Frederick Kiesler
PS EU00- FUN CTI 0 NALI SM
IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE
the floor plan
The floor plan is no more than the footprint of a house.
From a flat impression of this sort it is difficult to conceive the actual
form and content of the building.
If
God had begun the creation of
man with a footprint, a monster all heels and toes would probably
have grown up from it, not man. (He might have been without
head and arms, to say nothing of
his
internal structure.) Fortunately
the creation proceeded otherwise, growing out of a nuclear concep–
tion. Out of a single germ cell which contained the
whole
and which
slowly developed into the separate floors and rooms of man. This
cell, owing its origin to the erotic and creative instinct and not to any
intellectual mandate, is the nucleus of the human edifice. It is a
strange compound; while still a gelatinous mass it contains the fu–
ture man, his mind and his instinct,
his
sweat and his dream. It is
as
though nature cast the first ball into the arena of life, and then
stood by with folded arms to see what the play of circumstances would
make of it. Whatever sort of creature results, it is never deflated, but
three-dimensional, like a ball; it seeks
coordination.
With all its senses
it breathes
contact.
It
is connected by an infinite number of ties,
bonds, rays, waves, molecular bridges, with the visible, the tangible,
that which can be readily smelled and equally with that which cannot
be
so readily smelled, that which is not immediately tangible, the in–
visible; and it puts forth myriad threads of its own in order to entangle
itself still further in life. It cannot live without
others.
Its life is com–
munity. Its reality is a co-reality. Its realism of realization is a
correalism. Its reality is a realism of coordinated forces which condi-
