Spyros Papapetros

Spyros Papapetros's talk will present Frederick Kiesler’s unpublished book project Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing, whose pages are on display in the exhibition pre-architectures. The lecture will analyze the interdisciplinary research of the architect and his wife Stefi Kiesler in the fields of paleo-archaeology, natural and cultural anthropology, human psychology, animal physiology, and art/architectural history, exposing the biases that informed these disciplines during the era in which the manuscript was compiled. Throughout the ten parts of his treatise, Kiesler sketches an eclectically universal history of housing from the habitations of animals and the early stages of humankind to the "slums" of war-torn, twentieth-century urban environments. The lecture will focus on the first half of Magic Architecture, describing the origins of housing in human “cave dwellings” and animal nests, as well as charting what Kiesler names “the birth of design” in technical skills like painting and tool making.

Spyros Papapetros teaches art and architectural theory and historiography at the School of Architecture and the Programs on Media and Modernity as well as European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (MIT Press, 2014). He is co-editor with Gerd Zillner of the first published edition of Frederick Kiesler’s Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing (MIT Press, forthcoming), as well as the author of Pre/Architecture (Sternberg Press, forthcoming).