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The House that Refuses to End: Shaping the Collective-Self in Friedrich Kiesler’s Endless House
Vukovich, Sophia Theresia
Vukovich, Sophia Theresia
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Abstract
This thesis examines Friedrich Kiesler’s Endless House—an unbuilt architectural project developed between 1944 and 1965—as the expression of a transhistorical concept of dwelling that counters the passive existential mode Kiesler attributed to Functionalism. Rather than interpreting the Endless House solely through its opposition to the dominant International Style, or reduced to its seemingly Surrealist form, or through Kiesler’s connections with the New York émigré avant-garde, this study positions the project as the culmination of his artistic trajectory by foregrounding Correalism and the ideas posthumously collected in Magic Architecture. Correalism, a porte-manteau of “correlation” and “realism,” articulates a relational pseudo-scientific vision of architecture in which human beings and their environments co-constitute one another in a continuous, dynamic field. Through an analysis of the Endless House’s form, material proposals, sensorial experience, and intended rituals of inhabitation, the thesis argues that Kiesler sought to replace Modernist universalism with a model of “endless” becoming grounded in primordial continuity between humans and their environments. Turning to anthropology, theater, and phenomenology, Kiesler developed an architecture of participation: one that dissolves the boundaries between stage and life, actor and inhabitant, shelter and organism. In this light, the Endless House can be read as a generator of active, ritualized domestic existence as a space that transforms passive routine into performative consciousness and collective renewal. Never realized, the Endless House gains conceptual force precisely through its speculative condition because it embraces process over finality. As an organism, rather than a building, it proposes an alternate paradigm of dwelling in which domesticity encourages heightened consciousness, environmental awareness, and a reimagined relation between individual and collective becoming.
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Thesis (B.A. in Art History, Minor in Business Administration)--John Cabot University, Fall 2025.
Date
2025
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Keywords
Kiesler, Frederick, Domestic architecture
Citation
Vukovich, Sophia Theresia. "The House that Refuses to End: Shaping the Collective-Self in Friedrich Kiesler’s Endless House". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2025.