$39.95 when purchased online
Target Online store #3991
About this item
Highlights
- An in-depth exploration of the work of Frederick Kiesler, the visionary architect, with a special focus on his Mobile Home Library.
- About the Author: Mark Wasiuta is a writer, curator, and architect on faculty at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York.
- 192 Pages
- Architecture, History
Description
Book Synopsis
An in-depth exploration of the work of Frederick Kiesler, the visionary architect, with a special focus on his Mobile Home Library.Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines explores the work of Austrian architect, theater designer, and theorist Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965). The book's centerpiece is a close examination of Kiesler's iconic but unrealized Mobile Home Library, which will be fabricated for the first time and photographed for the publication. Built around a speculative essay by Mark Wasiuta, tracing Kiesler's visionary, even obsessive interest in sight, dreams, looking, and reading, the book covers Kiesler's research and teaching at Columbia University's School of Architecture in the late 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the main projects he developed at his Design Correlation Laboratory, the Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine. The Vision Machine was imagined as an ambitious device intended to visualize human sight, from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and hallucinations. The Mobile Home Library was conceived as a dynamic, modular object--part device, part furniture--whose repertoire of rotating, spinning movements allowed variable forms of interaction with readers and users. At first glance these two projects barely resemble each other. Yet together they illustrate the strange and astonishing scope of Kiesler's correalism, which spanned and confused his biotechnique (a biologically-oriented design process aimed at fostering human health) and his techno-oneiric surrealism. The book is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in Fall 2024, but is a stand-alone volume. It presents Wasiuta's substantial research and thinking on Kiesler, a wealth of photographs, drawings, documents, film stills, and pedagogical experiments from Kiesler's laboratory, as well as photographs of the exhibition's centerpiece, the (re)construction of the never-built Mobile Home Library. Frederick Kiesler was born in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine) in 1890 and died in New York in 1965. For a short time, he was a member of De Stijl, he briefly partnered with Adolf Loos in the 1920s, and he was an associate of many avant-garde artists, including Man Ray and Fernand Léger.
About the Author
Mark Wasiuta is a writer, curator, and architect on faculty at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York. He is Co-Director of its master's-degree program Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture. Wasiuta is coauthor and coeditor of Rifat Chadirj: Building Index, Dan Graham's New Jersey.Dimensions (Overall): 11.0 Inches (H) x 9.0 Inches (W)
Weight: 1.25 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 192
Genre: Architecture
Sub-Genre: History
Publisher: MIT Press
Theme: Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
Format: Hardcover
Author: Mark Wasiuta
Language: English
Street Date: October 7, 2025
TCIN: 91077392
UPC: 9780262049269
Item Number (DPCI): 247-27-8442
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
If the item details above aren’t accurate or complete, we want to know about it.
Shipping details
Estimated ship dimensions: 1 inches length x 9 inches width x 11 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 1.25 pounds
We regret that this item cannot be shipped to PO Boxes.
This item cannot be shipped to the following locations: American Samoa (see also separate entry under AS), Guam (see also separate entry under GU), Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico (see also separate entry under PR), United States Minor Outlying Islands, Virgin Islands, U.S., APO/FPO
Return details
This item can be returned to any Target store or Target.com.
This item must be returned within 90 days of the date it was purchased in store, shipped, delivered by a Shipt shopper, or made ready for pickup.
See the return policy for complete information.
Trending Book Pre-Orders
$16.48 - $17.48
Buy 1, get 1 50% off select books
4.6 out of 5 stars with 447 ratings
$19.99 - $22.15
MSRP $19.99 - $32.99
Buy 1, get 1 50% off select books on select items
3.6 out of 5 stars with 9 ratings
$15.44 - $21.00
MSRP $21.99 - $30.00
Buy 1, get 1 50% off select books
4.9 out of 5 stars with 46 ratings
$9.85 - $23.09
MSRP $15.99 - $32.99
Buy 1, get 1 50% off select books
4.9 out of 5 stars with 84 ratings
$15.19 - $18.37
MSRP $18.99 - $28.99
Buy 1, get 1 50% off select books
4.7 out of 5 stars with 14 ratings
$8.80 - $24.50
MSRP $16.00 - $35.00
Buy 1, get 1 50% off select books
4.4 out of 5 stars with 397 ratings