Endless House

Frederick Kiesler1947–1960, never builtARCHITECTURE / Work

A house with no corners, worked on for fifteen years and never built, drawn explicitly against the rectilinear box.

A long pale grey model of linked rounded pods with large circular openings, raised on short ribbed columns above a rough textured base, standing on a white plinth against a grey wall. — Model for the Endless House, 1959. Cement, steel wire mesh and plastic. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
PHOTOGRAPH Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mrs. Lillian Kiesler 89.8. © Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna / whitney.orgReferenced from its source. Rights not established by SIMULACRA.

Plates 2

Overview

A house Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) designed as one continuous shell, with floor, walls and ceiling merged into a single curved surface.

It was never built. What exists are models, drawings and photographs. The first model, from 1950, is ceramic. Two models from 1959 survive: one in cement, steel wire mesh and plastic at the Whitney, about two and a half metres long, given by Lillian Kiesler; one in wire mesh and concrete at mumok in Vienna, given by Gertraud and Dieter Bogner in 2017. The Kiesler Foundation counts three models in all.

What to notice

01Round openings cut into the shellThe windows on the 1959 model are not frames set in a wall. They are circular holes in the skin, deep enough to read as tunnels, and they open in different directions on each pod.
02The mass is liftedThe rounded volumes sit on short column-like supports above a rough base, so the heaviest-looking part of the house is the part off the ground. It reads as something resting rather than built up from footings.
03A model made by handThe Whitney model is cement worked over steel wire mesh, the same method proposed for the house itself. Its surface is lumpy and uneven, closer to sculpture than to a presentation model.
04Floor as groundThe design called for floors of sand, grass, terracotta tile and pebbles. The surface you walk on changes from room to room, so the continuity of the shell is set against a floor that is never the same.

Historical context

Kiesler, born in Czernowitz in 1890, worked in Vienna as an architect, artist, theatre designer and theorist, and moved to New York in 1926. He began exploring what he called endless space in 1922. The Whitney describes the house as his answer to the sterile, rectilinear architecture that dominated mid-century modernism. In his own description: "It is endless like the human body. There is no beginning and end to it."

For MoMA's Visionary Architecture exhibition, which opened on 29 September 1960, the plan was to build the house at full size in the sculpture garden. That never happened; a model, a full-size photographic mural and drawings were shown instead. MoMA returned to the project in Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, curated by Pedro Gadanho, from 27 June 2015 to 6 March 2016.

Connections

Formal resemblance

the floor refuses to be flat ↔ with
Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay, Claude Parent + Paul Virilio
Parent and Virilio tilt the floor so the body is never at rest; Kiesler curves floor into wall so there is no corner to rest against. Both make the plane underfoot the subject of the design. No influence is claimed.
one continuous surface ↔ with
Torqued Ellipses, Richard Serra
Serra's ellipses are a single rolled plate whose inside cannot be guessed from outside. The Endless House is a single cast shell with the same property. Both are understood by moving through, not by looking at.

Personal association

against the box ↔ with
Church of the Light, Tadao Ando
Ando's chapel is a concrete box made powerful by a cut. Kiesler's house is the argument that the box itself is the problem. Read together they test the archive's preference for monolithic, rectilinear mass.
Sourceswhitney.org