Definition Series: Resilience
Thursday, April 13th, 2017
7 – 9 pm

#resilience #definitionseries @storefrontnyc

With Beatriz Colomina, Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), Mark Linder, Laura McGuire, Carrie Norman, and Stephen Phillips

In his Manifesto on Tensionism (1925), Frederick Kiesler declared that we must have “NO MORE WALLS,” promoting instead “organic” architecture with an “elasticity of building adequate to the elasticity of living.” Seeking to break down physical and social boundaries in our everyday lives through a wide-variety of media (art, architecture, animation, furniture, exhibition, and theater design), Kiesler aimed to challenge the static forms of modern construction by creating more open, inclusive, and resilient building structures and practices.

“Resilience” has been appropriated by various fields ranging from sustainability and environmental studies to urban design. Definition Series: Resilience reflects upon Kiesler’s ideas, addressing the possibility of architecture to spring back into multiple shapes while facing shifting cultural and political realities.

This event invited historians, theorists, and practitioners to each present a definition of “resilience” as a point of departure for discussing a more resistant and liberatory “elastic architecture.”

Definition Series: Resilience was hosted by Storefront in collaboration with the Cal Poly LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design and its founding director: architect, historian, and theorist Dr. Stephen J. Phillips, the author of Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture (MIT Press).

About the Book:

In Elastic Architecture, Stephen Phillips offers the first in-depth exploration of Kiesler’s innovative and multidisciplinary research and design practice. Phillips argues that Kiesler established a new career trajectory for architects not as master builders, but as research practitioners whose innovative means and methods could advance alternative and speculative architecture. Indeed, Kiesler’s own career was the ultimate uncompromising model of a research-based practice.

Exploring Kiesler’s formative relationships with the European avant-garde, Phillips shows how Kiesler found inspiration in the plastic arts, experimental theater, early animation, and automatons to develop and refine his spatial concept of the Endless. Moving from Europe to New York in the 1920s, Kiesler applied these radical Dadaist, constructivist, and surrealist practices to his urban display projects, which included shop windows for Saks Fifth Avenue. After launching his innovative Design Correlation Laboratory at Columbia and Yale, Kiesler went on to invent new houses, theaters, and galleries that were meant to move, shift, and adapt to evolutionary changes occurring within the natural and built environment. Although many of Kiesler’s designs remained unbuilt, his ideas proved influential to later generations of architects and speculative artists internationally, including Archigram, Greg Lynn, UNStudio, and Olafur Eliasson.

About the Definition Series:
Each iteration of Storefront’s Definition Series invites participants to produce definitions of a specific key term constructing a multifaceted edifice around particular terms and their contemporary usage in specific fields, contexts and practices.