A fictional interview with Frederick Kiesler Normunds Pune r11841284 The interview takes place in the newly opened Endless House in the heart of Vienna - Karlsplatz. After almost 100 years since the first drafts were made, on the 2nd of September, 2025 the construction works were completed. During our talk the architect Frederick Kiesler gives us a tour of the once most famous unrealized architectural project, that know stands in the former place of the Wien Museum and is now open to the public.
Normunds Pūne:
Good evening Mr. Kiesler, I am very happy that you could find time in your schedule and be here for this conversation. Frederick Kiesler:
Thank you for having me. N.P. :
I want to start with a question that bothers me as a student when I take a look at your biography. You didn’t finish your studies twice, neither at the technical university nor at the art academy of vienna? What was the reasoning behind these decisions? Where the universities too conservative for you at the time and completing the degrees would have been just a waste of time?
F.K. :
Then, as a young man, I was somewhat I maximalist. Physically and emotionally I could not stand doing something that didn’t feel right or relevant. I guess I wanted to be out there in the praxis, because it delivered the necessary adrenaline to really pursue my ideas and have the chance to realize them in a scale that was just impossible at the university. And under the circumstances of pressure, that the outside world and responsibility towards others brings with itself, I learned much faster. But, in principle I hold nothing against the higher eduction, just at the time when I was a student, it was not the right fit for me.
N.P. :
Your first success came considerably early in your career, in the year 1925, you created a stage design for Karel Capeks R.U.R. and this was a foundation point for further intensive work in the realm of theatre. To put it in your own words, it was the beginning of the main idea and life-long preoccupation - the endless. Although most of the experts of your ouvre find the evidence in the spiral motive, that occured for the first time in your work, could it be that the theatre and theatre world finding itself in the state of timelesness played a substantial role?
F.K. :
Theatre offered me the necessary space for my work in that particular phase. I couldn’t do the Endless House then. Theatre liberated me since I did not have to deal with people, but with characters. Characters that as you rightfully mentioned before live in a different “fabric of time“, they are made out of different matter than we are. I think that through the work of Raumbühne I completely changed the way theatre was perceived and it was a challenge both for the actors and especially for the viewers. The conventional theatre in it’s construction reminds us of a landscape, the typical theatre set has strong picturesque qualities and mostly the same compositional elements and way of thinking that is used while painting or drawing is applied in creating a set design as well.
I find that such way of working involves too much technical thinking and it reminds me of creating numerous variations within the the given frame and then just settling for the one option. The decision is if not arbitrary, then based on dry analysis. What I was going after was a discovery of a completely new and more aware state of the space. The actors shouldn’t move along a rigid, flat, rectangular plane and “create“ the impression of a revolving plot. What they need is a space that supports them, but in itself is an independent entity. The tools that I applied to do this were purely sculptural and spatial. The stage reacts like a sculpture and this spatial awareness, confrontation with space is frightening. Our cities are just like the flat, picturesque stages of our theatres. We move through the rectangular, cut-out paths and act out our personal drama, more or less, one could say, we have the power to stop, make decisions and also escape confrontations. Our dreams, on the contrary, are built in a spatial manner and we have no control over them. The space seizes us and we can neither run away, nor close our eyes. Our only hope is to wake up. The intention of the Raumbühne was to mimic these qualities and state of dreams and nightmares. N.P. :
In 1926 you were invited to come to New York and to work on the theatre project. In some earlier interviews you have described the excitement at your arrival and the impression that this metropolis left on you. Very soon after that you became part of the cultural circles of New York, many friendships and long-lasting creative collaborations developed. The work that you created in Europe in it’s formal language was very much in the classical-avantgarde tradition. Your settlement in New York marks a gradual break with this tradition and leads to the curved, sculptural unmistakable Kislearian language of expression. My question concerns the influence of the environment on one’s work. Since Manhattan’s most decisive condition is the grid and how the city developed further was very much in reaction to it, I wonder whether the grid and the american tendency towards angular shapes in design in everyday objects that are constantly around served as something, possibly unconsciously, to rebel against? Because, in my opinion the Endless doesn’t necessarily have to be curved and smooth to “function“, the Raumbühne is a great example of it.
F.K. :
The biomorphical forms emerged together with the formulation of Corealism. I imagine a matter that finds itself in a perfect, spherical state and then the forces start to act upon it, to pull it and push it, to carve out space and to add material like clay anywhere it is necessary. The scale of the single-family house is in a way the most dramatic one and also one of the hardest to work with. I’m interested in the ordinary, in the everyday rituals. But I don’t want to teatralize it. I imagine the life of a particular New Yorker, of a person who isn’t totally anonymous in my imagination. I see that this person wants to think, look into the distance for a short time a couple of times a day. This person wants to be conscious of itself. To be conscious means to be stimulated and only constant presence of Space can provide this. The color-clock for example was an attempt to bring in the presence of the flow or ritual of the time in the everyday life. We are made out of time, that’s the material we are built of. And the material is the basis of everything - in gostronomy, in architecture, in the ordinary (everyday life). So this person that I imagined, because of the constant state of mobility that his/her senses are in, starts to notice time and to notice the Endless. Endless is comedy and tragedy, always interchanging, changing places, so that it is impossible to tell the difference. I want more tragedy and more humour in architecture and I’m sure the outcome won’t be something parametrical or biomorphical. Endless is not and was never about smoothness, take a look at the photos of the models. I’m completely against the categorization and the archeological attempts that people have made to re-model something similar in 3D softwares.
N.P. :
Mr. Kiesler one thing still isn’t quite clear to me and in my last question where I emphasized the aspect of the city, particularly New York, in the genesis of the Endless House I hoped that you would discuss and bring it more into relation with each other. Where is the Endless House positioned? Is it part of the city, a very complex social, technological and climatic organism or should we imagine it somewhere on the countryside with that particular system with it’s particular components? And I think that this aspect is crutial, because it should determine the development of the single continuum. In the metropolis I could imagine that this continuum could expand itself greatly and form a dense network of event-venues. So far, I’m quite critical of you holding yourself so much on this one particular scale that reminds one so much of a single family house, that could be reproduced with some variations and overtake the suburbs. I don’t believe in the capacity of this version to become the universal model in which to read into and generate endless amount of meanings.
F.K. :
Well, your point about the significance of a particular context in the work of architecture is valid and understandable. However, I think it’s not completely fair and fruitful to apply the same means of judgment when we speak about my ideas. My goal is to discover new territories and the only way to do it is through attempting to connect the known with the unknown. There are known factors in the Endless, but there are also as much if not more unknown ones in it. It is an open platform for me to raise questions and formulate thoughts that are never finished and ready for the print. I’m interested in alternative ways of living and seeing. In order too see things differently I had to liberate myself, also if just temporary, from these conventions that you like to call a city or a countryside. What I’m trying to accomplish has a lot to do with our society, I will explain: When I hear the second version of Anton Bruckner’s 8th Symphony I’m overtaken by the colossal power of it. It is a work of grand scale and it completely goes over the borders of being something that a single person could create. It is an expression and portrait of the society, that stands behind this work, the composer was the medium who was chosen to do the last necessary thing and to articulate and bring it into being. A symphony is like a cathedral. It is one feature after which to judge the achievements of a particular culture. The society has given me the space and the creative license to question our way of living on the most fundamental level. I’m questioning the human being as much as it’s envirnonment and I would argue that both are not to be seperated. Perhaps the Endless is more like a vision-machine. It is an attempt to see behind the surface and bring into the light a whole different narrative that currently, invisible to our eyes, reveals itself. To answer your question about the position of the House: it could be placed everywhere and from that moment on it starts to function as the beginning of a whole range of new possibilities for that place. It could either stay desolete and remote for hundreds of years as a single unit or expand it’s continuum. I haven’t done any strategic simulations concerning this, I focus on the the act of landing the project. How people react to it and what they decide to do is none of my business.
N.P. :
Your first architectural education and practice took place in Vienna. In other interviews you have acknowledged the importance of this city in shaping you. When I think about you in the lineage of great Viennese architects, you entered the stage after two eras, that put the groundstone of what became modern architecture, namely, Otto Wagner and then Adolf Loos. Wagner’s work has been shaped by the technological, social and artistic components or maybe they could also be called energies. He approached a wide range of scales and building content, from a Villa, to a Wohnhaus, an administration building, a museum, infrastructural as well as city planning projects. Wagner wasn’t a reneissance man, he was a modern man! The decisive technological enthusiasm and revolt against the orders of canons created a practical architecture with space for Wagner’s personal artistic expression.
The material is not conceived, but it’s also not a protagonist with a story, it’s more part of the architect’s Großstadt universum. His architecture are the bits and pieces that eventually had to turn the metropolis concept into a being. Loos, as member of the following generation, concentrated on the scale of the individual. In his case, as well, the materials don’t lie about their function, but instead by being part of the great and cohesive artist’s ouvre, each material has it’s own narrative. The relation between each of the existing narratives and the individual, creates a unique, intimate space. In a way you seem to be following the Loosian agenda when it comes to positioning the individual in the centre of your interest, but where he used detailed, fragmentary elements that build a space, you sort of position yourself over the material and negotiate directly with the space. If asked, you kind of inattentively mention the reinforced concrete as the solution for everything. I think that this immaterial architecture, creation of mental spaces, that bear the information and don’t have to provide shelter becomes very interesting if we think about the recent developments in city planning, the increasing robotization and digitalization with it’s invisible infrastructure that make your idea about the Endlessness highly relevant. F.K. :
Yes, the Endless House, wasn’t realized in the reinforced concrete as planned before, but I took a step backwards from the emphasis of a “perfect“ form that I discovered in the egg-shape and understood that the theoretical part of it could be re-interpreted in this new context. And indeed the Endless House has now landed on the Karlsplatz, on one of the busiest squares in Vienna. An infrastructurally and culturally very dense and complex place, that has been in te planing for more than 100 years. Countless architectural competitions have taken place, Otto Wagner was really close to realize his vision of it, but instead, for decades it has been a confusing, shapeless, somewhat enigmatic public space. Where are the Endless qualities more needed, in such undefined, somewhat confusing spaces or on the contrary as a antidosis in situations of over-planning, where some form of loosening is needed? I was sure that Karlsplatz is defenitely a place in the city about which we should think a lot and research about. It could turn out to be the intersection point of democratic discourse and ideas. Karlsplatz should be in an endless discussion and never be defined by a master plan. I imagine it as a simultaneously dense and open space. Dense with caves that would secure the privacy of the public. I hope that in Karlsplatz the new Endless House will function as a space that empowers the people and contributes to their freedom.
N.P. :
Thank you, Mr Kiesler for your time!
F.K. :
Thank you.
A fictional interview with Frederick Kiesler Normunds Pune (r11841284) Schreiben über Architektur, Landschaft und Städte Prof. August Sarnitz Academy of Fine Arts Vienna