Spyros Papapetros and Gerd Zillner: Kiesler: magic, metaphysics and home.

Frederick Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, artist and theorist who, born at the tail end of the nineteenth century, bore witness to the irresistible rise of modernism in architecture and alongside it, the pyrrhic victory of amoral, individuated thinking, revealed so starkly in the mania of colonialism and the horrors of its implosion in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke with Spyros Papapetros, Associate Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, and Gerd Zillner, Director of the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna, about the great man, and particularly about his hitherto unpublished opus, Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing, compiled between 1944–1946 and now published for the first time by MIT Press.

Conceived as a Neo-Vitruvian treatise, and an implicit rival to Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture from 1923, at the heart of the book is Kiesler's central concept of magic architecture which rejected the functionalism and efficiency of Corb, Buckminster Fuller, and modern planning. Instead, Kiesler proposed an alternative history of housing grounded in magic, ritual, dream, and the integration of animal instinct with human creativity, arguing that the deepest purpose of architecture is not physical shelter but spiritual and psychological protection — the creation of dwellings that answer humanity's fundamental fears, desires, and sense of the unknown. So, prescient indeed.

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