I invited my father to the Graham Foundation on a whim to attend a talk in the top-level ballroom. As an institution that nurtured my budding as an architect over a decade earlier, I was familiar with its odd visitation choreography: enter the mansion, climb three flights with other guests, snag a seat, and wave at your friends across the room before the event starts. This time was no different, except that I was texting my father (a first-timer) a disorienting set of directions on how to get upstairs well into the beginning statements.

Curator Mark Wasiuta delivered a presentation on Frederick Kiesler’s work–a “paper” architect whose life’s sketches, processes, speculations, and other brilliant documented shenanigans were displayed on the two floors below us. One of the grandest relics on display was the first fully realized prototype of the Mobile Home Library: a modular, ergonomic solution to streamlining media-intake in one’s domestic sphere. Mark spoke of the endless speculation behind the machine since its inception between 1937-41–by Kiesler and his students–only for it to amount to dozens of diagrams, drawings, and partial study models by the end of his life.

So, the machine was built for us to witness in 2024. It centered an entire salon in solitude, lending a way for you to surround it and for it to surround you. The resulting piece gave life to its numerous studies, and it even demonstrated its mobility with an automatic motorized rotation mechanism. Most impressively, visitors were restricted from touching it.

It seemed that the pristine product was a tool for spectatorship, rather than a tool for testing theories of correalism in architecture. The Mobile Home Library’s conception, built on numerous media, was, in the end, not built for any media other than as itself. Its empty shelves and creaking motor left me desiring an evening alone with it to test its potentials. So, my father and I touched it (… accidentally).

ah.