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. Wrappers with a light diagonal crease (see scan). Spine lightly worn to edges and a snagged heel. Textblock lightly thumbed. Contents complete and unmarked, so a very good copy.
9 x 12 original magazine with 138 pages with numerous black and white illustrations and vintage advertisements catering to architects. Both the Record and the Architectural Forum were considerably more progressive than their competitors, with the Record being notable for its lengthy relationships with Frederick Kiesler, R. Buckminster Fuller, C. Theodore Larsen and Knud Lönberg-Holm.
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.
Contents
- 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
Throughout his career, Frederick Kiesler [Austria-Hungary, 1890 – 1965] worked across multiple mediums. He believed that “sculpture, painting, architecture should not be used as wedges to split our experience of art and life; they are here to link, to correlate, to bind dream and reality.” After studying painting and printmaking in Vienna in the early 1900s, he became known in Europe for his inventive stage designs, featuring mirrors and projections. In the course of working on these projects, he met and at times collaborated with artists such as El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy. In 1923, Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg invited him to join de Stijl, making him the group’s youngest member.
In 1926, after traveling to New York to co-organize the International Theatre Exposition at Steinway Hall, Kiesler and his wife immigrated to the United States and settled in the city. There, Kiesler helped spread the ideas of the European avant-garde, such as non-objective painting, abstraction, and the merging of art and life. He found work as a professor at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and as the director of scenic design at the Juilliard School of Music. From 1937 to 1942, Kiesler was the director of the Laboratory for Design Correlation within the Department of Architecture at Columbia University, where the study program was more pragmatic and commercially oriented than his deep, theoretical concepts and ideas, such as those about "correalism" or "continuity," which concern the relationship among space, people, objects and concepts.
“During the 1930s, Kiesler devoted much of his time to elaborating his design theories, publishing articles (including a series in Architectural Record on "Design Correlation"), and lecturing at universities and design conferences around the country, gaining notoriety for, among other things, his exhortations on the mean-spirited character of the American bathroom and the pressing need for a nonskid bathtub. He also called for the founding of an industrial design institute (for which he prepared architectural plans in 1934) and eventually persuaded Columbia University to allow him to set up an experimental Laboratory for Design Correlation within the School of Architecture. This laboratory, which functioned from 1937 to 1942, was the testing ground for many of Kiesler's biotechnical ideas. During this period, he actively experimented with new materials and techniques, such as lucite and cast aluminum, and executed some of the extraordinarily sensual, organic furniture designs that presaged the form-fitting, ergonomic concepts of the 1940s and 1950s.
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.
In 1942, he was chosen to design collector and art dealer Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York, for which he planned every aspect, from an innovative method of installing paintings to its lighting, sculpture stands, and seating. In 1947, he designed the installation Salle Superstition for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. In this exhibition, Kiesler also displayed his first work of sculpture, Totem for All Religions, a wood-and-rope construction that stands more than nine feet tall and simultaneously evokes a totem pole, a crucifix, and various astronomical symbols.
Alfred Lawrence Kocher (American, 1885 – 1969) taught at Penn State from 1912 to 1926, where he was instrumental in the establishment of the School of Architecture. In 1926 he was appointed Director of the McIntire School of Art and Architecture at the University of Virginia. Kocher’s contribution to architecture in the United States was both as a pioneering advocate for modern architecture and as an advocate for the preservation of architectural landmarks.
When A. Lawrence Kocher was appointed Managing Editor of The Architectural Record in 1927, the magazine issued a “Delphic utterance” that it was embarking on a new chapter in its history which would probably include “something about ferro-concrete, about architectural polychromy, about a more effective direction and use of the allied arts and crafts. Possibly the impulse originated by Sullivan, developed by Frank Lloyd Wright and amplified abroad will bring repercussions from Europe. No doubt standardized shapes and machine-made surfaces will find their logical place in design. That there will be movement, enterprise, new feeling is clear....” (Architectural Record, January 1928, p. 2) Under Kocher’s direction the magazine was transformed from a beaux-arts periodical into one espousing a broad concept of modern architecture encompassing education, social responsibility and concerns, modern design, and contemporary materials and methods of construction.
Although his early writings were about traditional architecture -- The Art of Lancaster County (1919), Fireplaces in England (1926), and Early Architecture of Pennsylvania -- fifteen articles in Eighteenth Century architecture published in The Architectural Record (1920-22) – he was equally committed to the use of modern materials and construction methods and to contemporary design in new buildings. This was reflected in his private practice. Of special interest to Kocher was the design of small, affordable houses. Three houses – one of aluminum and glass, one of canvas, and a third constructed of plywood (except for the sheathing for the roof) – attracted national attention. Ideas which he proposed in the 1920s such as well-designed, prefabricated interior components for storage and utilities have become commonplace. A design for Sunlight Towers, an apartment tower, placed the towers at forty-five degree angles to the street. The saw-tooth shaped facade provided for light and for cross-ventilation.
Kocher had been interested in Black Mountain College from its beginnings. He included Black Mountain in a series of articles on the education of the architect in the September 1936 issue of Architectural Record, and soon after the college purchased the Lake Eden buildings, he proposed that the campus should be modern. He suggested a collaboration between the Black Mountain’s Bauhaus contingent – Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and Xanti Schawinsky – and Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who had only recently arrived at in the United States to teach at Harvard University.
In the summer of 1940 when Black Mountain realized it could not construct the buildings designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer for the Lake Eden campus, the college turned to Kocher to design simpler buildings that could be constructed largely by faculty and students working with a contractor. At the time Kocher was visiting professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In the fall of 1940, he was appointed Professor of Architecture at Black Mountain, and he moved to the college with his wife Margaret Taylor Kocher and their two small children Sandra and Lawrence. For the first two years his salary was paid by the Carnegie Foundation in New York, and for the third year, by a gift of $1,000 from Philip L. Goodwin, architect for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Over a two year period, several buildings designed by Kocher were constructed at the college. The main building which Kocher designed had four wings providing for administration, a library and exhibition hall, student studies, faculty apartments, and rooms for social gathering. One wing, the Studies Building, was constructed in 1940-41. The studies themselves were finished by students in the fall of 1941. Although the faculty considered construction of the additional three wings after the war, Kocher was not able to return to the college to supervise the construction, and the project was dropped.