With Beatriz Colomina, Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), Mark Linder, Laura McGuire, Carrie Norman, William O’Brian, and Stephen Phillips

In his Manifesto on Tensionism (1925), Frederick Kiesler declared that we must have “NO MORE WALLS,” promoting instead “organic” architecture with an “elasticity of building adequate to the elasticity of living.” Seeking to break down physical and social boundaries in our everyday lives through a wide-variety of media (art, architecture, animation, furniture, exhibition, and theater design), Kiesler aimed to challenge the static forms of modern construction by creating more open, inclusive, and resilient building structures and practices.

“Resilience” has been appropriated by various fields ranging from sustainability and environmental studies to urban design. Definition Series: Resilience reflects upon Kiesler’s ideas, addressing the possibility of architecture to spring back into multiple shapes while facing shifting cultural and political realities.

The event invites historians, theorists, and practitioners to each present a definition of “resilience” as a point of departure for discussing a more resistant and liberatory “elastic architecture.”
Definition Series: Resilience is hosted by Storefront in collaboration with the Cal Poly LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design and its founding director: architect, historian, and theorist Dr. Stephen J. Phillips, the author of Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture (MIT Press).