Magic Architecture - The Story of Human Housing

Magic Architecture was the architect Frederick Kiesler’s most ambitious book project, an epoch-spanning history of human housing from prehistory to the atomic era, submitted to editors after World War II but left unpublished. In its holistic view of habitation through the lens of anthropology, ecology, and the life sciences, Magic Architecture is one of the most extraordinary texts on architecture written in the twentieth century, now at last published in the twenty-first. Kiesler’s exploration of the effects of modern technology in combination with the alternative epistemology of “magical” practices associated with cave drawings and the first artifacts of human industry reflects his profoundly interdisciplinary perspective on the development of art, architecture, and design.

This edition preserves Kiesler s conception of the book as a neo-Vitruvian Renaissance treatise divided into ten parts or books that narrate an alternative history and theory of architecture. Also included are sixty composite illustrations, cut and pasted from books and popular science journals, with elaborate captions. The editors have reassembled the book s text and illustrations from archival material, supplementing them with notes that document the evolution of the work.

Introductory essays provide a chronology of Kiesler s research and an interpretation of key themes. Appendixes offer additional textual and visual material gathered by Kiesler for the project.