ENDLESS HOUSE
Frederick Kiesler, 1960
A Family House With a Truly Organic Design
In 1960, a model of a house was shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a model so extraordinary that it was hardly recognizable as a building at all. It was called the Endless House, and it was a structure without straight lines, in which floors merged seamlessly into walls and walls into ceilings, creating rounded, organic internal spaces that flowed into one another. It was quite unlike the orthogonal buildings that Americans were used to, and unlike any house most of the visitors to the museum had seen. The design was by Frederick Kiesler, an architect who had been born in what is now Ukraine but had lived in the USA for almost forty years.
This ‘new’ way of designing a house was something that Kiesler had been developing for many years – in a sense he began work on it even before he moved to America. His exploration of new ways of handling space dates back to 1925, when he produced a three-dimensional installation for that year’s Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the exhibition that showcased a range of contemporary decorative styles, from Dutch de Stijl to French Art Deco. Kiesler’s installation was called Raumstadt (Space-City or City of Space) and was a large construction of wood and canvas, about 66 × 33 × 26ft (20 × 10 × 8m). Based on rectangles and straight lines, its open wooden framework was painted white, and parts of the framework were filled in with panels in red, blue or yellow.
The effect of this collection of planes and lines was rather like a three-dimensional version of an abstract painting by Mondrian, and it was suspended from the ceiling of the gallery so that it seemed to be caught in mid-air. Its ostensible purpose was to act as a support system for an exhibition display, but Kiesler saw it as a model of a city, asymmetrical and free-floating, and an exploration of ‘free space’ to create a place without walls or foundations, a home for a modern society where a new kind of society could grow and flourish. Although Raumstadt was based on straight lines and right angles, Kiesler was soon questioning this orthogonal approach, and rejecting most of the other accepted norms of architecture, too. ‘No more walls!’ he declared in a manifesto of 1925.
In the late 1920s, when he moved to New York, Kiesler devoted a lot of his time to work outside the usual run of architecture. He designed shop window displays, notably for Saks Fifth Avenue, and worked in the world of art gallery design, specifically with Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. His work for Guggenheim was particularly provocative – his interior had curved walls and pictures that stuck out into the room, apparently a gesture of defiance to the Nazis, who had displayed paintings by so-called ‘degenerate’ artists (those who produced the modern art that the Nazis despised) at odd angles, in order to ridicule them. The work for Guggenheim also led Kiesler to do furniture designs, and some of the furniture he created for her – biomorphic tables and chairs that are all curves – leaves the straight-lined approach behind. By the late 1940s, he was exploring this kind of organic form on a larger scale, by creating an architecture of curves and developing buildings that no longer had identifiable components such as columns, roofs or floors.
What Kiesler wanted to do in architecture was revealed in a design proposal called the Space House. This was a spheroid or roughly egg-shaped structure, which the architect suggested should have a large, double-height living area in the middle and, towards the ends where the building was lower, private rooms for the various occupants. He saw this as an ideal layout for a building that would accommodate parents and children, where the generations needed both small, intimate spaces of their own and a larger, more generous, collective space, too. Bedrooms and a room such as a library, where someone could be alone with their thoughts, could be smaller rooms; living and dining rooms would be higher. According to this logic, the egg-shaped form ‘grew’ as the result of the spatial requirements of the users.
Kiesler’s reasoning shows how he thought of the egg-like Space House in three dimensions from the outset. He rejected the idea, which he attributed to Functionalist or Modernist designers, that an architect should start with a floor plan and develop the design upwards from that. The floor plan, he argued, was the house’s footprint, nothing more. We would get into trouble, argued Kiesler, if we tried to design a human being from a footprint – we would create a being that was all heels and toes. An architect has to look at the design in three dimensions from the start.
By 1960, when the MoMA exhibition came along, Kiesler was ready to extend his radical handling of space and make it more complex, while still basing it on real human needs. The Endless House model that he made for the show stands on a series of plinths or pylons that hold it well above the site. A curving staircase rises from ground level to the house itself, which consists of an elongated form, swelling in places and narrowing in others, and pierced with large, irregular openings, some roughly triangular, others rounded, one tear-shaped. The plaster surface of the model is rough, as if the structure is made of raw concrete, and the ‘endless’ quality comes from the continuous way in which one part of the building seems to merge into the next, with no formal facade, no front, no back and no ends.
The building looks odd and unfathomable, but Kiesler explained it clearly in terms of its function. It was designed as a family home for a couple and their children. The plans indicate distinct spaces: a large living room with a central fireplace in the middle of the house; a bedroom for the adults at one end of the building; the children’s room at the other end, near the kitchen and dining area; tucked away to one side is a small quiet room; and staircases give access to different levels.
When they commissioned the Endless House design from Kiesler, the museum authorities and architect had hoped to build a full-size version of the house in MoMA’s grounds. However, by the time the architect had got to work on the plans and model, the museum had begun a project to extend its own building, and there was no longer any space for a full-size Endless House. The building remained a project on paper and in plaster, and Kiesler died in 1965, too soon to find another site for his revolutionary structure.
