Frederick Kiesler: From life to architecture - to life.

This paper argues there is a correlation between the architect Frederick Kiesler and the biosemiotic project. In so doing it proposes this coupling establishes a framework leading to an architectural-biosemiotic paradigm that puts biosemiotic theory at the heart of cognising the built environment, and offers an approach to shaping the built environment that supports (and benefits) human, and organismic, intelligence.

Uexküll’s understanding of the organism-in-its-environment is, perhaps, the keystone to the inside-outside problematic. Peirce’s sign model and semiotic theory emphasises how cognising, and the inside-outside synthesis, is a condition of sign interpretation. The principle of a difference, underpinning Bateson’s ecological standpoint brings these two positions together to distinguish what has become the biosemiotic project. In this paper I distinguish another individual, Fredeick Kiesler (1890-1965), an Austrian-American architect, theoretician, theatre designer, artist and sculptor whose lifelong project was the unification of the sciences with art, through architecture. I suggest Kiesler provides a theoretical and practical precedent delineating a concrete bridge from the humanities to the biosemiotic project. Kieslers central idea was ‘continuity’, through which he formulated the notion of ‘endless space’; in contradiction to his contemporaries whose formulation of infinite space underpinned the modernist ideal. Kielsers Manifesto of Correalsim is the bridge, which I propose provides a concrete means for applying biosemiotic thinking in the humanities, most significantly in architectural design and theory.