


Recently, Ben Nicholson, a visiting critic at the University of Houston, suggested an idea to Joe Meppelink and Andrew Vrana, who teach classes in the brave new techniques. Why not have students reconsider a project that, 50 years ago, was far ahead of its time? Why not attempt to build a design what famously could not be built?

Depending on who you ask, Frederick Kiesler was either a visionary or a wacko. Born in 1890, he hung out with a fast crowd of Surrealist artists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. He designed odd shop windows and curvy chairs that worked just as well when turned upside down. But mainly, his ideas were too strange to be built.

Consider "The Endless House," whose plans and model now reside in New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the 1950s, architects were generally enthralled by the Modernist box, the glass-walled, ruthlessly unadorned machine for living. In that context, Kiesler proposed a house shaped something like a womb: No corners, all curves.

He went on to flout the conventions of modern architecture. Instead of glass and steel, he proposed to use pebbles, wood, grass and tile. A stained-glass window, shaped like an eye, was designed so that the color of the light entering the house would change as the sun passed overhead. The house was greatly admired as thought-provoking if impractical.

Among Kiesler's admirers was architect Philip Johnson. Early in his career, Johnson designed a shockingly modern house for Houston art patrons John and Dominique de Menil, and Dominique introduced him to her friend, Jane Blaffer Owen. She was a Houston oil heiress by birth but married into a town that seemed a world away from this city: New Harmony, Ind.

New Harmony has a Marfa-like vibe, only driven by spirituality instead of art. The town was founded in 1814 by the Harmonists, a group that believed the end was nigh. In 1824, believing God directed them to move back to Pennsylvania, the group sold the town to businessmen Robert Owen and William Maclure. Owen proposed to launch "a Community of Equality" where education would flourish, and he attracted a group of giddy intellectuals.

The experiment lasted three years. The intellectuals couldn't get along or farm worth a hoot, but they left behind a town that years later Jane Blaffer Owen adored.

She hired Johnson to create a church that would capture New Harmony's tradition of spiritual seeking. Johnson suggested that she hire Kiesler to design the adjacent Grotto for Meditation.

The Roofless Church shows that Johnson, once a fervent plain-box Modernist, was losing that faith. He designed a walled rectangular garden dominated by a 50-foot, Kiesler-like dome with a hole at the top. The dome looked something like a cloth draped over a giant egg. Some said it looked like a rosebud turned upside down; others saw a bat with its wings folded.

But Johnson couldn't out-Kiesler Kiesler. Drawings and models for the Meditation Grotto showed no rectangular enclosure, no right angles, no straight lines. Visitors would enter the amoeba-shaped garden through a gate, follow a curving path past a meditation pond and arrive at a curved, cave-like building shaped something like a shell.

Maybe Johnson really didn't see how Kiesler's wildly curvaceous grotto could be turned into engineering drawings. Or maybe he didn't want his church to be upstaged. For whatever reason, he advised Owen that the design was impossible to build.

The grotto — perhaps Kiesler's masterpiece — seemed doomed to exist only on paper.

The UH professors assigned two classes to study the grotto and to propose a way to design it for today's world. Modern tools made it possible to design an exacting replica of Kiesler's models, but the professors didn't think that was what Kiesler would have wanted, were he aware of computer-aided possibilities.

The students interviewed Jane Blaffer Owen. They studied Kiesler's knotty theoretical writings and the single building of his still in existence. They joked that they should make a bumper sticker: What Would Kiesler Do?

The students finally decided that Kiesler would have wanted an airy, laser-cut steel structure in which no two pieces were alike. Its geometries would echo nature.

Finally, with the air of a Surrealist shenanigan, the students made an imaginary land grab. The UH architecture school's building was designed by Johnson. It seemed poetic justice that Kiesler's grotto should snuggle next to it.

The university was preparing to dig a pond on the proposed site, but Meppelink and Vrana unleashed their students to prepare a concrete slab there as if they were going to build their grotto. They moved stakes. They shoveled. Meppelink prepared to make a sheepish apology to the university's director of facilities, to explain that the grotto was just an intellectual exercise.

But to the professors' surprise, university officials chose to adopt the students' project and even to change the pond to a blobbier, more Kieslerian shape.

The class has built a quarter-sized model of the shell-shaped grotto, the one that supposedly couldn't be built. And the university is now raising money to fabricate a full-size version.

Kiesler's unbuildable grotto may yet be built.