Spyros Papapetros || Magic Architecture

Spyros Papapetros

Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing

response by Francesca Hughes

Tuesday, November 11, 2025 @5pm ET

N 107 (School of Architecture)

Written around the end of World War II and submitted to publishers soon after, Frederick Kiesler’s Magic Architecture never appeared during the architect’s lifetime. Eight decades later, it is available in a critical edition. Comprised of over three hundred pages of typewritten text and over seventy composite plate illustrations, this is the most extensive book project by the Austrian-émigré architect, artist, and designer. The manuscript draws from Kiesler’s readings in the fields of cultural anthropology, (paleo-)archaeology, human psychology and animal physiology, as well as the histories of architecture, literature, and painting. In the ten parts of his Neo-Vitruvian treatise, Kiesler sketches a selectively global history of housing from the earliest known habitations of humanity to the “slums” of twentieth-century war-torn metropolises. For Kiesler, “magic architecture is everyman’s architecture,” an architecture that mediates between “dream and reality,” while confronting the urgent problems of human housing after a period of global devastation. Houses,” writes Kiesler are “defense mechanisms” against the “fear of the unseen,” an unlocatable threat echoing contemporary anxieties about the use of ballistic technologies in the atomic era.

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural Theory and Historiography at Princeton University. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic (Chicago), co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field (MIT), and co-curator of pre-architectures (CIVA). His monograph Pre/Architecture is forthcoming from Sternberg Press (2025).

Francesca Hughes is the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor in Architectural History at Yale. An architect, educator, and theorist, her work examines architecture’s entanglement with feminist critique, computation, and the history of science and technology. Her current project, Indiscreet Histories of Architecture’s Universal Discrete Machine, explores architecture’s epistemological ties to the long project of computation.

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