Constructed by Kiesler. 1935. BW Photo. New York. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.102.

It is through these constuctions that Kiesler exemplifies how the role of the human performer could be enhanced when combined with technological techniques.

Phillips, Lisa. Detail of set for Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. 1923. BW Photo. Theatre am Kurfurstendamm, Berlin. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.40.

Part IV

Kiesler’s “Electromechanical” Sets: A “Living Architecture” for Man in Animation of the Inanimate Kiesler’s representation of the mechanical world was full of admiration rather than fear of it. Working with Karel Čapek, a Czechoslovakian playwright, in 1922,1 Kiesler designed the “electromechanical” set for R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots). In his play, Čapek told a disturbing parable of the destruction of humans at the hands of the robots of their own making – steel automatons that could outperform human labours. His theatrical work displayed a witty yet compassionate vision of humans coping with their own weaknesses amid the stresses of a high-technology age.2 He broached fear with humorous and ironic empathy and Kiesler alongside him embraced a ‘technophilic’ attitude – equally discomforted and excited in a mixture of dread of servitude and desire to master. 3

Part IV

Kiesler’s set for R.U.R. was the extreme embodiment of automated technological environment: “Compiled from the most diverse apparatuses and machine parts (megaphone, seismograph, tangra device, iris diaphragm, light bulb) – some real, some painted. According to their functions, the devices could send light signals or sounds, as well as project films or perform optical illusions with mirrors.”4 This sparked a phenomenal passion of Kiesler’s and he continued to design sets with “electromechanical” ambition in Berlin. With director Stahl Nachbauer, he used cinematographic effects to envelop the actors within mechanical scenery and challenge the spectator’s field of vision, submerging the audience in lights, images, sounds and movement. A rarefied atmosphere imbued with colour produced an immaterial entity that moved rhythmically through the space to automatically engage the body. Within a chaotic abundance of elements, the body was not given time to rationalise or perceive distinctly but rather was overpowered and made to react instinctively. Vision itself is what is experienced in that moment and it takes on shapes that could be those of a psychotic delirium. Awash with illusory effects and innovative filmic techniques, Kiesler’s stages astonished. “A whole abstract forest of neon lights, brilliantly coloured, projecting from the ceilings, walls and floors,” would dance between screens flooded with water “making them beautifully translucent.” “In fact, throughout the entire play, everything was in constant change and movement. Lights shone on the audience, the side walls moved.”5 The tactility of these automated effects elicited reaction in the viewer that was both physical and psychological.

“Electromechanical” Sets

The ‘tangra’ device, a combination of plane and concave mirrors, opened new portals into perceptions of automatist ambition – in switching between live-action onstage to projected images of action offstage, the audience was left to wander: Are these people real, images, or machines? Like Bergson, Kiesler believed a split had formed between reality and vision, between “matter and memory,”6 and that this could be utilised for automatist architecture in its symbolic ambiguity. “[A] spooky world created out of nothing … a masterwork in its simplicity.”7 Richter remarked on the efficacy of the simple mechanisms Kiesler employed in his design for Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, 1923.8 Between angled ceiling, floor and walls, its originality in composition was to contract the spectator’s vision to a single point – on the emperor, sitting alone in a desolate room – and then, retract and respond to the play’s evolving parameters as it progressed: “Accompanied by the increasing beat of the drum, the panicked Emperor appeared plagued by melancholic visions … The red- and black-coloured sets began to open up and move back and forth in syncopated rhythm. … the story culminated with the stage sets contracting to their original position, as the Emperor shot himself.”9 Kiesler emphasised his stage designs as a series of “rhythmic unfolding constructions, contracting and expanding in space.”10 Using constructivist theatre techniques adapted from Vesnin and Meyerhold, Kiesler’s set “devices” animated the stage through sequences of dynamic spatial compositions enabled by the mobility of its parts. Set in incessant motion, the stage was no longer static and could actively engage with its audience. This environment motivated bodily response informed by its structure that, in turn, responded to the performative event, the play itself.

Part IV

Kiesler, Frederick. Stage design for Eugene O’Neill, Emporer Jones. 1923. Photo Collage. Berlin. From the catalog of “Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik,” Vienna 1924. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Kiesler, Frederick. Stage design for Eugene O’Neill, Emporer Jones. 1923. Plan Drwaing. Berlin. In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.45.

“Electromechanical” Sets

Phillips, Lisa. Stage design for Eugene O’Neill, Emporer Jones. 1934. BW Photos of Models and Sets. Lustspieltheater, Berlin. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.100.

Part IV

Kiesler suggested that by moving the floors and walls in conflation to the actors’ rhythms, rather than the reverse relationship proposed by Craig, an endless illusory reel of cinematographic effects might unfold – similar to stretching out a roll of film. In the discovery of this relationship that suggested the sensation of moving – living – space, Kiesler saw the aconscious observer as perceiving their surroundings in distractive vibrations that would stimulate autonomic – unconscious – responses.11 By associating architectural idea with early experimental animation techniques,12 Kiesler repositions architecture as the creation of “spatial films.”13 By tying technology intrinsically to the production of space, he highlights the importance in their relationship and introduces mechanical intervention as a tool that may support, if not supplement human experience, rather than surpass, alienate or overrun it. By naturalising modern technology and its spatial forms, Kiesler’s methodologies work to alleviate concerns for living alongside mechanisation. In his motivation to animate the stage using automated technologies into “living space,” Kiesler’s “electromechanical” sets are successful; however, within them he does not prioritise ‘personal autonomy.’ This is because “in the theatre each spectator must lose his individuality in order to be fused into complete unity with the actors,”14 as a greater effect is given by the simultaneous response of the collective than by the sum of the unique responses of individuals. This is a notion explored more fully in his design of the Space Stage.

“Electromechanical” Sets

Bogner, Dieter. Backdrop in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. with accentuations, 1923, Reproduction, BW Photo; Ink on baryta paper, cardboard, tape. Berlin. In Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Barbel Vischer, Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten: Architectur – Kunst – Design = Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions: Architecture – Art – Design, (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), pp.124-125.

Tatlin, Vladimir. Model for Monument to the Third International. 1920. BW Photo. Berlin. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.110.

Part V

Space Stage - ‘Automatons’ Moved ‘Along Spiral Ramps’(II): Rollercoasters and Circuses “The Didactic Play,” “The didactic play … facilitates and suggests the interchange between audience and actors, and vice versa, through an extreme economy of theatrical devices.”1 Kiesler resolved that the Space Stage, or Raumbühne, would directly link the stage with the audience, its evolution deemed necessary by the “new spirit” that had burst the boundaries of traditional theatre.2 Conceived at the ‘International Exhibition of New Theatre Technique’ in Vienna, 1924,3 it habituated freecirculation and -interaction between actors, spectators and environment stimulated in spiralled forms that created the “tension, rhythm and interplay necessary for … modern theatre.”4 49

Part V

“Theatre on a Dais,” Or, “The filling in of the orchestra pit. This abyss, which separates the players from the audience as though separating the dead from the living; …. has steadily decreased in significance.”5 The Space Stage was a physical element added to mediate this disconnect. In the construction of continuous space, it was “a spiral ramp,” “circulating around a central platform”6 upon which actors moved up and down, almost automatically, in uninterrupted flow. Through “abolition of the static axis,”7 Kiesler “situated the audience and actors together in continual movement.”8 Its structure grew in a coil that extended through the space of the audience to blur division and simultaneously engage players and audience. Through this stage device, Kiesler established a direct relationship with the architecture and interactively addressed the viewer. The form of the Space Stage is often likened to a rollercoaster, looping around to encircle itself in an endless Möbius strip. Within this space, Kiesler indicated that the distinction of “the actor” and “the scenery” could disappear completely. Through ideas softened from Appia’s annihilation of the human performer, “plastic forms created from glassy balloon materials would comprise the space of an [elastic] atmosphere invoked by film projection.”9 Although previously practiced in the compulsion of the unconscious collective, Kiesler here is more overtly open to employ pure automatist tactics, whilst remaining resistant to its extremes. Rather than replace the human character completely, Kiesler initiates instead an immersion of the animate within the inanimate – a synthesis of the actor with the visual and tactile fields of film. Hybrid creatures – evolved into part-men, part-immaterial object – dance in front of the empathetic and perceptive eye of the audience and they too are offered opportunity to lose themselves in technological lavishness.

Space Stage: Rollercoasters and Circuses

Phillips, Lisa. Kiesler and friends during rehearsal Space Stage, â&#x20AC;&#x153;International Exhibition of New Theatre Tevhniques,â&#x20AC;? 1924. BW Photo. Konzerthaus, Vienna. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), pp.36, 38.

Part V

Kiesler, Frederick. Spiral Plan Development for Autonomic Action, 1924. Drawings. Paris. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), pp. 45, 53.

Space Stage: Rollercoasters and Circuses

Endless Theatre Plans

Kiesler, Frederick. Endless Theatres Devlopment, 1924. Drawings and model. Paris.

In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), pp. 45, 53.

Part V

Tuszynzky, Ladislaus. Die RaumbĂźhne. 1924. Cartoon. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna. Berlin. In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.64.

Space Stage: Rollercoasters and Circuses

The Space Stage received harsh criticism over its form and ‘machine aesthetics.’ Karl Kraus likened it to the “serpentine”10 pathways of major road constructions, wherein the imagination “[paints] scenarios for [it] that include traffic noises and a pugilistic atmosphere.”11 Furthermore, the mechanisations of its particular tectonics demanded “a new performance scenario for mechanical, abstract events of action.”12 The mechanised stage décor did not lend itself easily, nor flexibly, to even the most contemporary performance, and created a paradoxical situation in which the architecture reconstructed the art so dramatically it could no longer support it. Thus, the project seems to me to be a form of “hard” technological determinism, where the agency of technology proves overbearing. “The Space Stage represented an oversized gymnastic scaffolding to which their choreography had to adapt … detached from its dramatic function; it became a symbol [of] the [Constructivist] movement.”13 On Kiesler’s behalf, I offer Benjamin’s suggestion that “the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, while the truly new is criticised with aversion.”14 Kiesler’s theatre confronted fears of technological conflation between author, actor and space with revolutionary ambition that Deleuze did not conceive possible in such “control societies.”15 Part of a process of morphology and remodelling of the stage that had been circulating since the seventeenth century, Kiesler contributed to the meaningful elaboration of spatial ideas relevant to the dynamism of contemporary life.16

Part V

Alternatively and around the same time, Moholy-Nagy proposed that his Total Theatre should enlist the “everyday mechanics” of the circus. Costumes, poses and makeup of clowns and circus performers17 more readily incorporated the body of the human performer and defined it separately from the technological environment. Both Kiesler and Moholy-Nagy held humans in higher regard than automatons for the stage scenario: Nagy chose to exaggerate human features and gestures to elicit audience reaction, and Kiesler exemplified bodily action through fusing it with cinematographic atmosphere in mechanised rhythm – “Subjects and objects were to be modulated into an endlessly unified whole that motivated the body and mind to wander autonomically.”18 However, from Kiesler’s proposal arises a curious set of complications: On the one hand, the stage functions and modulates to bodily action, acting effectively as a “living machine” for man. On the other, mechanical rhythm and illusionary sceneries automated by machine-technologies manipulate bodily perception, and in turn movement, for spectator and actor. In relaxed and distractive, ‘aconscious’ states idealised by Bergson and Brecht,19 the ‘mass’ effectively acts as an automaton – it performs autonomically according to its surroundings. Both scenarios suggest a form of automatism – one vital, the other mechanical 20 – and it is difficult to separate the two in architectural practice. The Space Stage project, intentionally or otherwise as Phillips puts, undermined “critical effort to inform society of what is it experiencing as it [created] environments that [motivated] viewers unwittingly to action.”21 We are prompted to ask, how far should we let these environments composed of plastic forms motivate our bodies, “devoid of active conscious thinking,”22 as automatons? And, is this action freeing or destructive?

Space Stage: Rollercoasters and Circuses

Phillips, Lisa. Kiesler and Leger in fornt of Space Stage, 1924. BW Photo. Vienna.

In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p140.

Kiesler, Frederick. Vision Machine Study. 1937-41. Diagram showing perception and degrees of consciousness and unconsciousness. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna.

In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.157.

Part VI

Bretonian Surrealism: Fundamental Problems with the ‘Autonomic’ that led to the ‘Vital’ “Automatism is to resolve the opposition of perception and representation; objective chance, the opposition of determination and freedom.”1

- Hal Foster, “Compulsive Beauty”

“The [First] Manifesto of Surrealism,” written by Breton in 1924, defines surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”2 – a “violent liberation that reaches out for a better life in the heart of the technological age that corrupts our cities.”3 ‘Surrealist automatism’ was hence described as, “a ‘magical dictation’ that renders one a mechanical automaton, a recording machine, an uncanny being … ambiguously sentient, neither animate nor inanimate.”4 In 1930, however, its Second Manifesto condemned automatism as “a continuous misfortune.”5 “One is possessed marvellously but mechanically,” “a marvellous figure, but driven rather than free.”6

Part VI

Bergson describes walking in this state: “I take a walk in a town seen then for the first time. At every … corner I hesitate, uncertain where I am going. I am in doubt; and I mean by this that alternatives are offered to my body, that my movement … is discontinuous … Later, … I shall go about it mechanically, without having any distinct perception of the objects I am passing. … I began in a state in which I distinguished only my perception; I shall end in a state in which I am hardly conscious of anything but automatism…”7 Bergson speaks of a psychic “involuntary” mechanism that compels the walker along their certain path. What we politely call “way-finding” is surely a tactic of manipulation – a marvellous compulsion rather than liberation, and in here lies the fundamental problem of pure automation and the architecture that renders us in this state. “The question of the constraints of the conscious mind [obscures] the more important question of the constraints of the unconscious.” Where we prioritise the unconscious in trying to activate or facilitate “free,” instinctual, autonomic movement, a part of the being is lost. This architecture may not be liberatory at all, “as it decentres the subject too radically,” and in this way, “automatism reveal[s] a … mechanism that threaten[s] a literal disintegration of the subject.”8 Kiesler’s most critical objective was to shift “psychic automatism, from an interior mental process to one [re-centred] upon the body in space.”9 Architecture and film both serve as “covert training ground for changes in apperception … but … can also fall prey to the politics, ethics and economics of capitalist society and world culture.”10 In ongoing struggle between control over the mass and power of the individual, the built environment is able to hone human habits, which are “by their very nature … unconscious – autonomic.”11

Fundamental Problems with the ‘Autonomic’

Thus, we are not always in control of our relationship with it. Implementation of automatist techniques, just as in the integration of digital technologies in modern practice, should be to complement human existence, however, there is no guarantee that these avant-garde tools will not be borrowed back as weapons, as Baudelaire suggests probable.12 L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui wrote this on Kiesler’s architecture in 1949: “but does it not seem [to pursue] one goal: to reach Man, to destroy him in some fashion to recreate him, and to let him eject a new ‘elan’ of imagination and liberty?”13 Liberatory architecture14 strips the subject of subjective input and functional properties of the conscious to reveal concealed and unexpected associations so movement through its space seems effortless. Meanwhile the architect must examine “subject-object relations” and the problems surrounding objectification so as to not lose the ‘self’ completely within the ‘other.’ Foster writes in Compulsive Beauty that far from dissociation of personality, automatism in architecture should strive to reach this ‘idyllic space’ as a synthetic end to re-associative means.15 Concerns for free will and personality haunt automatist aspirations, “architecture [being] complicit in the training of our own subjectivity – or the objectification of … buildings as well as [ourselves] … Our behaviour is constructed as much as it is instinctive.”16 To preserve individual-determinism, or ‘self-autonomy,’ within a predetermined, mechanised world, the architect should produce vital forms that adapt and modulate to the rapid changes occurring in modern life. Kiesler’s wariness to rely solely on machine technologies to achieve this relieves his architecture from authoritarian tendencies and leads him to a ‘vital’ rather than ‘mechanical’ automatism.

Part VI

“The performances of mechanical art-toys unfortunately are, by their very nature, as repetitious and limited as push-button releases of jukeboxes.” “Sculptures as electronic marionettes, architecture as engineering antics, amusing as they may be … must not lure us from the real issue.”17

Fundamental Problems with the ‘Autonomic’

Kiesler, Frederick. Correalism Chart showing evolution of ‘the knife.’ 1939. Diagram. From “On Correalism and Biotechnique,” Architectureal Record. Berlin. In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.150.

Part VI

Kiesler, Frederick. Biotechnical motion study. 1938. Collaged Drawing. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna. Kiesler, Frederick. â&#x20AC;&#x153;From Dificiency to Efficiency,â&#x20AC;? time scale chart. 1938. Drawing Collage. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna.

In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), pp.142, 143.

Verging on a New World Culture: “Vital–” rather than “Robotic–” “[Humans are] not machines, but freedom-loving animals, far-ranging minds and God-like spirits, who find themselves subordinated to machines.”18

- Aldous Huxley, “Prisons.”

Intrinsic to the human is a ‘force’ that motivates action and “shape[s] the growth of outer forms.”19 Deleuze called it the soul.20 Richter, a close friend and associate of Kiesler,21 proposed ‘rhythm’ as the principle life force of animate form and fundamental link between people and architecture. An “inner natureforce which directly forms and animates ideas,”22 it enlivens plastic art and animates the inanimate. For Kiesler, vital architecture contained the nature of organic life in the presence of this ‘inner-force’ he called Vitalbau.23 He believed that live actors provided the ‘inner-life force’ necessary to shape theatre design, and as such, the aura of the performer outweighed the efficiencies of mechanical props. Deleuze writes: “Living matter [does not exceed] mechanical processes, but … mechanisms are not sufficient to be machines. A mechanism is faulty not for being too artificial to account for living matter, but for not being mechanical enough, for not being adequately machined.” “the organism is infinitely machined, a machine whose every part or piece is a machine.”24 Futurists embraced humans as truly being machines in this way – perfectly and infinitely mechanised organisms – however, Kiesler along the lines of Expressionism and Italian Futurism sought to engage with human autonomy separate from the mechanical, prioritising health of body and mind over industrial progress – this would be installed in a newly forming epoch wherein Kiesler would evolve Biotechnics and Correalism.25 65

Part VI

Kiesler, Frederick. We live through Correalsim, 1937-42, Drawing; Ink on Paper, New York.

In Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Barbel Vischer, Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten: Architectur – Kunst – Design = Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions: Architecture – Art – Design, (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), p.16.

Kiesler, Frederick. Emperor Jones stage set collage. > 1942. Collage. From Hans Richter, “Rhythm,” in Little Review on the International Theatre Exposition, Winter, 1926. Courtesy of California Institute of the Arts Library. In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.56.

Fundamental Problems with the ‘Autonomic’

Part VI

This epoch “rediscovered the social conscience,” and in its discovery, the need for unification between consciousness and the environment. In light of extraordinary technological progress, “the twentieth-century [saw] the dissolution, of unity,” between art, science and architecture, upon which the Renaissance was built. The new reality of the plastic arts manifested as a correlation of the needs of the conscious and the psyche.26 Denis Maher writes that, “much like Breton’s early automatism, [Kiesler’s architecture] is conceived as an autonomous mental process, a way of building that aligns with innermost needs. … In freeing the act of building from wealth, [and other] limitations, … he asserts the absolute primacy of [its] design, [combining] the immediacy of space with the immediacy of [the] living … Drawing upon natural will [and] instinct, Kiesler affirms the innermost nature of architectural production.”27 Although Bergson dreamed of a world in which its inhabitants have “[eliminated] all memory,” dissolved personality and past recollection of experiences that harm ‘pure’ perceptive ability,28 these are not the beings we design for. Selfdetermination and the psyche separate humanity from ‘robots,’ thus, we cannot design scenarios in which we expect them to behave exactly alike. Therefore we can choose to describe Bergson’s walk differently, more sensually and spiritually: “Unity of movement is an affair of the soul, and almost a conscience.” “The motive force sometimes is mechanically explained through the action of a subtle surrounding, [otherwise it] is understood from the inside … of the body,” “the cause of movement that is already in the body, … only awaits the suppression of an obstacle from the outside.”29

Fundamental Problems with the ‘Autonomic’

Essentially this part describes the pressures in discussing automatist architecture. There is a compromise to reach in designing for the self-deterministic nature of humans and the development of an environment that supports the body, mind, and spirit completely. Kiesler wrestled with desire to create controlled, technological environments that addressed these inner-most needs. In his design for the Film Arts Guild Theatre in New York, he suggested enticing the viewer into a semi-autonomic state – a “semiorganic object” arrayed to counter the purely technological.

Phillips, Lisa. Film Arts Guild Theatre, auditorium. 1929. BW Photo. New York.

In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.17.

Part VII

Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’: The subject in its Singularity “It’s as if, even before [we have entered] into the [movie] theatre, the classic conditions of hypnosis [are] in force … it’s not in front of the film and because [of it] … that [we] dream off – its without knowing it, even before [we] become a spectator.”1 - Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie House”

Kiesler’s Film Arts Guild Theatre, 1929,2 rethought how film should be presented to the masses. Its design followed projects that instigated covert mechanisms of control through synthetic strategies in theatres, shop fronts and department stores.4 The facade employed seductive “tactile qualities” that provoked “habit” – namely rhythm and asymmetry. Through window designs, Kiesler first exemplified the powers of asymmetry over the body, theorising that conscious articulation of the gaze through non-symmetric compositions promoted dynamism of movement. “The rhythm which results from asymmetry is mobile and kinetic. Therefore, if rightly composed, it directs the eye,” and in turn the body, “to the point to which you wish it directed.”5 71

Part VII

Kiesler, Frederick. Funnel effect. 1928-29. Sketch. Courtesy of Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 1930. Kiesler, Frederick. Rhythmic storefront designs. 1928-29. Drawing. Courtesy of Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 1930. Kiesler, Frederick. Asymmetric show window design. 1928-29. Drawing. Courtesy of Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 1930.In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.93.

Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’

Kiesler, Frederick. Film Arts Guild Theatre. 1929. Photograph of exterior facade and entry. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna.

In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.93.

Part VII

Contraction was the means by which to focus the attention of the ‘consciously perceiving’ passer-by, not the individual who perceived ‘purely’ and automatically. Capturing the concentration of the conscious observer is a distinct challenge for the “psycho-function” of liberatory architecture, as it should not override all powers of self-determination and personal-association. Kiesler’s movie house juxtaposed planes and forms in different colours and materials, inspired by “Dada and De Stijl tactics, [to draw] the attention of the modern city dweller.”6 Linear patterns continued into the space of the lobby following the contours of the ceilings, floors and walls to which the body moved instinctively and the eye fluttered constantly, distractedly, between, until it found itself resolved in front of the movie-screen. Whilst the image space controlled movement of the body through its corridors, the continuous path of alternating black and white opaque glass in rhythmic sequence “[emphasised] the purpose of the building as home of moving pictures.”7 The automated response I believe Kiesler desired of the movie-goer was not to rid associations made in previous visits to the cinema, but rather use architectural language to reinforce these with imagery of rapidly unfurling scrolls and reels.8 Consequently, the individual assumes their position before the screen with conscious familiarity, thereby in a relaxed state. “Architecturally, there is an enormous difference between the theatre and the cinema.” “While in the theatre each spectator must lose his individuality … to be fused into complete unity … [in] the cinema … [the] most important quality of the auditorium [is] its power to suggest concentrated attention and at the same time destroy the sensation of confinement that may occur easily when the spectator concentrates on the screen.”9

Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’

Phillips, Lisa. Film Arts Guild Theatre, foyer 1929. BW Photo. New York. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.18.

Part VII

Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’

Roland Barthes best describes how the spectator enters the cinema in a prehypnotic state to “[bury] himself in a dim anonymous, indifferent cube where that festival of affects known as film will be presented.” The “cinema situation” enwraps the viewer distinctly from the theatre and is a pleasure more relatable with reading a novel than watching a play – “how many members of the cinema audience slide down into their seats as if into a bed, coats or feet thrown over the row in front!” The movie house is “a site of availability, … It is in this urban dark that the body’s freedom is generated.”10 As discussed, the theatre should“[lure the audience] inside the action … as the actors on stage permit them to approach and become absorbed.”11 The cinema should attempt to maintain the focussed attention of a single individual, thereby grounding the viewer in a ‘personal-autonomy.’ Confined to themselves, the experience of the viewer is to lose touch with external realities and find themselves again in the imaginary and endless spaces projected by the film. “I am confined with the image … I fling myself upon it” “I press my nose against the screen’s mirror, against that “other” image- … with which I narcissistically identify myself; … [the image] captures me: I am glued to the representation, and it is this glue … (the pseudo-nature) of the filmed scene [I experience] its coalescence.”12

< Phillips, Lisa. Film Arts Guild Theatre, auditorium.

Bernhard, Ruth. Film Arts Guild Theatre, interior. 1929. Photograph. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna.

1929. BW Photo. New York.

In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.17.

In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.121.

Part VII

To achieve an architecture that renders the individual in this semihypnotic state, there needed to be a dismissal of the twentieth-century trend in transforming traditional proscenium stages into cinemas. Society had already grown comfortable to the technology of film and, further, its reduction of all art’s autonomy through reproducibility.13 Our age is a mechanical one. We harness the powers of digital tools as the former century embraced “the optical flying machine,” – the camera.14 It was the consensus that film had “grown mature enough to create its own form of architecture,”15 with distinct functions to that of the three-dimensional ‘real’ space of theatre. Its cultural appearance, embellished by ornamentation, distracted and assimilated the viewer, stripping them of all individuality. Against these purposes, Kiesler attempted to forego any reference to proscenium stage architecture, instead adopting a highly mechanical, technological style. “Lighting effects directed the eye to the screen, “interior lines of the theatre … [focalised] to the screen compelling unbroken attention [from] the spectator in a completely blackened room,” “Kiesler’s cinema provided for an immobile, secure spectator to be enveloped within the image – individually yet among others.”16 To celebrate in the technological and optical era, the “Screen-O-Scope” was a curtain with an opening that resembled the shape of a camera’s lens or the aperture of an eye. The individual viewed the film from “the position of a critic,”17 which by its own definition required a level of personal-autonomy and conscious thinking. Kiesler designed the space so that the viewer took on the “intimate” and “critical” role of the camera.

Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’

Though an anonymous article of apparatus, Kiesler did not ask the viewer to perform the functions of its automated parts, as in ‘mechanical automatism,’ but rather situate themselves in a secure and empowered position while watching the film. “Without intimidation from the aura of an authoritative presence,” the viewer’s perception was theoretically enhanced and freed to develop more perceptive, self-driven and personal responses – awakened to a new, conscious “presence of mind.”18

Part VII

Kiesler, Frederick. Film Arts Guild Theatre, ‘Screen-O-Scope.’ 1929. Drawings. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna.

In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.118.

Bernhard, Ruth. Film Arts Guild Theatre, view of > a position of the flexible ‘Screen-O-Scope’ movie screen. 1929. BW Photo; Gelatin silver print on baryta paper. New York. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.128.

Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’

Kiesler, Frederick. The Universal, side elevation with a view of the entrance. 1962, BW Photo; Gelatin silver print on baryta paper, mounted on cardboard. New York. In Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Barbel Vischer, Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten: Architectur – Kunst – Design = Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions: Architecture – Art – Design, (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), p.134.

Part VIII Conclusions Drawn from the ‘Universal Theatre’: “Multiplicity as a New Spatial Order” “Embedded in a building programme … is a complex matrix of ideas impacting human lives … It is important to realise that architecture is … very much about power.”1 Presented at the “Ideal Theatre” Exhibition, 1962,2 the Universal Theatre was Kiesler’s greatest theoretical proposal – “a visionary exploration [it] aimed at … [creating] architecture modulated to [evolving sets] of parameters that could expand and contract with changing user needs.”3 It was the natural conclusion of a lifelong process defining tectonic spatial form that modulated to man’s innate requirements – an ‘elastic’ architecture. In this regard, Kiesler’s final project would determine if humans can live autonomously – “freely” – within the new cultural milieu, sullied by machine-autonomy, in which they are required to exist. I believe that Jacques Ellul’s word ‘technique’4 best describes this.

Part VIII

‘Technique’ encompasses machines and other technological devices, but also “organisational methods, managerial practices, and, most [importantly], a mode or manner of thinking that is inherently mechanistic.”5 Kiesler embodies all of these in design, although perceived possibility in the definition of the term that its author did not. Ellul saw this state as a ‘fait accompli,’ completely “autonomous, selfdetermining, … independent,” and beyond human intervention.6 He confessed to “not yet know” what was to be done in order to “sound a “call to the sleeper to awake.””7 Human “somnambulism,” after all – ‘unconscious sleepwalking’ – has allowed technology “to legislate the conditions of … existence,”8 thus far. It was Kiesler’s intention to use “elastic spatial planning” as a force to raise “the sleeper’s” attention of the operational systems that comprise the environment. Langdon Winner acknowledges that when, “faced with any proposal for a new technological system, [architects] would [need to] examine the social contract implied by [the] building … How well do the proposed conditions match our best sense of who we are and what we want … society to be? Who gains and who loses power in the proposed change? Are the conditions produced by the change compatible … ?” “[This] would require building institutions in which the claims of technical expertise and those of a democratic citizenry would regularly meet face to face. [It is here that] the crucial deliberations would take place.”9 At the birth of “robotic-culture,” Kiesler’s project notably suggested an alternative approach to “engaging [with] modern power structures.”10 As a ‘vitalist,’ he attempted to generate forms that responded “to intrinsic life forces,”11 rather than celebrate technological feat in designs for machine efficiencies. His Universal Theatre was a “[moulded,] free-form auditorium and skyscraper.”

Conclusions Drawn from the ‘Universal Theatre’

A “vast potato” or “unborn moose,”12 within its organic form a thirty-storey tower housed “theatre, film, offices, and sporting events … [that took place] simultaneously.”13 In its programmatic overlapping, it promoted “dispersive relationship,” of various human engagement14 within an environment that was “manifold,” not solely reliant on mechanical means to become adaptable and flexible. Though “situated within a highly controlled multimedia environment,” the Universal Theatre supported the revolutionary, and socio-political action of this new milieu. To quote Benjamin, its elasticity “[confronted] the technologically armed environment,” to challenge technological aggression and “functionalist modern dogma in favour of multiplicity as a new spatial order.”15 It merged “theatre, art, and business, in support of a new open … inclusive,” and immersive community that diffused the physical and social boundaries of architecture – a thereby ‘liberatory’ environment. “Space flowed universally – endlessly – … as actors and spectators moved about [it freely] with … continuity, alongside changes in their environment.” Through mass-communication, “a unified environment [was created] where it was ultimately unclear whether the artists were free to affect the lives of workers, or to what extent business would define the role of art.” Essentially, the ‘Universal’ exemplifies how certain design methodologies evoke control, whether multimedia-technological or organisational, that can eliminate controversies of governing-powers and offer greater freedom of movement in open and engaging, ‘liberatory’ environments.16

Part VIII

Kiesler, Frederick. Universal Theatre. 1960-61. Longitudinal section drawing. Courtesy of the Austrian Federick Kiesler Private Foundation Archive, Vienna.

Harvard College Library. Model of the Universal Theatre. 1960-61. Aluminium. Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney

In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.275.

Museum of American Art, 1989), p.94.

Conclusions Drawn from the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Universal Theatreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Langley, Alex. Universal Theatre. 1960-61. Cast aluminium model of main auditorium and entry. Photograp. Courtesy of Lillian and Frederick Kiesler Papers, Archive of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Kiesler Estate. Plan for the Universal Theatre. 1960-61. Blueprint. New York.

In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.95.

In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.274.

Part VIII

Conclusions Drawn from the ‘Universal Theatre’

Harvard College Library. Model of the Universal Theatre. 1960-61. Aluminium. Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.94.

< “Seats, guardrails and interior surfaces

Kiesler, Frederick. Space Theatre for > Woodstock. 1932. Theatre scheme organised for singular mid-sized performance; one small theatre event, and one larger beneath with expanded mezzanine; and one large main event in main auditorium with mezzanine. Series of photographs - “Manifold” Space. Architectural Forum.

modulated to support multiple bodies in motion correlated with shifting actions.” - Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.295.

Kiesler, Frederick. Universal Theatre, balcony seat drawing. “Typical Balcony - Seating and Standing.” 1960-61. Drawings. Courtesy of Harvard Theatre Collection.

In Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.290.

Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.118.

Part VIII

‘Elastic Space’ as a Prototype for Future Automatist Design From this dissertation, I hope the reader gleans better understanding of how technology and architecture, in both autonomous and deterministic ways influence and may be used to complement life in modernity. Kiesler offers a variety of means – visual, haptic, rhythmic, asymmetrical and organisational – that aid human autonomy over mechanical technologies. It is through a theoretical analysis of his architecture that the use of contemporary robotics and postmodern human perception17 of automatism can start to be resolved. Although not a specific solution, Kiesler’s “elasticity” offers “a guiding principle for form and structure.” Phillips concludes that, “twentieth-century desires to create elastic spaces were perhaps more informative of modern latent drives, … conflicts, and artistic ambitions than they were producers of viable tectonic proposition.”18 Ultimately, however, there is a lot to learn from these responsive, technological systems that at the height of mechanical revolution still managed to evade ethical hardships of technological determinism and promote human autonomy from the machine. Kiesler escapes Bergson’s horrifying depictions of humans made to become automatons in creating multimedia environments that infuse with and complement human existence. He designed architecture with distinct psycho-functions that prioritised human-autonomy and freedom in scenarios that retained selfdeterminism, as in the Film Arts Guild Theatre, or else assimilated the individual into a “mechanomorphic” mass, as in his Endless Theatres. In naturalising modern technologies and adopting ‘vitalist’ perspective amid such “controlling, organising, and delimiting automated systems,” his work becomes fundamental to revisit today.19

ENDNOTES Notes to: Preface: Introduction to “Automatism” Marcel Jean, History of Surrealist Painting, (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p.118. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), in particular parts I-VI. 3 For further interest in early automatons, I suggest reading Mark E. Rosheim, Leonardo’s Lost Robots, (Berlin: Springer, 2006) 1

ENDNOTES

Notes to: I. Technological Determinism in Modernity: ‘Robotic Culture’ William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” in Essays in Pragmatism, (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p.40; see in Merritt Roe Smith, Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), “Introduction,” pp. ix, x, xi. 2 Ibid., p. xi. 3 Ibid., p. xii. 4 Ibid., p. xi. 5 I have described these terms in the same way in which Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith choose to define them. 6 Ibid., pp. xii, xiii. 7 Ibid., p xii. 8 Ibid., p 312. 9 Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” in Marx, Does Technology Drive History?, p.26. 10 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory and Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), p.174, 176. First published in Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985. See in Anthony Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs,” in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), p.148. 11 Jonathan Hale, William W. Braham, Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p.14. 12 Ibid. 1

Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” p.263. 14 Braham, Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, p.40. Marx, Does Technology Drive History?, “Introduction,” p. xii. 15 Ibid., p. xiv. 16 Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), p.311. 17 Braham, Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, p.14. 18 Ibid. 19 Lisa Phillips, “Architect of Endless Innovation,” in Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.7. 20 Ibid. 13

ENDNOTES

Braham, Rethinking Technology, p.70. Marx, Does Technology Drive History?, “Introduction,” p. xiii. 23 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.304. 24 Ibid., p.19. 25 Ibid., p.15. 26 Ibid., pp.24, 4. 27 Two phases of the Industrial Age: “Paleotechnic” and “Neotechnic.” (1910). Patrick Geddes 21

described the first as being wastefully industrial, leading to “dissipation of energies,” and “deterioration of life,” and the Neotechnic rooted in nature. I urge the reader to look at the chapter called, “1915: Patrick Geddes Paleotechnic and Neotechnic,” in Braham’s Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, pp. 19-26, in relation to this part of discussion in my dissertation. 28 See “Architecture and Its Robota,” in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, in particular, pp.303, 312314. 29 Ibid., p.7. 30 Robert Samuels, “Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture, Technology, and Education,” Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, ed. Tara McPherson, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p.219. 31 Memo from “technocentrist” Wade Roush to the author, March 31, 1992 (in the author’s possession); see in Marx, Does Technology Drive History?, p.2. 32 Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs,” p.150. 33 Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” pp.253-254. 34 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.314. Automatism was a prevalent concern of the ‘new psychology’ in France of the late nineteenth century; see writings by Jean-Marie Charcot, Pierre Janet and Jan Goldstein. 36 Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” pp.253-254. 37 Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs,” p.147. 38 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” pp.174, 176. See in Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p.148. 39 Ibid. 40 Quote by Villiers de I’sle-Adam; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.303. 41 Henri Bergson, “The World of Dreams,”; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, pp.187-188. 42 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.330. 35

ENDNOTES

Anthony Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs,” p.148. Pierre Janet as quoted by Jean Starobinski, “Freud, Breton, Myers,” L’Arc 34 (special issue on Freud, 1969), p.49. See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993), pp.3 & 221. 45 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.120. 46 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol.1 Technics and Human Development, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1966), p.200; see in Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” in Marx, Does Technology Drive History?, p.29. 43 44

Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p.16.

Notes to: II. ‘Automatons’ Moved ‘Along Spiral Ramps’(I): The Theatre as a Training Ground for ‘Automatist’ Action ‘Distractive, conscious stimulation.’ 2 Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Zirkis, Variete,” 47; English translation, “Theatre, Circus, Variety,” p.57; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.76. 3 Benjamin, “What Is the Epic Theater? (II),” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, p.302. Originally published in Mass und Wert, July-August 1939. Gesammelte Scriften, II, 532-539.; trans. Harry Zohn. 4 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.76. 5 Frederick Kiesler, “Foreward,” in Frederick Kiesler and Jane Heap, eds., Exhibition Catalogue of International Theatre Exposition (New York: Steinway Building, 1926), p.5.; see in Phillips, 1

Elastic Architecture, p.29. 6 A debate that sparked in light of divergent opinions on the radical projects displayed at the “International Theatre Exposition, 1926.” See “Old Theatre Is Dead, Says Kiesler,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 7, in Frederick Kiesler Papers 1923-1993, microfilm reel 127, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; see also in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.30. 7 See Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, p.254. 8 Frederick Kiesler, “Foreward,” in Frederick Kiesler and Jane Heap, eds., Exhibition Catalogue of International Theatre Exposition (New York: Steinway Building, 1926), 18; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.29. 9 Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,”p.268.

ENDNOTES

Ibid., p.267. This would come to be known throughout his life’s work as “Endless” Space. Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.304. 12 Ibid., p.80. 13 “It is usual to describe these twentieth-century developments in terms of a first and second generation of philosophers of technology. The first generation could be traced back to Comte, Marx, Ruskin, and other nineteenth-century figures who were all in some way reacting—both positively and negatively—to the impact of the industrial revolution on the social and cultural 10

conditions of the time … Subsequent writing in the 1950s and 1960s led to the emergence of a distinct and identifiable field, including the urban and architectural writers Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion, alongside philosophers and sociologists like Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, Ivan Illich, and Jurgen Habermas. What unites this disparate group of thinkers is the belief in the autonomy of technological development—a sense that society’s tools had turned against their creators in a kind of Frankenstein scenario—locking us irrevocably within a technological “system” (to use Ellul’s term) or a “megamachine,” as Mumford described it.” See in Braham, Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, p.15. 14 Anthony Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs,” p.149. 15 Ibid., p.147. 16 Ibid., p.149. 17 Ibid. 18 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.120.

Notes to: III. ‘Automatons’ Moved ‘Along Spiral Ramps’(I): The Theatre as a Training Ground for ‘Automatist’ Action See in Vidler’s “Homes for Cyborgs”, p.147. As described by Phillips in Elastic Architecture, p.67. 3 Ibid. 4 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.70. 5 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.260. 6 Uncanny, here effectively means anxiety. 7 See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p.6. For a more in depth reading on notions of the Uncanny see; Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny.” 1

ENDNOTES

Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.74. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, p.260. 10 Ibid., pp.259, 260. In particular, part IX as a whole. 11 Within “Elastic” space. 8

Notes to: IV. Kiesler’s “Electromechanical” Sets: Finding a “Living Architecture” for Man in Animation of the Inanimate Martin Banham, The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.158. 2 Ibid. 3 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p.152. 4 Barbara Lesak, ‘Visionary of the European Theater’ in Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, (New York: Whiney Museum of American Art, 1989), p.40. 5 Lillian Kielser, “Frederick Kiesler Biography,” (New York, October 31, 1980), p.167, Frederick Kiesler Papers 1923-1993 microfilm reel 127, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. See also Kiesler, “Yale School of Architecture-1947,” pp. 14, 15; read in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.41. 6 Title of Bergson’s book; Henri Bergson, “Matter and Memory.” 7 Hans Richter, “Koepfe und Hinterkoepfe,” Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, Frederick Kiesler Papers, Item 48; see also Kiesler, “Yale School of Architecture – 1947,” p.15.; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.44. 1

Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.44. Frederick Kiesler, “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” interview by Thomas Creighton, Progressive Architecture, July 1961, p.111.; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.44. 10 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.55. 11 Ibid., pp.304, 306. 12 Expansion and contraction were important techniques discovered in Eggeling’s and Richter’s early scrolls and films. See in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.49. 13 Ibid., p.55 14 Frederick Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theatre (1929),” in Frederick J. Kiesler: Selected Writings, ed. Siegfried Gohr and Gunda Luyken (Ostfildren bei Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1996), p.17; see in Stephen Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.116. 8

ENDNOTES

Notes to: V. Space Stage - ‘Automatons’ Moved ‘Along Spiral Ramps’(II): Rollercoasters and Circuses Walter Benjamin, “What Is the Epic Theater? (II),” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, p.305. 2 Ibid. 3 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.52. 4 See Kiesler, “Debacles des Theaters,” in Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik, p.53; the English translation is from Friedrich Kiesler, “Debacle of Modern Theater,” in “The International Theatre Exposition New York 1926,” Little Review (Winter 1926), p.18.; and see Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.57. 5 Ibid., p.307. 6 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.130. 7 Frederick Kiesler, “Manifesto of Tensionism,” in Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Bretano’s, 1930), p.48; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.82. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p.72. 10 Karl Kraus, “Serpentinengedankengange,” Die Fackel, no.s 668-75 (December 1924), p.39; see in Barbara Lesak, ‘Visionary of the European Theater’ in Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, p.39. 11 Lesak, ‘Visionary of the European Theater,’ p.39. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings 1

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.264. 15 See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp.178-179. 16 Read more in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, pp.65-67. 17 Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Zirkis, Variete,” p.47; English trans, “Theatre, Circus, Variety,” p.52; see in Stephen. J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.74. 18 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.306. 19 See Walter Benjamin, The Relaxed Audience, in “What Is the Epic Theater? (II).” 20 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.70. 21 Ibid., p.306. 22 Ibid.

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ENDNOTES

Notes to: VI. Bretonian Surrealism: Fundamental Problems with the ‘Autonomic’ that led to the ‘Vital’ 1

Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p.16. See Andre Breton, “The Manifesto of Surrealism,” in The Autobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p.123. 3 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p.16. 4 Ibid.., p.5. 5 Ibid., p.4. 6 Ibid.., p.5. 7 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, ed. Sixth Impression, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul & W. Scott Palmer, (Edinburgh: Riverside Press, 1950), p.110. 8 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, pp.4, 5. 9 Dennis Maher, "Luxor, Endlessness and the Continuous Key: Architecture and the Esoteric in Breton, Kiesler, and Schwaller de Lubicz." Dada/Surrealism 19, (Iowa Research Online: The University of Iowa’s Institutional Repository), p.16. n. pag. Web. Available at: https://doi. org/10.17077/0084-9537.1278 [accessed on 12/01/19] 10 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.306. 11 Ibid., p.307. 12 Ibid., pp.306-308. 13 Translation from the French of the Editorial of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui,” June 1949, Frederick Kiesler Papers 1923-1993, microfilm reel 127, 1, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. See in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.264. 14 When talking about an architecture that liberates, we often mean that it offers flexibility of space in the removal of physical barriers that inhibit or overly-control movement, but we must also mention here in relation to Kiesler liberation and rejuvenation of the psyche, as well as health and physical well-being. 15 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p.4. 16 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.308. 17 Frederick Kiesler, “Towards the Endless Sculpture,” in Kiesler, The “Endless House”: Inside the Endless House: Art, People and Architecture: A Journal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), p.30. See in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.303. 18 Description of humans by Aldous Huxley in Prisons, (London: The Trianon Press, 1949), p.16. 19 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.70. 20 Read in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, (London: The Althone Press, 1993), chapter 1. 21 Richter worked alongside Kiesler at ‘G-Magazine’ during his formative years in architectural research and practice. Read in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, Chapter 1, pp.46, 47. 22 Hans Richter, “Rhythm,” in “The International Theatre Exposition New York 1926,” Little Review (Winter 1926), p.21; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.70. 23 See Frederick Kiesler, “Manifest: Vitalbau-Raumstadt-Funktionelle Architecktur,” De Stijl 6 (July 1925), pp.10-11. See in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.70. 24 Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, p.8. 2

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ENDNOTES

This dissertation does not have space to elaborate on either of these concepts further but I encourage the reader to look to Phillips, Elastic Architecture, in particular Chapter 3 “Design Correlation: Laboratory Experiments.” 26 Ulrich Conrads, “Frederick Kiesler: Magical Architecture,” in Programs and manifestos on 20th-century architecture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971), p.150. 27 Maher, "Luxor, Endlessness and the Continuous Key: Architecture and the Esoteric in Breton, Kiesler, and Schwaller de Lubicz." Dada/Surrealism 19, p.19 n. pag. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0084-9537.1278 [accessed on 12/01/19] 28 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, in particular chapter 1, pp.69-73. 29 Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, p.12. 25

Notes to: VII. Cinema – ‘Self-Autonomy’: The subject in its Singularity Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p.345. 2 Read in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, pp.112-120. 3 Ibid., pp.112-113. 4 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, (New York: Bretano’s, 1930), p.107. See in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.92. 5 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.113. 6 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, p.87. See in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.113. 7 Refer to part IV of this writing: Case Study: Kiesler’s “electromechanical” sets, specifically the discussion of the production of “spatial films.” 8 Frederick Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theatre (1929),” in Frederick J. Kiesler: Selected Writings, ed. Siegfried Gohr and Gunda Luyken (Ostfildren bei Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1996), pp.16-17; see in Stephen Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.116. 9 Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” pp.345, 346. 10 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.116. 11 Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” pp.347-348. 12 Read in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” p.258. 13 Frederick Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theatre (1929),” p.17. See in Elastic Architecture, p.116. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p.119. 17 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” p.260. 18 Ibid., this chapter in its entirety. 1

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ENDNOTES

Notes to: VIII. Conclusions Drawn from the ‘Universal Theatre’: “Multiplicity as a New Spatial Order” Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.308. Ibid., p.269. 3 Ibid., pp.276, 268. 4 See Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” p.30. 5 Ibid. 6 Ellul, “The Technological Order,” Technology and Culture 3 (fall 1962): p.10; see in Ibid. 7 Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. xxxi, xxxiii; see in Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” p.31. 8 Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a theme in Political Thought, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 202, 314, 324; see in Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” p.32. 9 Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp.55-56; see in See Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” pp.32-33. 10 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.307. 11 Ibid., p.300. 12 See Norman Nadel, “Ideal Theatres Envisioned in Crafts Museum Display,” New York World Telegraph, January 27, 1962; see also Creighton Peet, “’Ideal’ Theatres Minge Actors,” Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Virginia), February 18, 1962; clippings in Frederick Kiesler Papers, microfilm reel 128, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; see in Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.271. 13 Phillips, Elastic Architecture, p.271. 14 Ibid., p.305. 15 Ibid., pp.307, 24. 16 Ibid., pp.24, 291, 295, 300. 17 Ibid., p.25. 18 Ibid., p.305. 19 Ibid., pp. 24, 25. 1 2

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Rosheim, Mark E. Leonardo’s Lost Robots, (Berlin: Springer, 2006), p.103. Samuels, Roberts., “Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture, Technology, and Education,” Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, ed. Tara McPherson, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008) Smith, Merritt Roe, and Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994) Thun-Hohenstein, Christoph., Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Barbel Vischer, Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten: Architectur – Kunst – Design = Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions: Architecture – Art – Design, (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016) Vidler, Anthony., ‘Homes for Cyborgs,’ in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), pp.147-164.

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Undergraduate Dissertation Isabel Fox 160098455 Newcastle University 108 2018/2019