Tough Prophet

The wellspring of any architectural masterpiece lies in its design; blueprints and bricks come later. Even such a titan as the late Frank Lloyd Wright had to wait years to see his "impossible" ideas bear fruit. And the more adventurous the pioneer, the longer the wait. One of the most adventurous of all is Manhattan's Frederick Kiesler, who at 62 has originated more ideas and seen fewer of them built than almost any other architect of his time.

For Scrolls, a Fountain. Coming to the U.S. from his native Vienna in 1926, Kiesler took up teaching at Columbia in the 1930s, amazed his students with suggestions that they develop spiral buildings, semicircular projection screens, "floating cities" wrapped in cocoonlike weather protectors, and "horizontal skyscrapers" suspended like bridges. In the 1940s he built great open sculptures and clusters of pictures "to relax inside" and designed striking stage sets for No exit and The Magic Flute.

Small, spry, tough, intense, Kiesler got few commissions for his missionary work and asked for no favors. His credo, stated in the College Art Journal: "The artist must learn only one thing in order to be creative: not to resist himself, but to resist without exception every human, technical, social, economical factor that prevents him from being himself." Recently, a former student of Kiesler, Armand Bartos, asked him to become a partner while remaining strictly Kiesler. Their collaboration resulted first in Manhattan's strange and elegant World House Galleries (TIME, Feb. 4, 1957). Now ground is being broken for the partners' full-scale project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: a gigantic shrine, to be entered from underground, and built around an 80-foot column of c water, to house the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Back in 1923 Kiesler proposed the first actual shell house in history. The Pantheon in Rome is half a shell. Kiesler modeled a true shell, an egglike construction balanced on stilts and tensile all around--not just at the top and sides. Last year, 35 years after he proposed it, Kiesler was commissioned by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art to carry out his still-revolutionary idea in model form. He secluded himself in his Greenwich Village loft, spent month after month brooding, sketching, constructing. The end result is bound to surprise even those who know him. Anchored to its supporting columns as lightly as a dirigible, Kiesler's "Endless House" looks more like a cloud than a building.

For People, Change. Entrance is up a winding ramp. Windows, to be filled with curving panes of Plexiglas, come wherever they naturally fall, between the ribs of the construction. Floors curve into walls and walls into ceilings, with no inter ruption and no corners. Designed for shoeless clambering, the interior is a plexus of balcony hideaways, ramps, hanging screens, near-flat areas with shelves for seats, and even a waterfall in the master bedroom. "Of course a building shouldn't be a box," Kiesler explained last week, perching by his model like a bird overlooking its nest. "It shouldn't be candy either--the candy engineering they're doing now. It needs to be flowing and opening, getting louder and softer, opening out and moving in. To be inside my Endless House will be like living inside a sculpture that is changing every second with the light."

Might it also be comfortable? Where would the refrigerator go? Won't those balconies be dangerous for children? How about privacy, heating and storage? Kiesler does have answers to these questions, though as an all-out idea man he can be impatient with too much insistence on the practical. Comfort is largely a matter of habit, he argues; his house might seem uncomfortable at first, yet not remain so. The curving lips of the interior overhangs make them fairly safe for children. There is visual privacy, though not the privacy that doors afford. The kitchen is to be built into one of the supporting pillars beneath. Radiant heating will keep the house snug. Storage space exists in abundance between the interior and exterior shells of the building.

Tentative plans have been made to build Kiesler's new departure in architecture in the garden of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, where a full-scale Japanese house was erected for exhibition five years ago. Never a man to waste time waiting for the decisions of practical men, Kiesler has plunged ahead into yet another project--a room for meditation, in which paintings open like windows and sculptures burst treelike from the floor.

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