THE ARCHITECTURAL RECORD
January 1934
M. A. Mikkelsen [Editor], A. Lawrence Kocher [Managing Editor], Theodore Larsen [Technical News Editor]
M. A. Mikkelsen [Editor], A. Lawrence Kocher [Managing Editor], Theodore Larsen [Technical News Editor]: THE ARCHITECTURAL RECORD. New York: F. W. Dodge Corporation [Volume 75, Number 1] January 1934. Original Edition. Slim quarto. Perfect bound and side stapled printed wrappers. 98 [xl] pp. Illustrated articles and advertisments. Spine well worn with front panel detached. Textblock lightly thumbed. Contents complete and unmarked. A good copy.
9 x 12 original magazine with 138 pages with numerous black and white illustrations and vintage advertisements catering to architects.
An exceptional document of the early 1930s American Shelter movement led by A. Lawrence Kocher, Knud Lönberg-Holm, Theodore Larsen and R. Buckminster Fuller. After Fuller’s “Shelter” magazine folded in 1931, the proponents of the movement devoted to “achieving an adequate public housing program for the American people” found refuge and employment at The Architectural Record. Here they presented the newest progressive ideas in public and private dwellings and represented the Public Works Administration’s agenda in both form and content. This january issue featured a tremendous 34-page profile of prefabricated and assembled experimental housing as well as the debut of Frederick J. Kiesler’s Space House. Next stop: Utopia.
- Frontispiece: The Vinylite House In Gorgeous Color
- New Housing And Construction Systems: Dymaxion Houses—An Atitude: Buckminster Fuller.
- Technical News And Research: Complied By Theodore Larsen
- Experimental Houses: 34 well-illustrated pages of designs by Bemis Industries, Buell Fabricated House System, Stran-Steel House, Columbian Homes, National Steel Homes, American Houses, Inc., General Houses Inc., Cellular Steel Unit Construction, Wheeling Steel House, Rostone Houses, Ferro-Enamel House, Negro Housing In Richmond Virginia, House Of Tomorrow By George Fred Keck, Low-Cost Farmhouse By A. Lawrence Kocher & Albert Frey, Barry Byrne Concrete Unit System, Diatom Houses By Richard Neutra, And The Universal House Corporation Of Zanesville, Ohio.
- The Construction Outlook
- Illustrated News
- Space House: Frederick J. Kiesler, Architect. 18 Page Article With Gorgeous Full-Page Photographs By F. S. Lincoln.
- Modernization: Case Studies By Morris Sanders, Frank Rooke, Etc.
- Aetna Life Insurance Company Building At Hartford, Ct: James Gamble Rogers
- Radio City Broadcasting Studios Of The National Broadcasting Company, Rockefeller Center: Reinhold & Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison, & Macmurray; Hood & Fouilhoux.
- Sound Control And Air Conditioning In The NBC Radio City Broadcasting Studios
- Lighting In The National Broadcasting Studios
- Panel Heating: Alfred Roth, Translated By Alfred Frey
- Building Trends And Outlook
- The Architects Library
Among the many projects Frederick J. Kiesler undertook during the Depression that never progressed beyond the blueprint stage were mass- produced, modular homes designed for Sears, Roebuck and Co. (1931); The Universal, a theater complex for Woodstock, New York (1931), planned as a flexible structure, adaptable for a variety of uses; and furniture and lighting designs. Kiesler had hopes of realizing his egg-shaped Endless Theater, but the time was not ripe.
Recalling this period in his life thirty years later, he wrote: "I was terribly poor, on a salary of $1,000 a year. I designed many projects for friends — all in vain. Many people made propositions without offers to pay.. ..Here were plans for a building that looked like an egg, not like the customary box. It wasn't square, it wasn't in steel, it wasn't in glass, it wasn't in aluminum. It was absolutely outside the mode of the International Style."
Finally, in 1933, Kiesler was given a chance to realize this new kind of building in a full-scale model of a single-family dwelling for the Modernage Furniture Company in New York. This project was the culmination of "seven years of waiting, seven years of search and research." 26 Space House, as it was called, had an organic, streamlined shell based on the principle of continuous tension, using the eggshell as a model. Influential in this design was the engineering construction of grain elevators, bridges, aqueducts, and planetariums — structures that also had curving, continuous exterior surfaces. This continuous-shell construction allowed for a flowing of interior space between floors, walls, and ceilings free of vertical supports. Though the full-scale model at Modernage was not technically a shell construction, it made allusions to it through the rounded facade. Space House had an elastic interior with varying floor levels and movable partitions. Other innovative techniques and materials were used, such as indirect lighting, brushed aluminum fixtures, rubberized flooring, fishnet curtains, and built-in modernistic furniture. 27 In Space House, "the streamlining becomes an organic force as it relates to the dynamic equilibrium of body motion within encompassed space."[Lisa Phillips]
Space House was also the first articulation of Kiesler's guiding principles of "correalism and biotechnique." Correalism, as he described it, is "an investigation into the laws of the inter-relationships of natural and man-made organisms," and biotechnique is "the application of such knowledge to the specific field of housing man adequately (an applied science)." It was an approach that involved defining man in relation to various forces in the environment — "natural, technological and human" — to seek the proper equilibrium among them. This approach was distinctly different from the Bauhaus ideal of form follows function: "Form does not follow function," said Kiesler, "function follows vision. Vision follows reality." "Instead of functional designs which try to satisfy the demands of the present, bio-technical designs develop the demands of the future."
The "true functionalist" (read "visionary") designer would begin by defining functions and examining their value based on reality, not theoretical worth. (This was largely the project of Kiesler's Laboratory for Design-Correlation at Columbia.) Kiesler formulated this idea in a much-quoted statement: "Form does not follow function. Function follows vision. Vision follows reality." In this way, the designer constantly should do away with obsolete functions and respond to new ones, creating new ideas and new conditions. "Function" is not a standard or a goal, but an ongoing process of identifying and responding to ever changing conditions and needs. Modern architects, to Kiesler, were avoiding their "full moral responsibility" in building without a vision based on observation and new ideas. Clearly the "moral responsibility" of the designer was of great concern to Kiesler, since the designer was responsible for guiding civilization. It was a principle Kiesler had long shared with fellow artists and architects, particularly with the members of the De Stijl group.